Alexander Gerald
One of the key lessons from the Russian invasion of Ukraine is that military mass has an inherent property that cannot be replaced with other capabilities.[1] The obvious problem is that mass is expensive to maintain. In war, military mass has great utility; in peacetime that same mass has limited utility at best yet must be maintained in case of, or to deter, war. This gets to the heart of the idea of strategy as ‘the use of military force to achieve political outcomes at a tolerable cost’.[2] How can military force be maximised, while minimising the costs in peace as well as war? At its simplest, the answer is reserve forces.
Reserve forces trade time for mass. A professional army is deployable in a relatively short timeframe, but the cost of maintaining a commensurate standard of training and readiness is high. A reserve army, comprised of part-time volunteers, maintains a lesser standard of training and readiness at greatly reduced cost, but in return can only be deployed within a moderate timeframe. Building any reserve force requires a series of decisions from policymakers and military planners. What ratio of reserves to regulars should comprise the whole force? What level of training should reserve forces maintain? How can you recruit and motivate them? However, all decisions are subordinate to one key decision: what function should that reserve force fulfil in your national security strategy?
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