Homeland Security and the Reserves: Threat, Mission, and Force Structure Issues

Homeland Security and the Reserves: Threat, Mission, and Force Structure Issues

Order Code RL31564
Report for Congress
Received through the CRS Web
Homeland Security and the Reserves:
Threat, Mission, and Force Structure Issues
September 10, 2002
Robert L. Goldich
Specialist in National Defense
Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Trade Division
Congressional Research Service ˜ The Library of Congress

Homeland Security and the Reserves:
Threat, Mission, and Force Structure Issues
Summary
Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, many have suggested
expanding the use of the reserves, particularly the National Guard, for homeland
security. If terrorism is a threat which is mostly additive to the threats to U.S. national
security which existed before September 11, 2001, then reserve force structure might
require few changes. If, however, policymakers believe terrorism should have a
higher priority, displacing some existing overseas threats, then some existing force
structure might have much less relevance to domestic operations, and would have to
be altered.
Over the past two decades, the reserves have shifted much of their peacetime
effort from training for wartime tasks to participating in current active force missions.
Denying the active forces access to these reserve resources, due to a restructuring of
reserves toward homeland security missions, most likely would reduce the readiness
of U.S. forces, at least in the near term. Also, a force with mostly internal security
responsibilities might not be an attractive prospect for potential recruits. At present,
some reservists can be enticed to join or remain in the reserves by, among other
incentives, real-world missions which are part of real overseas contingencies. On the
other hand, homeland security duty could attract some recruits not drawn to foreign
travel, but energized by participating in direct defense of American soil.
Some have suggested that reorienting the reserve components toward domestic
duties could pose troubling questions for civil-military relations. The extent to which
this becomes a major issue, now as before, will almost certainly depend on the extent
to which the public views such a military presence as necessary and desirable. That,
in turn, awaits the constant judging and rejudging of the degree of danger terrorism
poses, and how domestic military deployments could mitigate that danger.
Adequate homeland security may not need forces of the size of the entire Army
National Guard (360,000 personnel), let alone contributions from the other reserve
components. It may well be that properly trained and resourced civil organizations
will be more useful in such missions. Perhaps only a proportion of reserve forces
could be so oriented, leaving the rest geared toward overseas contingencies.
Policy issues include the proper balance between the domestic and international
aspects of an anti-terrorism war, the reserves’ involvement in it, and the related
priorities for programs and resources. For instance, transnational Islamic terrorism,
although it has just demonstrated its ability to kill thousands of Americans, may well
not have the staying power, secure bases, population base, and infrastructure of a
potentially hostile nation-state. In coping with such a nation-state, whether it is
linked with terrorism or not, the mobilization potential of reserve components
configured for intense, modern conventional conflict could well be crucial–as it has
been for many countries around the world, including the United States, since the era
of modern industrial war began in the late 19th Century.
This report will not be updated.

