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Navy Cracking Glass Wall Between Reserve, Active Forces

By RICHARD R. BURGESS
Managing Editor

Sea Power
July 2004

A second-class petty officer aboard the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise operating in the Persian Gulf earlier this year received a message about a family emergency back home. The ship, which had gone through intensive pre-deployment training with its assigned reserve component, had to replace the petty officer.

The ship’s crew identified a reservist by name and called him in New Jersey, asking if he could come forward for two weeks. Within 48 hours, the reservist had been flown aboard the carrier and was manning a console.

"That’s integration, that’s surge, and that’s what we are going to do in the future," Vice Adm. John G. Cotton, commander, Naval Reserve Force, told Sea Power.

A naval aviator and an airline pilot on leave from American Airlines, Cotton was recalled to active duty nine months ago to head the Naval Reserve and reshape the force. His office is in the section of the Pentagon that was rebuilt after terrorists crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the building on Sept. 11, 2001. The pilot of that airliner, Capt. Charles F. Burlingame, was a fellow Navy Reserve aviator and one of several friends that Cotton lost in the attack.

Cotton is helping to steer the Naval Reserve through one of most sweeping realignments in its history. Active-reserve integration (ARI) ranks No. 5 on the Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Vern Clark’s list of priorities, and he has charged Adm. William J. Fallon, commander of Fleet Forces Command, with formulating the requirements for implementing ARI Navy-wide.

Cotton has assigned one of his flag officers, Rear Adm. David O. Anderson, to a cell created by Fallon and headed by active-duty Rear Adm. James A. Winnefeld Jr. that is conducting a zero-based review of the Naval Reserve.

"Fallon himself started this two years ago," Cotton said. "Nobody had a holistic view of everything. So Adm. Fallon’s done that for the first time. This cell metrically looks at every billet, every capability, every unit, and they question everything we’ve done in the reserve and they weight it. On a scale of one to 10, does the fleet actually need this to sail, or does it not need this at all? Is this a surge requirement or a day-to-day requirement? Is it a valid mission for a reservist, contractor, government worker or active-duty sailor?"

Cotton said that the "most startling conclusion" was that what had to be fixed most in Navy active and reserve components was the culture. The active component had to be educated about what the reserve could do, he said.

"We’re about 80 percent complete in the first phase" of the review, Cotton said. The review "will never end; it will be continuous. The first time you will see some of the zero-based review decisions is in the fall when the [fiscal year] 2006 budget is on Capitol Hill."

The most far-reaching change with active-reserve integration is in unified planning. "There are no Naval Reserve requirements, there are only Navy requirements," Cotton said. "For the first time, reservists become part of the program, rather than an addition at the end; we actually get built into the system.

"As a nation we can no longer afford to have separate and unequal forces. We can’t have what we used to call ‘weekend warriors.’ The average reservist now doesn’t do weekends. The average reservist now supports what I call supportive commands whenever they can."

Since 9/11, approximately 26,300 Naval Reservists — about 28 percent of the force — have been mobilized in support of the global war on terrorism. Currently there are approximately 1,000 Naval Reservists — including 500 Seabees — in the Persian Gulf area.

However, Cotton noted, "the real story … is how many folks don’t have to be mobilized, who are written into the day-to-day plans of the Navy to support them in the training, the watch-standing, the deployment, the graduate-level training. For example, this week alone, there are 21,000 reservists, on orders, right now, performing operational support to the fleet in some substantive manner."

Cotton points to the success of the support given to flight training by reserve aviators as an example of wise and flexible use of reserve forces. He recently flew in a training aircraft with a furloughed airline pilot on a one-year recall to the Navy. "He has thousands of hours of experience and now he’s teaching young students air combat maneuvering."

Another airline pilot gives the Naval Air Training Command six to eight days per month. "All those skill sets we need are already paid for," he noted. "How do we bring all the sunk costs of training and better utilize them? Instead of having a separate force, the active component is taking ownership of the reserve component, and the active duty [component] is actually going to be responsible for the readiness of its reserve component, as it always should have been."

Cotton says that changes in the personnel system might be required to effectively use the skills that Naval Reservists bring to the fleet. The requirement that reservists retire at age 60 complicates recruiting a 45-year-old surgeon, for example, who could not accrue enough time for retirement.

Flexible contracts may be the answer, he said. Some people with certain skill sets need minimum training before serving. "We hired a doctor who was 68 and we sent him forward to the desert because he wanted to fix soldiers."

Recruiting is one area in which integration is already moving forward. Reserve recruiting has been merged with recruiting for the regular Navy. "In the future I see Navy reservists going to full boot camp, going to A-School [primary skills training], and then picking up a commitment to stay in the Navy Reserve," Cotton said.

Ironically, the high retention rates of active-duty sailors during the last two years have the unintended consequence of making recruiting veterans for the Naval Reserve more difficult, said Rear Adm. Daniel L. Kloeppel, commander, Naval Air Force Reserve. The Naval Reserve traditionally relies on highly trained personnel leaving active duty to fill many of its billets.

"Because we are getting a little smaller, I don’t foresee any issue in the future," Cotton said. "In the 2005 budget, [the Navy] has programmed minus 7,900 active personnel and minus 2,500 reserve personnel. So we will recruit less."

The extensive reserve infrastructure also is going through realignment. As of October 2003, Commander, Naval Installations, the Navy’s landlord, absorbed every Naval Reserve activity into its command.

"We can’t think of ourselves as separate reserve activities in the heartland, we have to think of ourselves as part of a Navy region. We will never build another Navy-Marine Corps Reserve center," Cotton said. "We will only build armed forces reserve centers, or joint operational support centers."

Today a "reservist in blue jeans" can go into any of 27 joint reserve centers at midnight and, "with good connectivity, work on [intelligence] products for Bosnia, Iraq, Korea, and not have to be in-theater sleeping in a tent, eating MREs (meals ready to eat) and being force-protected."

Joint headquarters units also will be established in each of the states, manned by members of all seven reserve components. "What an amazing concept: people who live in a region will be asked to respond and protect that region," Cotton said.

The Naval Reserve also currently operates a fleet of eight frigates and 15 mine warfare ships. Their future in the realignment will be decided by the Navy leadership, under the one-Navy concept.

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