Interview: Vice Admiral John Cotton, U.S. Navy
By Fred Rainbow and Fred Schultz
Proceedings, June 2004
The Chief of the Naval Reserve, Commander, Naval Reserve Force, on 6 May 2004, addressed Naval Reserve instructor pilots assigned to VT-21 at Naval Air Station Kingsville, Texas-spoke recently at the U.S. Naval Institute's editorial offices in Annapolis, Maryland.
Proceedings: In recent combat operations, what have been the Naval Reserve's contributions?
Vice Admiral Cotton: This year, the Naval Reserve numbers 85,900. That's a little more than 14,000 full-time support people and just more than 71,000 selected reservists, spread across about 39 different programs. This is probably the wrong way to categorize them, because we're more about capabilities in a capabilities-driven Navy.
As far as mobilization numbers go, we're at just more than 22,000 Naval Reservists mobilized in support of Operations Enduring Freedom, Iraqi Freedom, Noble Eagle, and other operations. But that also doesn't include the many people who have been doing extra active duty for special work. I can show you that 24% of the Naval Reserve force today is doing operational support on some set of orders. It's not a drill-weekend force; it's an operational support, "get-to-your-supported-command"-type force.
Contributions run the gamut. The best use for reservists is a predictable, periodic mission, so you can tell them that on, such-and-such a day we need you for such-and-such length of time. These people need to be predictable to their families and especially their employers.
Proceedings: What will be the pace of operations in the immediate future?
Vice Admiral Cotton: Note, 2,683 are mobilized. The mistake people make in judging the effectiveness of a reserve component is the number mobilized. That's a Cold War construct, because we all think it's a force-in-waiting until it's mobilized. Since Desert Storm, the Coast Guard, the Air Force, and especially the Navy have integrated their forces and mission-oriented them such that they don't need to be mobilized.
For example, the training command now has about 250 flight instructors; 75 of them are full-time support officers, the others are selected reservists. These guys have thousands of hours of flight time, and they now are flight instructors.
All over the Navy, in our fleet headquarters and our Navy operations center at combatant commander headquarters, we have watch teams. Every joint task force exercise is judged and umpired by reservists. None of these folks is mobilized; they're all brought in on orders. That goes for joint headquarters, too. We have more than 1,700 reservists in joint commands. Many of them are not mobilized. Some are brought in for weeks, maybe up to 179 days on active duty for special work, depending on the funding stream available. For the future, I expect the number of mobilized reserves to go up a little and stay steady.
The footprint we have now in Iraq is about 40% guard and reserve, which is a lot higher than anybody thought it would be. Is that going to be sustainable? Probably, with increased use of the guard and reserve. How long are we going to do it? The President says this will be a long war, so we will do this until we finish it.
Proceedings: You have said that no longer is there such a thing as the Naval Reserve. What do you mean by that?
Vice Admiral Cotton: In the words of the CNO [Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Vern Clark], it's not the Naval Reserve, it's the Navy. The Naval Reserve is the reserve component or the reserve element of our Navy. We depend on the Navy; the Navy depends on us.
The Naval Reserve needs to be thought of as one system of the Navy, not a separate and unequal force as it has been in the past, with separate politics, equipment, funding, and policies. We have to put together a human resources strategy that is a continuum of service.
The essence of relationships in the future will be at the unit level, between the active commanding officer and the reserve commanding officer [CO]. Future manpower documents will have the active component and reserve component on the same sheet of paper. And the active CO is responsible for reserve component readiness. Where the rubber meets the road is where these two COs talk about their capabilities. There will be no such thing as a Naval Reserve requirement, only Navy requirements.
Proceedings: How do you forecast, when you do not know exactly what you will need in the future?
Vice Admiral Cotton: Essentially, for a capability today, we had to think of it a couple of years ago and had to vet the entire process. This year, we are strapped to fight the war. This is arguably the largest movement of materiel and manpower since World War II, and we were not constructed to fight such conflicts without supplemental help. This is an election year, and people are looking closely at what the available resources will be.
Proceedings: The Naval Reserve seems to be in great shape in some areas and not in such good shape in other areas as far as alignment goes. What are you doing to try to achieve that balance?