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Terrorist Attacks on U.S. Territory: Another Worldwide Mission for the
U.S. Armed Forces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
New Missions on Top of Old? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
The War on Terrorism and Active/Reserve Mission Differentiation . . . . . . . . . . 6
Reserve Support for the Active Forces in Peacetime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
The Homeland Defense Mission and Guard and Reserve
Recruiting and Retention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
The Reserves, Homeland Security, and Civil-Military Relations . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
How Much Reserve Homeland Defense Force Structure is Enough? . . . . . . . . . . 9
Concluding Observations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Homeland Security and the Reserves:
Threat, Mission, and Force Structure Issues
Introduction
Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, many have asserted that
“homeland defense” and/or “homeland security” are natural, ideal, or logical
missions for the reserve components of the armed forces (including the National
Guard),1 and that reserve missions and resources should be substantially reoriented
so as to emphasize homeland security. Several rationales for this assumption have
been advanced, including the following:
! As the focus of contingency planning expands to include attacks on
U.S. territory, reserve forces, because of their members’ long-term
community ties, will be the most knowledgeable about local
conditions, problems, and special circumstances.2
! Reserve units are stationed at small armories and other facilities at
thousands of locations, in major urban and suburban areas as well as
rural ones, around the country. Active force units–particularly those
of the Army and Marine Corps–tend to be concentrated at large
bases, often in areas removed from major population centers (to
provide enough space for training).
! The statutorily-defined, and constitutionally-derived, status of the
National Guard as the organized militia of each state (10 USC 311),
as well as a federal military reserve force (10 USC 10105-07, 10
USC 10111-13) enables the Guard to be used within the United
States without posing questions of improper military intrusion into
civil affairs.
1 In this report, the term “reserves” or “reserve components” includes the Army National
Guard and Air National Guard, with both state and federal responsibilities, as well as the
purely federal Army Reserve, Naval Reserve, Marine Corps Reserve, Air Force Reserve, and
Coast Guard Reserve. Also, only the Selected Reserve of each component is included–those
units and individuals who commonly perform, and are paid for, 14-15 days of training each
year–“summer camp”–away from their home areas and one weekend a month–“drill”–at
local facilities.
2 See, for example, Senator Joseph Lieberman’s speech on “The Best Defense: Leveraging
the Strength of Our Military to Protect the Homeland,” delivered before the Progressive
Policy Institute Forum on Making America Safer: Next Steps for Homeland Security, June
26, 2002. Provided by the Senator’s office.

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! The reserves, by definition, exist only to augment the active forces
in time of crisis, and the threat of a terrorist attack within the United
States is an obvious example of such a crisis.
At an even more fundamental level, this report examines the relationship
between threat identification and U.S. military strategy, and the related issue–one
dependent on the resolution of the first–of whether more reserve assets should be
configured to deal with homeland security threats.

Before September 11, 2001, there was some movement toward redirecting
reserve force structure to cope with homeland security issues.3 However, the
reserves, like the active armed forces, have been organized primarily to fight
conventional major theater wars (overseas conflicts of the same approximate size as
the Korean, Vietnam, and Persian Gulf Wars in terms of number of forces employed)
and smaller contingencies (such as the deployments to Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti, or
Afghanistan). Massive attacks of any sort against Americans on American soil were
almost totally absent in such essential statements of U.S. national military strategy
until the early 1990s. Such terrorist attacks received somewhat more attention after
the first World Trade Center bombing of 1993 and the bombings of the U.S.
Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya later in that year, but they clearly were regarded
as much less likely than conventional conflicts (the latter being framed throughout
the 1990s as another attack on the Persian Gulf oil states by a resurgent Iraq and/or
an attempt by North Korea to conquer South Korea and reunify the country under a
Communist regime).
Terrorist Attacks on U.S. Territory: Another
Worldwide Mission for the U.S. Armed Forces
The current Administration has not made explicitly clear whether it regards
attacks on the United States itself as a threat which is mostly additive to the panoply
of threats to U.S. national security which existed before September 11, 2001, or
whether the threat to the American homeland has in fact displaced, to a major extent,
the previous threats used for defining the missions, and therefore planning the size
and structure, of the U.S. armed forces. This is a question of great long-term
significance for the reserve (as well as the active) components. If the terrorist threat
is additive, then the missions the existing reserve force structure is designed to
perform, remain, and new forces must be organized to meet the new, terrorism-
generated missions.
3 The most visible such move–although one involving few personnel–involves the activation
of the Army National Guard’s Weapons of Mass Destruction-Civil Support Teams–WMD-
CSTs–to facilitate the initial response of military forces to WMD incidents in the United
States; 32 such teams, each with 22 personnel, have been authorized by the Congress since
1998. “The WMD-CST mission is to assess a suspected WMD event in support of the local
incident commander; advise civilian responders regarding appropriate actions; and work to
both facilitate and expedite the arrival of additional military forces if needed.” Department
of Defense. National Guard Bureau of the Army and Air Force. Weapons of Mass
Destruction Fact Sheet, 8 May 2002.

