Support: February 2, 2000

Archives

For the last two decades, the United States has reorganized it's armed forces so that the reserves (which include the National Guard) contained a larger proportion of support units (partially because many reservists do the same kind of work in their civilian jobs) and a larger proportion of combat units (which benefit from more battle drill than reservists can get.) Today, the army reserves are actually larger (564,000 troops) than the regular forces (479,000.) The increasing number of peacekeeping missions has called for more support units, and more reservists have been called to active duty as a result. In the first four years of the Bosnia operation, more reservists were called up than during the entire Vietnam war. To put it in more stark perspective, during the late 1980s, reservists spent less than a million man days on active duty. In 1999, reservists spent 13 million days on active duty.


 

X

ad

Help Keep Us From Drying Up

We need your help! Our subscription base has slowly been dwindling.

Each month we count on your contributions. You can support us in the following ways:

  1. Make sure you spread the word about us. Two ways to do that are to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.
  2. Subscribe to our daily newsletter. We’ll send the news to your email box, and you don’t have to come to the site unless you want to read columns or see photos.
  3. You can contribute to the health of StrategyPage.
Subscribe   Contribute   Close