Centerfield

Take the Reserves Off Long-Term Foreign Duty

As a active reservist grumbled in today's Statesman letters section, it's grossly unfair to send RESERVES to Iraq year after year,as often as active duty troops. They're very patriotic men, and have been soldiering on, but it's not really what they signed for, is it? Historically, signing on to the reserves has meant lifetime training and occasional duty, mostly to deal with unexpected, occasional, short-lived crises. Now it's harder and harder to tell the difference between the active military and reserves.

This has been going on since Bush I, who was smart enough he really shoulda known better. In my judgement, he was in a bad spot, manpowerwise, but I blame him for not establishing some system to solve this longer-term. Strategypage has some arguments for the practice:

Most people in the IRR [Internal Ready Reserve] are there for four years, to finish out the eight year obligation incurred when they enlisted (usually for four years of active duty.) The IRR has existed for nearly half a century, and had never really been used until the last four years. The current situation appears to be exactly what the IRR was designed for, and the army plans to use it heavily. . . .

I don't see it. I mean, if they were in shape to endure a multiyear separation from their families with low pay, wouldn't they still in the ACTIVE MILITARY? We've forgotten what the idea of RESERVES is.

... But when there's an emergency, and a call for reviving the draft.,..

The only emergency here is bad leadership. Either of the Bushes, or Clinton, including Bush II, could have taken action to increase the active military so we aren't being cruel to the men we depend on. I'll betcha we still have no plans to use the new planned brigades to take IRR off active foreign duty.

There are two reasons this keeps happening. First, we sign on to more and more multidecade peacekeeping and occupation missions as time goes on. The other reason is that at this point, more American troops are needed to occupy countries like Iraq than to conquer it in the first place.