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Statements of national policy regarding threats and resultant missions set a tone
from which subsidiary, and more specific, decisions effecting the size and structure
of the armed forces are derived. For instance, the George W. Bush Administration’s
first Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), published several weeks after the
September 11, 2001, attacks, reoriented the hierarchy of purposes for which DOD
sizes and shapes its forces. In enumerating four such purposes, it gave first priority
to “Defend the United States,”4 followed by three other threats, all related to forward
defense and overseas deployments. By contrast, the 1997 QDR which it replaced
listed three threats, all related to overseas deployments and concerns, and none with
homeland security.5 These differing emphases, over time, are cited not just in
public–but, perhaps more importantly, in policy formulation debates within DOD–in
support of or opposing concerns about more traditional overseas military threats,
such as major theater wars (MTWs) in the Persian Gulf against Iraq or possibly Iran;
and/or a possible North Korean attack on South Korea.
There are no indications – and very few suggestions – that U.S. foreign
policymakers are abandoning, or should abandon, long-term American interests in
maintaining a stable and democratic Europe, open Persian Gulf oil routes, and a
restrained and less truculent China. Indeed, the ongoing discussion about a possible
U.S. attack on Iraq, due to the Saddam Hussein regime’s ongoing support for
terrorism and efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction, suggest that new
terrorism and old strategic competition can merge in the threat identification process.
It would appear, therefore, that if only by default, the Administration assumes that
coping with a major terrorist threat is yet another matter that will be on the permanent
agenda of U.S. policymakers and therefore the American people. However, this has
not yet appeared explicitly in public statements about U.S. national strategy and
defense policy.
New Missions on Top of Old?
Until recently, the most demanding threats, and therefore the military missions
that U.S. forces would have to be prepared to undertake to deal with those threats
when war began, that U.S. forces should realistically plan to meet, according to
policies adopted by the George H.W. Bush and Clinton Administrations, were two
nearly simultaneous major theater wars. One, it was postulated, would be in
Northeast Asia (i.e., a “second Korean War”) and one in Southwest Asia (i.e., a
“second Persian Gulf War”). As stated in the Clinton Administration’s 1997 QDR,
4 Quadrennial Defense Review Report (hereafter referred to as 2001 QDR). Department of
Defense, September 30, 2001: 17.
5 Report of the Quadrennial Defense Review (hereafter referred to as 1997 QDR).
Department of Defense. May 1997: 11-12. 10 USC 118 provides that such a review be
conducted every four years “during a year following a year evenly divisible by four”–i.e.,
the year after each presidential election and during which a new Administration actually
takes office.

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national policy was that the United States should be able to fight and win both of
these conflicts:6
As a global power with worldwide interests, it is imperative that the United
States now and for the foreseeable future be able to deter and defeat large-scale,
cross-border aggression in two distant theaters in overlapping time frames,
preferably in concert with regional allies. Maintaining this core capability is
central to credibly deterring opportunism–that is, to avoiding a situation in which
an aggressor in one region might be tempted to take advantage when U.S. forces
are heavily committed elsewhere–and to ensuring that the United States has
sufficient military capabilities to deter or defeat aggression by an adversary that
is larger, or under circumstances that are more difficult, than expected.
The current Administration modified relevant language in its first QDR, so that the
Administration’s stated view as to the required capabilities of U.S. forces were
subtly–but definitely–decreased when compared to those levied by the Clinton
Administration:7
For planning purposes, U.S. forces will remain capable of swiftly defeating
attacks against U.S. allies and friends in any two theaters of operation in
overlapping timeframes.
***
At the direction of the President, U.S. forces will be capable of decisively
defeating an adversary in one of the two theaters in which U.S. forces are
conducting major combat operations by imposing America’s will and removing
any future threat it could pose.
However, both of these broad statements of the required objectives of U.S.
forces concluded that the same numbers and types of U.S. military units would be
required to carry out the missions to attain those objectives:8
! Armored/mechanized and light infantry brigades and divisions;9
! Support units capable of sustaining the combat brigades and
divisions around the world;10
6 1997 QDR: 12.
7 2001 QDR: 21.
8 See 1997 QDR: 29-32; and 2001 QDR: 22.
9 A brigade has between 3,000 and 5,000 soldiers, is commanded by a colonel or sometimes
a brigadier general. A division has 10,000-15,000 soldiers, is composed of three brigades
of infantry or armor; some combat aviation and artillery; and a wide range of support units;
it is usually commanded by a major general. Headquarters, Department of the Army.
Organization of the United States Army. Pamphlet 10-1. Washington, June 14, 1994: J-2.
10 Discussion about reserve roles in homeland security, it should be noted, frequently
centers about the Army National Guard and Army Reserve. Together they form about two-
thirds of all Selected Reserve strength–about 64% of a total of 877,000 as of September 30,
2001. CRS Report RL30802, Reserve Component Personnel Issues: Questions and
Answers, by Lawrence Kapp. Updated February 24, 2002: 4. They also include the
(continued...)

