Is There Any Value In A Regular Reserve?

 

The Russian Armed Forces have begun a ‘partial’ mobilisation to call up around 300,000 people to bolster the failing military campaign in Ukraine. Across Russia scenes have been broadcast showing a veritable ‘Dads Army’ of often elderly, overweight, and unfit males being forcibly sent back into military service, often for the first time in decades. To some this exercise could prove the value of maintaining a large ‘regular reserve’, while to others it highlights the sheer pointlessness of regular reserve forces and their likely value on the battlefield. Could the UK repeat a similar act though and would it want to? In a word, no.

Regular reserve forces are a curious concept that date back to the days of mass conscription. After people have completed their period of service they remain liable to be called back into military roles in an emergency should the nation need it. During WW1 and WW2 this reserve was the bulwark upon which many national armies mobilised, fleshing out formations and providing manpower to staff units to their full strength. Even after the end of WW2 this practise continued. The British Army, for example, maintained plans to call out the regular reserve during its Transition To War (TTW) in the event of the Cold War going hot.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright 2023.

In theory during the Cold War, the UK would have nearly doubled the size of the armed forces in barely a week, bringing civilians back into uniform and sending them to Germany to fight alongside regular forces. On paper the UK could have easily added a couple of hundred thousand troops to the Army quickly, sending out mobilisation paperwork and issuing kit and equipment. In practise it was unlikely to have worked – calling up troops who had not served in years and who may not be fit for duty or want to serve was not likely to end well. Why would someone who voluntarily left the Army years previously willingly turn up for the start of WW3 when they could be home with their family facing nuclear annihilation instead? This is the key problem with regular reserves and mass callups in a nuclear age.  They look great on paper but they require you to scrape the barrel to find people to serve, many of whose military value is close to zero, and by the time retraining was done, the war was likely to have been long over anyway.

Since the end of the Cold War the UK has regularly toyed with the idea of making more use of its regular reserve component, trying to create a seamless career experience where people can be brought back to serve some years after they’ve left, particularly where they have niche skills or experience. This always seems a rather risky plan – there is no guarantee these people will turn up, and they are also likely to have significant wider skills fade too – relying on someone who left 5-10 years ago to be credible, except in very specific areas is a risky plan. It would surely be easier to staff the full time and volunteer reserve forces properly, rather than rely on hoping that people have kept their contact details up to date and forcing them back into the colours years later…

Retraining people is but one part of the problem, the other is equipping them to make them relevant to the modern conflict they will be deploying to. In Russias case, their reservists are being called back into service, yet have no familiarity with modern equipment. They are likely to be issued with legacy material, with imagery suggesting this may include AK47 rifles, ancient T62 tanks (potentially 60 years old) and older dated equipment drawn from the depths of Russian Army stores. While it may be familiar to older soldiers, it is also utterly outclassed on the battlefield, particularly when facing the extremely capable and very well equipped Ukrainian Armed forces, who are some of the most battle hardened troops on the planet.

Russia has a legacy of retaining equipment in reserve for far longer than other nations, and the UK could not do anything similar. Unlike in the Cold War, when stockpiles of legacy equipment like Lee Enfields and Webley revolvers or green goddess fire engines were held onto ‘just in case’, there is no large national contingency stockpile to drawn on now that could equip new formations of troops. This is probably not a bad thing as the challenge of keeping a ‘shadow stockpile’ of legacy equipment maintained and serviceable, long after it had left front line service would present real challenges and cost a lot of money. Trying, for example, to maintain ammunition stockpiles and keeping them in date would be expensive and arguably pointless- who would be issued with these rifles, when would they be fired and how much would need to be spent on storing and replenishing it all, when it was highly unlikely to ever be used? A key lesson is that volunteers will always outperform ‘pressed men’ and that stockpiles of legacy obsolete munitions are not worth holding onto. It is better to invest scarce resources in modern equipment and stockpiles, not cling onto legacy equipment as a ‘just in case’.

The risk of keeping large stockpiles by, ‘just in case’ is that it encourages people to assume that there is a Plan B or C option on the table. This is not always a good thing – if the front line of the British Army were to be broken in conventional warfare against a peer rival (a good question as to who this may be now given that Russia is arguably demonstrably not a peer rival based on their performance), is the right thing to do to send a new generation of older reservists with obsolete equipment out to be slaughtered again, or find another way to resolve the conflict? The days of having huge numbers of bodies to march to the sound of the gunfire and die in droves has passed forever. Would the British public really tolerate the calling up of people from all walks of life to be thrown into the cauldron of conventional war? Probably not.

For Russia the mobilisation of its older generation of men is likely to cause significant societal and economic impacts. There is little likelihood that these troops will make a meaningful difference on the battlefield beyond acting, quite literally, as a sponge to soak up Ukrainian munitions. The difference between this and other wars though is that there is no new Army waiting in the wings to swoop in later and change the course of battle – if the reservists were being used to ‘hold the line’ much like as the British Army used the TA in the early part of WW1, while the next generation of troops were trained, then this would at least make sense.

Instead Russia has burned through its front line forces, rendering large chunks of the Army barely operable. The arrival of new less tactically proficient troops with older equipment represents a last throw of the dice by Putin to try to overwhelm Ukraine. The problem is that with Russian logistics in complete disarray and morale plummeting, it is hard to see what difference they can make against highly capable Ukrainian troops. What this war has brutally exposed is that for all the beautifully written doctrine and military thought in Russian security circles, the Russian Armed Forces are poorly sustained, lack the independent initiative or ability to respond to rapidly changing battlefield circumstances, and rely on mass, not capability to try to shape the battlefield. They have not proven themselves to be up to the task.

For the West the question is one of what does this war tell us about the value of large scale reserves in wartime? Arguably it has shown that they are of relatively little value for most nations. The ability to forcibly draw on unwilling people to serve does not help secure victory – it merely builds resentment. The most effective means of rapidly growing your armed forces is by relying on recruitment and those who volunteer to serve when they see their nation under threat, as we have seen in Ukraine. Training new recruits good habits is far easier than beating bad habits out of old reservists, and provides a much more effective military force

What then is the value of retaining a ‘regular reserve’ for countries like the UK? It is difficult to conceive of the circumstances where the Army would need to grow so quickly that the only solution is to bring back former personnel instead of bringing in new recruits and training them from scratch. At best it offers a theoretical means of being able to bring in highly specialist people with niche skills, perhaps in areas where there are not many regulars to draw on as a short term means to plug staffing gaps while more people are trained up. The days though of being able to conduct widespread mobilisation, nearly doubling the size of the Army overnight are gone forever, and this is probably not a bad thing.

It will be interesting to see whether the lessons of this are reflected in the forthcoming defence review in the UK, and whether this is seen as the right time to step away from the concept of a regular reserve entirely. Wars of the future will require well trained and well-motivated troops able to fight in highly ambiguous circumstances using the most advanced technology available. It is hard to see how a regular reserve assists with this and if anything provides an illusion of security which when tested for real is unlikely to deliver.