What Is The Role of the Reserve Forces?

The Ministry of Defence has announced that it is conducting a review into the future function and role of the Reserve Forces, intended to provide a clear idea of the role of the reserves until 2030.

The volunteer reserve is an integral part of the British Armed Forces, and one which has a long history of providing volunteers to step up and support operations across the globe. In WW1 it was the Territorial Army and Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, serving in the Royal Naval Division, who held the line in 1915 after the destruction of the regular Army ahead of the arrival in significant numbers of Kitcheners volunteers (Humphreys great grandfather was one of them).

In the Cold War the Territorial Army was significantly larger, growing to some 70,000 personnel by 1989, with an aspiration to enlarge up to 86000. With clearly defined roles in both the UK and in Germany, the TA represented an extremely large force, relatively well equipped, and one which knew the roles expected of it, and the precise spot on the ground in Germany where they were likely to die.

Royal Wessex Yeomanry - Reservist Tank Crews

-  Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

This force was lost in the post Cold War years, replaced by a smaller force that could, on paper at least, mobilise more easily than the Cold War force, and which was intended to be used as an integral part of the modern armed forces. For the Army this meant a growth of units that would step up when required, providing additional people into units, and some mobilisation of whole units.

For the Royal Navy it meant losing a dedicated force of Minesweepers and instead providing specialists who would practically never go near a ship for the duration of their time in the reserve. This force would mobilise when needed to provide bespoke support in various niche functions too small to be sustained in a regular career structure, but which still needed to be carried out in times of conflict.

The first substantial post-Cold War use of the Reserves came about in 2003 when the deployments to OP TELIC and latterly OP HERRICK saw a significant number of reservists mobilised to fill roles identified, often in a hurry and then deploy to carry out an operational tour.

For many reservists this period is remembered as a time of knowing that if you wanted an Op Tour it was relatively easy to get one, and the expectation was that you would be deployed early in your career, or mobilised at the very least.

Today in the post HERRICK world the Reserve occupies a curious place in the armed forces structure. On the one hand they represent a pool of volunteers who give their spare time to support the armed forces, but on the other, the modern regulars have perhaps struggled to quantify what it is a reserve component can do in the modern era.

The suggestion that the reserves could be mobilised en-masse for a large scale deployment in the manner of the Cold War seems ever more unlikely – realistically it would be phenomenally difficult to do this for anything other than the most grave of crisis, and in reality the chances of it occurring in a sufficiently timely manner is slim.

Is it better to see the Reserve as a source of individuals able to augment with their specific skills, using local units as hubs to conduct admin and basic training, but in reality focusing most of their effort on augmenting as required in small groups – perhaps even up to Company strength?

The issue is complex – on the one hand the Reserve represents a source of some 40,000 people, who can provide a valuable range of assets and experience, but is it properly managed? For years the armed forces have been talking about making use of the civilian skills of their reservist staff, but no effective way has been found of doing this properly – not even Defence Connect seems up to the job…

There is also a challenge around why people become reservists – some join for a change to the routine, others as a prelude to regular service. Some join for a complete shift in life – for example many London units have highly paid lawyers or financiers working in very junior roles precisely for the change in pace, while still offering an opportunity to do something meaningful and different.

Anecdotally Humphrey has found speaking to reservists of different generations that attitudes varied considerably about why they were in. Some were in it to mobilise for WW3 but felt uncomfortable at being asked to step away for short term deployments. Others wanted to be in for the adventure, but once the deployment itch was scratched, found routine reserve life very dull and either left in short order, or became a regular.

The question of mobilisation too is particularly difficult for employers. The Army move some years ago to say that reserve soldiers should expect to spend 1 year in 5 mobilised backfired in many quarters, and particularly with previously sympathetic employers. It is one thing to have someone on the books as a reservist and give leave for their annual camp, and then lose them for WW3 or a one off deployment – quite another to find one of your team is essentially moonlighting 20% of the time with another company.

The impact of mobilisation for people in small organisations is keenly felt – big employers like the NHS or Civil Service can absorb the hit and source spare people easily to cover. But, if you are a small company of 5-10 people, finding a trained person to cover (even if the military cover the costs) is not easy, and mobilisation leaves a gap that cannot be filled.