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! Tactical air forces capable of insuring air superiority in an overseas
theater of operations;
! Airlift and sealift capability that can get U.S. air and ground forces
to those theaters and sustain them in prolonged combat.
Therefore, an “additive” threat would tend to reinforce the continuing need for
these kinds of combat forces and the support forces needed to sustain them in
combat, and therefore that proportion of the total force already in the reserve
component force structure, maintained to deal with the most demanding contingency
that successive administrations, and DOD leadership, have faced.
A replacement mission geared toward reserve operations within the United
States, on the other hand, would suggest that some of the forces just iterated could
be reduced considerably, particularly airlift and sealift and those support forces
needed for prolonged deployments overseas in austere theaters of war in under-
developed and infrastructure-poor areas. It would also suggest that some existing
forces necessary for combat in conventional conflicts overseas (such as infantry or
armored divisions or brigades, or engineer, military police, and medical units) might
have continued relevance in a homeland security-intensive environment and therefore
could be retained, but they might need considerable restructuring to fit into the
domestic American context. It is difficult to see how much of the Army reserve
components’ current equipment, such as the tanks and infantry fighting vehicles of
the armored and mechanized infantry brigades and divisions; the field artillery guns
and rockets in combat brigades and divisions as well as in separate field artillery
units; and the attack helicopters in aviation units, would have relevance to operations
within the United States. Conversely, some support units found in the Army Guard
and Army Reserve are ideal for homeland security and defense operations, such as
military police, civil affairs, medical, construction engineering, intelligence, and
transportation units.
In particular, past reductions in the strength and/or numbers of Army National
Guard and Army Reserve11 infantry and armored brigades and divisions have resulted
in intense and often bitter disagreement and institutional infighting between the
active Army on the one hand, and the affected Army reserve components and their
professional associations–the Reserve Officers Association, the National Guard
Association, and the like–on the other. This bitterness is not due solely to differing
10 (...continued)
overwhelming majority of both combat and support units which are relevant to creating and
maintaining domestic security in terms of public order, public health, emergency food and
shelter, and infrastructure repair and reconstruction. The other components are either too
small or too specialized to drive policymaking on this issue, even though all have units and
individual skills which could be useful, and have been used, for emergency relief and/or
homeland defense purposes. For an enumeration of the percentage of each military
service’s type of unit found in its reserve component[s], see Reserve Component Programs.
Fiscal Year 2000 Annual Report of the Reserve Forces Policy Board. May 2001: 4-8.
11 The Army Reserve has not had any maneuver combat brigades–infantry or armored
brigades–since the mid-1990s.

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views about programs and resources. In the eyes of the organized reserve
community, cuts in maneuver combat units threaten, or have damaged, the
institutional legitimacy of the Army Guard and Reserve. They hold the strong view
that the fundamental reason a military force exists is to fight. To the extent that its
ability to fight is directly affected by the loss of combat force structure, any military
service or reserve component thereof tends to see such loss as an attack on, and
decrease of, its military legitimacy.12 Recent past history unquestionably indicates
that attempts to make such changes will generate intense political combat, at the very
least.
A diametrically opposed point of view comes from a recent analysis by the
Heritage Foundation. The Heritage report suggests that the heightened importance
of homeland security demands that the entire National Guard be fundamentally
restructured so that its primary mission is homeland security.13 The Heritage study
and similar discussions elsewhere argue that the Guard’s local ties and decentralized
presence throughout the country makes it ideal for homeland defense missions. They
assert that the responsibilities that the Guard and other reserve components have been
given for current operations, rather than training for mobilization readiness, in fact
compromises the need of the active forces for capable and well-trained reserve
augmentation in case of overseas contingencies. Furthermore, they say, the extra
post-mobilization training time that Guard units need makes them less useful than
active duty units for overseas deployments, while the homeland security missions the
Guard might face are likely to be less demanding, if no less important, than combat
against an armed enemy outside of the United States. This approach, too, can be
expected to generate intense political conflict.
The War on Terrorism and Active/Reserve
Mission Differentiation

