Americas Defense Meltdown - IT Acquisition Advisory Council

Bruce I. Gudmundsson • 193least serviceable pieces in an artillery park were being sent to the foundry, and theartillery park consisted of a mixture of old and new pieces. The reform of the oldArmy Reserve and Marine Corps Reserve advanced in much the same fashion. Everyyear, new reserve units were formed, old reserve units were disbanded, and the forceas a whole consisted of a mixture of both new and old units.In order to make full use of the services of members of the old-style, the disbandmentof “one weekend a month, two weeks each summer” Army Reserve and theMarine Corps Reserve units was carried out in a slow, systematic manner. The firststep was a moratorium on the recruitment of new non-prior-service reservists, thosewho would traditionally begin serving with the unit after six months of full-time,entry-level training. This had the effect of slowly converting units into cadre organizationscomposed entirely of officers and noncommissioned officers. (Had there beena general mobilization, such units would have been “filled-out” with new recruits.)After several years in a cadre status, each of the old reserve units passed its flag tothe new unit and stopped drilling.The reform of the Army National Guard was a somewhat different process. Whilea few new units were formed and a few old ones were disbanded, the lion’s share ofthe change took place in the realm of equipment and training. As units of the ArmyReserve took their places in the mobilization tables, National Guard units exchangedthe weapons of conventional warfare for the tools of local defense. In some cases,this exchange was painfully obvious, with tanks and artillery pieces disappearingfrom the parking lots of drill centers. In other cases, such as those of helicopter andtransportation units, the change was harder to see.Over the years, faithful readers of the Defense Almanac noticed that the ArmyReserve had expanded to a great degree and the Marine Corps Reserve had grownsomewhat, while the National Guard, the active-duty Army, and the active-duty MarineCorps were smaller than they had been in the first decade of the 21st century. Thosewho gathered more detailed statistics observed that while the National Guard wasgetting older, the Army Reserve and Marine Corps Reserve were getting younger. Atthe same time, those who followed cultural trends noticed some interesting developments.Within the military, a much greater proportion of officers had served the ranksprior to pinning on their bars. In American society at large, the proportion of veteransin each group of college graduates increased with each passing year.Endnotes1 For details of the recasting of the obsolete ordnance of the field batteries of the Army of NorthernVirginia, see The War of Rebellion, United States War Department, 1st ser., vol. 19, (I), 836-37; vol.21, 836; and vol. 29 (II), 637-38. For background on the pieces in question, see Philip Katcher,American Civil War Artillery, 1861-1865, Field Artillery (Oxford: Osprey, 2001).