Sunday, January 8, 2023: 9:40 AM
Congress Hall C (Loews Philadelphia Hotel)
Christine Cook, United States Army War College
At annual training 2003—my “two weeks a year,”—a sergeant major approached me and said, “Congratulations on your new battalion command, Ma’am. I hear your unit is going to the sandbox.” By October, my unit and hundreds like it mobilized to replace other Reserve and National Guard units that had already deployed for Operation Iraqi Freedom. While this was not the first time National Guard troops deployed outside the United States in wartime, not since World War II had the deployment been on such a massive scale. The National Guard got the deserved reputation during the Vietnam War that it was where to be if one did not want to deploy for war. What had happened in the intervening forty years that now made National Guard and Reserve troops very likely to serve in a wartime deployment? Why did the US military depend so heavily on National Guard and US Army Reserve units in the Iraq War?
In “’Two Weeks a Year My A$$’: The Expanding Role of Deployed National Guard and Reserve Troops in the Iraq War,” I argue the US military had to depend heavily on the reserve component because post-Vietnam War legislation and policy made it impossible to go to war without using National Guard and Reserve units. Part of this legislation mandated critical support units—such as military police and logistics units—resided in the reserve component, so any combat arms units could not move, shoot, or communicate without the assistance of Guard or Reserve units. Regular Army senior leaders distrusted this legislation and mandates, and some leaders asserted a deployment plan that depended on mobilizing the reserve component would fail. When Operation Desert Storm proved these assertions unfounded, it set the stage to test the theory on a larger scale with Operation Iraqi Freedom.