Reserve Support for the Active Forces in Peacetime
The issue of the extent to which the reserve should focus on homeland security
is further complicated by the fact that over the past two decades the reserves have
shifted much of their peacetime effort from training for wartime missions to
performing actual peacetime operations in support of, or with, the active force. Some
of these “peacetime” missions involve high-intensity operations up to and including
actual combat. Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve aircraft regularly deploy
to maintain the “no-fly zones” over northern and southern Iraq; reservists from all
components have been involved in various kinds of counterdrug operations in Central
and South America; and reservists are an integral part of U.S. operations in Bosnia
and Kosovo, and the arduous and demanding combat operations in Afghanistan.
12 For a more detailed discussion of this argument, see CRS Report 97-719F, The Army
Reserve Components: Strength and Force Structure Issues, by Robert Goldich, updated July
15, 1997: 19.
13 Spencer, Jack, and Larry M. Wortzel. The Role of the National Guard in Homeland
Security. Heritage Foundation Backgrounder #1532. Washington, April 8, 2002.

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To restructure reserve units toward homeland defense could, therefore, not only
reduce their utility for wartime missions, but reduce the ability of the armed
forces–active and reserve–to carry out existing peacetime missions, most of which
are integral, high-visibility components of U.S. foreign policy. The active armed
forces, especially the Army, have become so dependent on the reserve components
to carry out their current operations, due to the progressive downsizing of the active
force since the late 1980s,14 that denying the active forces access to reserve assets
would severely curtail their operational capabilities. For instance, in FY2000, 64%
of Air Force tactical airlift and 27% of strategic airlift aircraft were in the Air
National Guard and Air Force Reserve; even more striking, 44% of Air Force
strategic airlift crews and 52% of other airlift and aerial refueling tanker aircraft
crews were in the Air Force reserve components. Fully 58% of Army field artillery
battalions, and 70% of all artillery units, were in the Army Guard.15 To the extent
that substantial parts of these two kinds of units and personnel were eliminated or
reorganized to perform tasks more suitable to prevention of and/or recovery from
terrorist acts within the United States, the ability of the services to respond to major
overseas contingencies could be considerably constrained.
The Homeland Defense Mission and Guard and Reserve
Recruiting and Retention
It is not clear that a force with exclusively internal security responsibilities
would be an attractive prospect for potential recruits. At the present time,
prospective Guardsmen and federal reservists can be enticed into the Guard and
Reserve by, among other incentives, real-world missions, for real overseas
contingencies (the Persian Gulf, Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti, now Afghanistan). If
members of a future homeland security-dominated reserve component faced the
prospect of their entire enlistment–or career of 20 years or more–within no more than
a few hundred miles of their home, many might well vote with their fingers–by not
signing their enlistment contracts in the first place. Prosaic homeland security
duties may be much less an incentive than more exotic operations overseas.
Conversely, family and/or civilian career problems could make service in
reserve units that will never deploy overseas attractive to many current and
prospective reservists. The opportunities for homeland security duty could attract
recruits who might have viewed foreign military deployments with skepticism, for
either practical or ideological reasons, but for whom defense of American soil would
be an obvious mission worth supporting. There is no reason to think that these same
general attitudes would not be as present in the purely federal reserve components.
Interestingly, recent studies by several contract research organizations indicate that
14 Active force military personnel strength dropped from 2,174,000 in FY1987 to 1,387,000
in FY2002–a 36% decline.
15 Reserve Component Programs. Fiscal Year 2000 Report of the Reserve Forces Policy
Board. Washington, May 2001: 4,7. For a more detailed description of how the Army has
moved so much of its total artillery force structure into the reserve components, see Bilo,
BG Bill, U.S. Army (Ret.). “Guard Core Competency: More than 70 Percent of Army’s
Field Artillery is in the Army National Guard.” Armed Forces Journal International,
February 2001: 16-17.