If your company relies heavily on this person and their skills and knowledge, then losing them regularly becomes unsustainable, and they may well move to discourage membership of the reserves as a result.

The worry has to be that under the current model the reserve experience has become something that is increasingly a time drain that only people working for big organisations can do, because smaller companies do not want the hassle of losing valuable skilled staff to go and ‘play army’ on a regular basis.

There is an issue with costs too – does it make good sense to mobilise a highly paid person to be a private soldier? Given the MOD covers the salary difference, and also bears the costs of covering a replacement, mobilising people can be phenomenally expensive – a friend of the authors was mobilised as a very junior officer, but paid a 2*’s salary due to coming from a high flying tax free salary job. Was this really the best use of a lot of public money to fill an SO3 post for 6 months?

Given all this, its perhaps reasonable to ask how the reserves can best operate in the future and what model this may take. Humphrey would suggest that there are three main areas where the volunteer reservist would excel.

Firstly, the Reserve should be constituted in a way that enables it to provide specialists in very short notice to provide niche capabilities for a genuine crisis, or at slightly longer notice to move for planned deployments. This may take the form of bringing people with either prior regular service experience, or professionally qualified individuals like doctors or engineers and asking them to sign binding contracts of availability.

It may also work if all regular service leavers, unless they choose to opt out, automatically transition into the volunteer reserve on leaving, rather than the moribund and utterly unusable ‘regular reserve’. This would help them transition into civvy street, but retain their services if required, and provide a pool of people who could quickly be brought up to speed again if required.

For entry, thought should be given around whether to bring civilians in as new entrants or to recognise professional skills and appoint a rank accordingly. This already works with medical personnel, but perhaps the time has come to expand the scheme. If you work in an area deemed vital, such as cyber, engineering, logistics or so on, then providing you can validate qualifications, these will permit new entrants to be appointed to much higher ranks – perhaps as high as SO1 (Lt Col, Commander level).

The argument for this is that few people will willingly join the reserve to use their professional skills, only to find that they have to do multiple years of courses to learn how to successfully deploy a hand of command and the correct way to intone ‘fella’ properly before they promote.

Instead, recognise experience and reward it with rank for their professional success – this works well for medics, and there is no reason why it cannot work elsewhere. It is also worth remembering that while few people join for the sole purpose of holding rank, the ability to get people to listen to you and take you seriously is much easier if you have stripes or pips on your shoulder.

The military don’t judge on knowledge, they judge on visual sighting of a rank tab, and Private Smith RLC may be one of the most highly experienced logisticians out there in real life, but in the eyes of the Army, he may be only fit for stagging on and not listened to. Give people the rank they need to do the job, and to be taken seriously when they speak – not ignored.

The second area where the reserve could be used is to provide a body of more junior and less trained generalists to be mobilised primarily to support national emergency and defend key points.

What this is intended to do is cover that group of people who perhaps don’t have direct military skills, but who want to contribute something to society. They could be employed in formed units to provide a general core of troops able to support where needed in a crisis and develop a fairly limited set of skills and be employed primarily for home use (with underpinning legislation amended to ensure they can easily be called on).

The reason for suggesting this is that it takes a great deal of time and training to be proficient at most military roles. If this is your hobby and you take time away from it, you inevitably suffer skills fade and need more time in training ahead of an operation to be of use – meaning a longer mobilisation. This may work for some people but is arguably of limited value to most deploying units – why not instead bring in a regular from elsewhere.

Instead use this pool to be able to support operations at home, but do so in a way that means when they are mobilised it is for a reason employers understand. Few managers would begrudge losing someone for 2-3 weeks to support disaster recovery or to help work on a major task at home, when they know it is their local area being impacted. This brings an immediacy to the efforts lost when people head off to Iraq or Afghanistan and helps people relate much more closely to the armed forces as a result.

This focus on domestic and UK operations may lack the glamour of deploying overseas on combat tours, but arguably is far easier to recruit for – ‘join the reserve, play a part in keeping YOUR community safe’ is a powerful strap line to work to.