Vice Admiral Cotton: It's not a shape thing, it's an access thing. Obviously, if I'm in Norfolk, I prefer to have a unit that lives right next door. But how do I get to someone in Des Moines, Iowa, for example? It's an access issue. You need to give them a predictable, periodic mission. Is it the two-day/two-week construct, the contract they've had before? About a third of the force members are going to college, and these are the people who need predictable lifestyles. They're still going to s have a drill weekend and a two-week-type environment. We're finding about two-thirds of the force, though, actually can do more. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs [Thomas F.] Hall is looking at three kinds of reservists. Maybe you have the 24/4 drill plus 14-day active-duty basic reservists doing 38 days, the backbone of the force. That's the contract. Once they get more comfortable and can have some time with an employer, you can expand that a little bit. The average reservist I talk to actually will do two more days a month-maybe at the reserve center, maybe at the supported command if it's nearby, maybe at home via the computer. Reservists are participating in the Navy/Marine Corps Intranet, as well as Navy Knowledge Online. So if you get an Internet connection, you can plug into your command.
We're participating in the five-vector model for ratings. They can actually do their studies and requirements for advancement on the computer at home. We also have 27 Joint Reserve Intelligence Centers called JRICs. Instead of being in uniform in harm's way in Bosnia, the reservists just go to the JRIC. I visited the one in Memphis the other day. The reservists have full access. Now, at midnight and in blue jeans, they can produce for combatant commands in theater.
The JRICs are not just reserve centers anymore; operators use them, all services use them. We will never build another Naval Reserve center in the heartland. What we're going to build are armed forces reserve centers. I like to call them Joint Operational Support Centers, where you can go to Central Command in the morning and Pacific Command in the afternoon.
Proceedings: One interesting thing we have seen was the Air Force flying UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] in Iraq. from a control center in Colorado.
Vice Admiral Cotton: Even more interesting, we ran the war in Afghanistan from Tampa. That's where the commanders were. UAVs are a perfect reserve mission for the future. It's going to be predictable. It's going to be periodic. You can do it remotely. It requires a skill set. All you do is bring someone in who's familiar with it. It might even be a contractor who helped build the things and who is also a reservist.
Proceedings: What are the objectives of the Zero-Based Review (ZBR), how do you think it's going, and where might it go?
Vice Admiral Cotton: It is unlike any other, because the Navy for the first time is aligned under one fleet commander. Every time we did such a review of reserve capabilities and reserve units, usually it was the reserve liaison officer who got the tasking. Most of the ZBRs came back with stamped approval. They satisfied everyone, because the status quo in most services was always okay. If they needed something else, they just asked for more money.
The pressure now is, there probably won't be more money, because we've got probably more than we expected to get. So we have to look for effectiveness and efficiency within. The purpose of the ZBR, which has not been done since I can remember, is to look at every billet, every unit, and then do some risk analysis.
Predictable exercises ought to be done by reservists. There's no emotion in this. It's pure metrics on value added, risk for the individuals, and whether it is mission-critical for the Navy.
The Military Sealift Command (MSC), of course, is responsible for its own force protection. And it placed a large request for more support. But you don't need such support all the time; you just need it when a ship pulls in and when a ship is mobilized. Does a force-protection crew need to ride the ship the entire transit, or can it fly to the ship and be there just to secure the port? When the ship leaves, does that crew need to ride the ship? Probably not; these ought to be fly-away teams. The MSC analyzed that and reduced the requirement. But the overall MSC reserve unit grew by a couple hundred for this new request.
Proceedings: What is being done to ease the impact of reserve duty on small and individually run businesses?
Vice Admiral Cotton: This is a very hot topic. Let's face it, we're in a war, and we're sharing some critical skill sets with the civilian sector. I have been very impressed with the resiliency of our employers and how they understand the crisis we're in. I would say, overall, we're all doing very well. That's not to say some businesses haven't been affected. Almost 400 employers are matching salaries or giving some sort of compensation or recognition of a person's deployed status. I'm on a military leave of absence myself from American Airlines. I moved right into 4E458 in the Pentagon, which is where Flight 77, with my friends, crashed on 9/11 and murdered our Navy people. The captain of that airplane was Chick Burlingame, a Naval Academy graduate, class of '71, a Naval Reserve captain. In the back of the airplane was Rear Admiral (retired) "Bud" Flagg, who was my flag mentor and spoke at my squadron change of command. He and his wife, Dee, were killed that morning, along with many other great people. Sitting in my office and thinking about that every day keeps me coming to work, with a job to do.
Proceedings: Do you think volunteerism is partly driven by an economy that has been pretty soft?
Vice Admiral Cotton: First, I would tend to agree with you, although I don't have metrics. We all think about this. But if you rewind the clock about five years, we were in a pretty hot economy, and reserve participation was huge. In fact, if you look at the '90s, the graph of reserve participation and what people were doing was going up every single year. Has it spiked since 9/11? Absolutely, it has.
Proceedings: You weren't asking the same things from those people in '95 as you're asking from them now.