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“deployments” per se cannot be characterized as having a positive or negative effect
on retention; other factors make such generalizations questionable.16
The Reserves, Homeland Security, and
Civil-Military Relations
Some have suggested that a fundamental reorientation of National Guard and/or
all reserve components–one conceptual and doctrinal as well as force structure and
equipment-oriented–poses troubling questions for civil-military relations in the
United States. In response to a speech by Senator Joseph Lieberman which contained
proposals that appear to envision such a reorientation,17 two of his
colleagues–Senators Patrick Leahy and Christopher Bond–reportedly questioned the
effects of expanded use of the National Guard for homeland security:18
The letter from the co-chairmen of the National Guard Caucus stated that giving
the Guard such responsibility for preventing and responding to [homeland
security] threats “would severely detract from the Guard’s ability to sustain its
longstanding mission to serve as the nation’s primary military service.”
Leahy and Bond said a provision to turn the Guard into more of a
“domestically oriented, federally controlled constabulary force” is “troubling,”
and would “violate longstanding conventions against inordinate involvement of
the military in civilian affairs.”
The reported concerns of Senators Leahy and Bond clearly reflect continuing
political sensitivity–which derives from public caution–to the involvement of the
armed forces in domestic security control, intelligence, and enforcement operations.
Such feelings have traditionally been much weaker when the National Guard, rather
than the active Army, has been involved, due to the explicit constitutional status of
the Guard as the militia of each state, as well as a federal military reserve force.
Nonetheless, the public, when it sees National Guardsmen uniformed, armed,
equipped, and commanded just like the active Army, tends to view the Guard’s
presence, at least to some degree, as having the same implications as that of the
active Army. Although the completely federal reserve components have no such
history of state and local identification, it would seem logical that their local basing
and recruiting would generate the same positive identification among local civilians
as does the National Guard.
16 This was the impression left with the author when he attended a Conference on the Effects
of PERSTEMPO on Retention, organized by Under Secretary of Defense (Personnel and
Readiness) David S.C. Chu and the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), held at IDA in
Alexandria, VA on October 10, 2001.
17 See n. 2, above.
18 Mitchell, Charlie, and Geoff Earle. “As Lieberman Circulates His Homeland Security
Draft.” National Journal Congress Daily PM, July 19, 2002, available online at
[http://nationaljournal.com/pubs/congressdaily/].

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How Much Reserve Homeland Defense Force
Structure is Enough?
Adequate homeland security may not require military forces of the approximate
size of the entire Army National Guard (360,000), let alone contributions from the
other reserve components. For example, in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001,
attacks, it appears that civilian police, fire, and rescue organizations may be more
useful for recovery after an attack than troops. Some medical, engineering, and other
logistical support reserve units assisted in the World Trade Center recovery effort,
but the number of reserve component units in the immediate vicinity of New York
City almost certainly greatly exceeded the demand for them. In the aftermath of 9/11,
thousands of Army National Guard infantry and military police units were deployed
to guard various public facilities, airports being the most conspicuous. They were
progressively withdrawn as various civilian forces were able to take their place.
Terrorist attacks on the United States by definition do not involve organized
military units taking part in a conventional military operation, and therefore would
not need larger ground combat units to neutralize them. If terrorist infrastructures
and bases exist in foreign countries, as has been the case in Afghanistan, then the
long-established forces maintained for conventional conflicts would be those needed
to attack and destroy terrorist facilities, rather than specifically terrorism-oriented
units. Finally, as the Army begins to incorporate terrorism-related concerns into its
long-term force planning, it appears that the changes it is making in future force
structure will involve comparatively few units with small numbers of personnel,
however crucial their functions.19
In short, it is not clear that a wholesale conversion of reserve force structure to
units specifically targeted for counterterror operations would be necessary, given the
nature of the terrorist threat within the United States. Perhaps merely a sizeable
minority of the reserve components could be so oriented, leaving the rest to be
oriented toward overseas contingencies as before. The fact that for both homeland
defense purposes (Operation Noble Eagle) and combat operations in Afghanistan
(Operation Enduring Freedom), DOD has had to mobilize a maximum number of
94,000 reservists on active duty at any one time (a figure which has dropped to
84,000 already), compared to total Selected Reserve strength of about 875,000,
indicates that larger numbers of reserve forces may be irrelevant to the counterterror
war at this point.20
19 For example, see Scully, Megan. “Total Army Analysis focuses Reserves on homeland
security.” Inside the Army June 17, 2002: 12. at [http://www.InsideDefense.com].
20 Figures obtained from daily and weekly compilations e-mailed to CRS by the Office of
the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Reserve Affairs).