The challenge with this proposal is that it leaves gaps in work done now, particularly in specialised units, which would need to continue that are not covered by the provision of specialists elsewhere. Perhaps here it could work that former regulars going into the reserves could be gainfully employed – for example using a former intelligence officer to do intelligence work.

The final area where the reserve can play great value is in keeping the link between the armed forces and the local area. Building a uniformed disciplined reserve that can attend functions, represent at ceremonies and be a visible part of the support offered to first responders will help fill a key part of keeping the armed forces in the public eye – when paired with cadets, this is a good way of helping deliver military visibility and supporting the local area too.

The final thing is that the military need to define the proposition of the benefits of what reservist membership brings the individual and society as a whole. At the moment it seems built around a lose offer of pay, a bit of training and some cool things, which once basic training is over quickly becomes ‘spend your weekend in sub par office blocks working on outdated IT to deliver a product the regulars don’t really care about and stand by for a world of admin hassle to get paid’.

The usual line offered is ‘world class leadership training’ although this is never benchmarked or checked, and as any reservist who has done a commissioning course can attest, teaching people the basics of task centred leadership is fine, but rarely relevant in the workplace – more to the point, many reservists already have far more leadership skills and qualifications than the military can offer, and there is something a bit excruciating about being ‘trained’ in something by someone who is clearly just reading out powerpoint slides.

What is needed in this review is a clear vision of offering what it is that the volunteer reservist brings to the modern military. Is it a spare time regular force, is it a source of battle casualty replacements, is it a way to bring in cheap expertise in uniform or is it something else?

There is perhaps a lack of an ability to explain this beyond bland statements going ‘we value our reservists’ – yes, the regulars do value the reserves, but its arguable that they actually understand what it is they want to do with them at times.

The review too needs to focus less on recruitment and more on retention. Why do so many units seem to spend their lives recruiting and not retaining people and why is it that people leave so quickly? Understanding this is key to understanding the value the reserve can bring and how it can be employed – can it really generate a meaningful military component, or is it something that is only ever good for a source of partly trained people who require further work before deploying on an op tour.

Finally the review needs to slay once and for all the tired cliché of ‘twice the citizen’. Plenty of people across society give of their time to give something back. Be they charity workers, volunteers or people who help across a range of life, most people are twice the citizen in some way or another. What is needed is a better descriptor of what a reservist is, how they differ from others and why they are a special breed.

The review has huge potential to offer a direction of change to the reserve forces and make them directly relevant to the future direction of the modern military. But it must avoid maintaining the status quo for the sake of it, be unafraid to slay sacred cows and ask hard questions of what the reserve experience is meant to be, and why people join and how they can be used.

It must also look at important issues like career structures and ask if it is possible to have a military career in your spare time without becoming a full time officer in the process and also, in the 21^st century, is there a place for a part time volunteer in the modern military?

This may sound heretical but given the complexity of operations, the challenge of remaining current in role and the sheer time commitment needed to be effective, perhaps the most difficult question of all to ask is – is it time to stop recruiting part time volunteers? Instead moving to a model of employment contracts of varying time commitments and only using volunteers for domestic operations, meaning in turn a genuinely hard look can be taken at what the regular military can actually achieve on operations?

Would knowing there is no reserve other than ex regulars, and certainly no formed units, make a difference when looking at the structure of the military and the aspiration to deploy things like armoured divisions? Is it better to be honest and admit that no matter how keen and motivated, the Reserve is not necessarily the answer that is needed, and that if you want to deploy and stay overseas, you need regulars to do it – not rely on the goodwill of a patchwork of volunteers and their employers to bail the regular military out come the next crisis.

This is not to take away one bit of the commitment shown, but to ask whether we have become too reliant on those giving of their spare time, and assume they will be there, and used this as a way to become complacent about our actual levels of capability. Can we be certain the next time our backs are to the wall, we will have the numbers of trained personnel required to hold the line till the 21^st Century equivalent of Kitchener’s Army is ready?