Jim Perkins
Roughly half of the US military is in the reserve component. Yet the US military in 2024 is organized and manned by a system designed largely in the 1970s and 1980s, with active duty forces as the central focus. In this way, both individuals and units across the armed services’ reserve forces and the National Guard are managed and measured against active component constructs of readiness and force management. Predictably, the level of frustration in the reserve forces is very high—the Army Reserve cannot even fill 100 percent of its battalion command vacancies. People want to serve, but they are tired of the unnecessary complications or unpaid overtime.
Due largely to the Total Force Policy of 1973, National Guard and reserve forces are viewed primarily as elements of strategic mass rather than the source of critical skills and other enablers that they are. This Industrial Age model is no longer adequate in today’s competition for talent (and time). It is time for a modern solution that more effectively empowers the Department of Defense to tap into the full talents of the part-time forces.
Imagine that the Army’s XVIII Airborne Corps needs a unified deployment dashboard that provides real-time updates to force deployments around the world. To create it, the corps mobilizes a Navy Reservist whose day job is supply chain and logistics optimization at Walmart or Amazon to partner with a data scientist from the Air National Guard. Lending their unique expertise, they only need to be mobilized for four weeks to build the dashboard. This is all made possible by a tool that exists today, called GigEagle.
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