CRS-10
Concluding Observations
This report has identified several questions related to current and future
missions of the U.S. armed forces which probably need to be factored into decisions
about orienting the reserves toward homeland security issues. One of these
issues–the possible improper intrusion of the military into civilian affairs and damage
to the subordination of military force to civilian authority–has been discussed fairly
often since September 11, 2001.21 This is, of course, a long-standing theme and
concern of Americans in various contexts throughout our history. Other aspects of
the relationship between the reserves and threat perception have not been discussed
as thoroughly, perhaps because in the emotional aftermath of September 11, 2001,
it is taken as a given by top U.S. policymakers that combating terrorism is, naturally,
the top priority of U.S. foreign and defense policy.
History offers reminders about perceptions and priorities. There is little
question that, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and
throughout American participation in World War II, that American popular opinion
was much more supportive of fighting Japan than Germany. Even before Pearl
Harbor, however, as well as after it, there were no doubts on the part of President
Franklin D. Roosevelt and his Administration that Germany was the enemy against
which the United States had to devote most of its military resources. “Germany first”
was the major strategic decision of the United States in World War II, because
Germany was by far the militarily, economically, and technologically stronger of the
two major Axis powers,22 and therefore posed the greatest long-term threat to
American security and survival.
Similarly, as the Congress contemplates action on the reserve components and
the war against terrorism, it may not be the case that the anti-terrorism war, and the
reserve components’ involvement in it, should automatically get first priority–or all
priority–in programs, resources, and ideas. Threats less emotional, but more
dangerous in the long term, could conceivably be at least as important, if not more
so, and decisions about the size and structure of the reserve components should not
neglect such threats, if so identified. In particular, a cautionary note about the anger
and fear felt by Americans regarding further transnational Islamic terrorist attacks on
American soil might be in order. Such groups and movements clearly have the
ability to kill many thousands of Americans. They have just done so. It seems less
likely, however, that they have the staying power, secure bases, broad population
base, and physical infrastructure of a potentially hostile nation-state. Indeed, as al
Qaeda did in Afghanistan, terrorist movements may only realize their full potential
in entering into a symbiotic relationship with a nation-state, to the point where
counterterrorist action can only proceed when the nation-state involved has been
neutralized as a supporter of terrorism–as the United States did in Afghanistan in late
21 A recent examination of such concerns is in Owens, Mackubin Thomas. “ Soldiers Aren’t
Cops: the case against domesticating the military.” National Review Online, August 1, 2002,
9:00a.m., at [http://www.nationalreview.com/owens/owens080102.asp].
22 Morton, Louis. “Germany First: The Basic Concept of Allied Strategy in World War II,”
in Kent Roberts Greenfield, Editor. Command Decisions. Washington, Office of the Chief
of Military History, Department of the Army, 1960: 11-47.

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2001 and early 2002. In coping with such a future nation-state, whether linked with
terrorism or not, the mobilization potential of reserve components configured for
high-intensity conventional conflict could well be crucial, as it has been for many
countries around the world, including the United States, since the era of modern
industrial war began in the late 19th Century.