Readiness of Combat Reserve Units Questioned

Late last July, five days before Iraq invaded Kuwait, Lt. Col. David Evans and 568 members of his armored brigade completed a rigorous, three-week course in desert warfare in the 120-degree heat of the Army’s National Training Center in California’s Mojave Desert.

But instead of commanding 58 M-1 tanks on the Saudi Arabian sands, Evans is coaching the undefeated high school football team in rural Dalton, Ga. And he is waiting for a call to active duty--with the Army National Guard--that still hasn’t come.

Evans’ enforced idleness--and that of other guardsmen and reservists who are not being used in the Persian Gulf deployment--has touched off a politically and emotionally charged debate that may shake up the future composition of U.S. military forces.

The question being asked is: Are these reserve and guard units up to the job? Recent studies by Congress and the Defense Department itself indicate the answer may be “no.”

For more than a decade, the Pentagon has organized the armed forces around a “total-force” policy: maintaining a full-time armed force that is smaller than needed to fulfill assigned missions but that can be augmented with reserve units designed to be integrated into selected active units in time of need.

In 1973, when the draft was abolished and the nation switched to an all-volunteer army, Congress and the Pentagon developed this system of combat-ready reserves, in part to hold down the cost of meeting projected personnel needs. Eight of the 11 Army divisions based in the United States require the addition of a combat reserve brigade to attain full strength.

These so-called round-out brigades are supposed to be as ready as their active-duty counterparts. Over the last six years, Congress has spent $26 billion to provide reserve units with up-to-date equipment.

But when President Bush began sending reserves to the gulf Aug. 22, he bypassed the round-out brigades and other combat units. Although more than 20,000 reservists are serving in Operation Desert Shield, they are all noncombat specialists--cargo pilots, nurses and truck drivers.

The conspicuous disparity between theory and practice has touched off a heated debate about the efficacy of the current force structure and the readiness of the guard and reserve units that are supposed to be its backbone.

The central question is whether these units are being kept at home because they are not actually trained or equipped to do the job, or simply because senior officers in the regular armed forces have little confidence in them.

“The combat units of the National Guard and reserves are trained, ready and capable of performing their missions right alongside their active component counterparts,” says Rep V. (Sonny) Montgomery (D-Miss.), one of the reserves’ most ardent supporters in Congress.

“There is no reason we should not mobilize and deploy these units,” he contends.

But Benjamin W. Covington III, a retired Army colonel who headed a major Pentagon study of the reserves, disputes that assertion.

“Clearly, no unit that operates under the constraints of our reserve components can achieve the same level of readiness as a parallel active Army unit, given far more resources, time and so on,” Covington argues. “I find it difficult to believe that any rational human being can arrive at a different conclusion.”

Until recently, the Administration has defended its position by arguing that Bush has been forced to keep the combat units at home because previous law allowed the President to call up reserves only for a maximum of 180 days.

But in the waning hours of the congressional session that adjourned last week, proponents of the reserves slipped through legislation that would permit the President to call up reserve combat units for up to 360 days.

Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wis.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, argues that Operation Desert Shield provides a perfect “crisis” in which to test the total-force concept.

“We’ve heard a number of reasons for not sending guard and reserve combat units, but they’re about as solid as sand,” Aspin complains. “I suspect the most important factor is the active-force prejudice against using reserve forces.”

Rep. Beverly B. Byron (D-Md.), a key member of the House Armed Services Committee, agrees. If there’s anywhere to test current U.S. military strategy, the Saudi Arabian desert is the place, she says. “The nation has a right to know whether our investment in the reserves has been the right answer. If it hasn’t been the right answer, we need to change course now before we build the force of the future.”

As a result, the Pentagon and the Administration are about to face the sensitive job of either mobilizing combat reserve units or acknowledging what many in the military have whispered for years and what two recent reports seem to confirm: that the reserves may not be up to the job.

Although the Pentagon has denied publicly that the reserves are not up to fighting standards, officials also have acknowledged that there are concerns among active-duty officers over the preparedness of reserves, who train an average of 39 days a year.