Vice Admiral Cotton: In the Navy, we deliberately held down the mobilization numbers, because the requirement was unclear. But we were ready, on-station first. We helped win the initial fights. Right now, we're almost in a reset mode. The first default for manpower in theater should not be the reserve component.
We've used about 70% of our equipment and 78,000 people. There tare 378,000 people in the Navy. Admiral Clark's first question was: what are the other 300,000 people doing? The first resort shouldn't be to bring in a reservist for a year and on the 180th day move him or her from the reserve active status list to the active-duty list to be counted as part of your manpower. At that point you've got an active-duty manpower bill, because we're paid by the actives when we go on active duty; we have the same pay system.
There have been more than 32,000 requests for reservists from four-star combatant commanders. We've approved about 23,000, and we've mobilized about 22,000. So, essentially, we've said no more than 10,000 times to requirements from theater. We go through a very close validation process. Every service does it differently. I think ours is very efficient.
I think what this cries out for is central adjudication of joint requirements.
What we'd like to see in the future is centralized, individual, augmentee control. Should it be in Millington [Tennessee]? Probably. That's where the Navy does personnel. Should we have a reservist on the desk and an active on the desk? Absolutely. Now, when a requirement comes in, these people look at the skill set required and the talent available. We didn't know two years ago what we'd need today. We need to plan some flexibility into the system and then have access to the skill sets that satisfy the requirements.
Proceedings: Are there things the other services could adopt from the Navy that might work better for them?
Vice Admiral Cotton: The Air Force, I think, got it first; and in the mid-'80s, it really started integration. In the early '90s, it even decommissioned a couple of wings and put that capability into the reserve. They have borrowed from one another, even shared equipment through the years, to the point now that 60% of transport and air-refueling capabilities reside in the reserve.
The Army has the National Guard, the Army Reserve, and active duty. Since 9/11, because of the requirements placed on its folks, the Army has had to learn how to share equipment and share systems. Sometimes the culture is defined by just the systems we use. The Navy has been on the leading edge, I think, in some of the new systems we have.
The Coast Guard just had to cut back until it had only 8,000 reservists, almost all of them integrated in active units. So the Coast Guard had almost 80% of its reservists used since 9/11, and for good reason. A lot of Coast Guard issues go on.
The Marine Corps can't go to war without its reserves, they're so integrated. And they've had more than 20,000 of their almost 40,000 reservists recalled. Some of them who went last year are going back. That's what we're doing; we're reserving. That's what I'm doing right now. This is my third recall to active duty, to reserve my country.
This is the future. A lot of the reservists I work with every day have been enriched by their civilian experience. I was a better F/A-18 adversary pilot because I was trained very well by the airline on instrument procedures and discipline about flying.
Proceedings: What improvements are being made to facilitate the move between active service and reserve?
Vice Admiral Cotton: I would say it's in the embryonic stages because of the requirements being placed on the system right now. I think the major foundation for what we do in the future is going to be a single pay and benefit system for all seven-reserve components in all the services.
Proceedings: What is your biggest challenge?
Vice Admiral Cotton: It's the culture-the culture of the past, the culture of the present, and trying to build the culture of the future. We have a lot of baggage in the Navy. "Reservist" is kind of a two-letter word, which is to say there's always something in front of the word "reservist" The challenge is to change that perception. We've got some internal culture to work out. That's all part of continuing education, not only of our capabilities, but also of the Navy and what we can do. There are lots of culture problems in the Navy, about attitudes toward reservists.
Enlisted naval reservists are paid $11,000 a year to maintain a uniform, get a physical, take shots, and be ready at a moment's notice to serve their country. Pretty amazing. An officer averages about $22,000. It's five times that in both categories for an active-duty person. Take linguists, for example. I can have one active-duty person who speaks one or two languages, or I can have five reservists who speak five to ten languages. What's a better investment for the taxpayer?
If the biggest impediment to 24/7 operations of our ships is manpower, why don't we have people waiting on shore so that when you go into conflict, you can surge them? A Hornet squadron used to have 17 pilots who cruised the whole time. Maybe in the future we will cruise with 15 pilots, with two waiting in Lemoore or Oceana, already qualified and ready to go. They will have earned 1,000-hour patches and will probably be lieutenant commanders or commanders, immediate leaders.
Proceedings: What happens if' officers find themselves in that situation and they are senior to the commanding officer or the executive officer?
Vice Admiral Cotton: The CO is CO. It doesn't make any difference. Who's senior? It's the CO. I work for every CO out there. Everything I do is to enable those reserve COs to report to those active COs, so they can set up that synergy between the two units and maximize the capabilities, the interaction, and the integration of the reservists.