“Some commanders were not sure they could rely on reservists,” says Stephen M. Duncan, assistant secretary of defense for reserve affairs. But “there is no reluctance by the civilian leadership to call whatever units are required,” he insists.

A detailed examination of 17 Army National Guard units completed by the General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, last year found glaring deficiencies:

* Reservists are not adequately trained or equipped to perform critical tasks.

In an example with particular importance for the Persian Gulf, the GAO found that a helicopter assault unit had never been issued protective clothing for biological or chemical warfare and had never trained in its use.

The unit also had never been issued night-vision goggles for training.

* Reserve training does not emphasize battlefield survival skills. None of the units that GAO examined had constructed defensive-fighting positions adequate for protection. In one case, the location of two positions could have left soldiers shooting at each other.

* Reservists fare poorly in proficiency tests designed to evaluate critical skills related to preparedness. In 1987 and 1988, only about 60% of the reservists required to take the tests actually took them, and the failure rate was 25% higher than that of the regular Army.

The Pentagon’s Duncan concedes that the Defense Department agrees with most of the findings and recommendations in the report but insists that the 17 units that GAO inspectors examined did not represent a fair cross-section of the reserves.

Yet, the Defense Department itself raised similar concerns in an 18-month evaluation of reserve units completed last year by a task force of regular Army and reserve officials--the most comprehensive study of reserve units ever conducted.

The report concluded that training procedures had not been designed to fit the time limitations and other problems inherent in the structure of the National Guard and Army reserves, leaving some units without proper training for their missions.

One problem is obvious: Reservists are part-timers who get their average 39 days of training on weekends and in two-week annual exercises, usually in the summer. Active-duty soldiers train for or perform their military jobs an average of 240 days a year--six times the number spent by reserves.

Supporters of the reserves contend that the part-timers can function as effectively as regulars because they stay together as a unit for years. But the Army study found that this is a myth. Instead, it discovered, the turnover rate for sergeants and below is 50% a year.

To be sure, friction between regular forces and reservists is older than the United States. Gen. George Washington complained during the Revolutionary War that, unlike his regular army, county militia--the predecessors to today’s National Guard--could not cross county lines.

Martin Binkin, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington, says there has been a “we-they” division between active and reserve soldiers in all modern U.S. wars.

“When I tried to find out just why the round-out brigades weren’t called up, my Pentagon contacts would tell me that they just weren’t really ready,” Binkin says.

But Binkin and other experts believe that additional factors are restraining the Administration from sending combat reserves to the gulf.

“One reason things are calm on the home front is because we are using an all-volunteer force rather than draftees,” says Charles Moskos, a sociologist at Northwestern University who specializes in the military.

“The reserves are the equivalent of draftees today. Sending them into combat positions would trigger a lot more public questioning of what we are doing there.”

Meanwhile, reserve commanders themselves have criticized the Pentagon and the Administration for the failure to use combat reserves. Many are eager to prove their effectiveness and bristle at any suggestion that they are unprepared.

“Our job is to be prepared, and if they need us, we’re certainly ready to go,” says Evans, the tank commander and high school coach.

The view was seconded by Lt. Gen. Herbert R. Temple Jr., who retired this year as chief of the nation’s Army and Air National Guards.

“I simply don’t know why they haven’t called the combat units, but it cannot be capability or readiness,” Temple says. “Guard guys look at regulars and say, ‘We achieve the same level of proficiency as an avocation.’ ”

There is no way to know in advance how well an individual soldier or a unit will perform in the heat of battle. Commanders in World War II found that some of their best-trained regular infantrymen froze and were unable to fire a shot once the fighting started.

Traditionally, military leaders stress training and proficiency at specific tasks related to a unit’s wartime mission. Since the reserves assumed such a vital national defense role, tens of billions of dollars have been spent on their training and equipment.

The Pentagon’s Duncan says he still anticipates that reserve combat units will go to the Persian Gulf, but he says it is a function of how long U.S. forces are there and the recommendations of the commanders on the scene.

Unless the combat units go, however, Aspin says the national debate over the role of the reserves in the future will continue to be “fueled by conjecture, when it could be based on fact.”