It's a good question, Brian, unfortunately any opinion I would have would be, like that lecturer, a guess at best.
I can only point to the US where there are some 807,000 National Guard and Reserve personnel across the four services who seem to be able to find employment in the civilian sector notwithstanding USERRA.
As I pointed out in my little
book, restructuring the reserves into an effective force capable of deployment requires several actions to be taken including creating incentives for employers to hire and retain reservists. A few that I touch on there are:
1. First and foremost to create a form of covenant with the soldier, his family, the employer and the military that mandatory training for reservists be set by regulations to a certain number of days and events that will be clearly set in advance AND NOT dicked around with by the local unit. I recommended the months of September to June at a 2.5 day weekend per month; none whatsoever in July to allow for family vacations and a 3 weeks annual exercise in August. I think the single greatest disincentive for an employer (and family) these days is that reserve service is largely unpredictable in the long term as to when exercises or courses will take place (which I think in large part is why many reservists just don't show up for them);
2. Concentrating the mass of training that a reservist needs to be effective into the first four years of service so as to
allow students to have full summer employment and reach trained status well before actually reaching the work force and having major family responsibilities;
3. Supporting the initial civilian education of soldiers by paying for the tuition at universities (for officer candidates) and community colleges (particularly for skilled trades such as transport operators, mechanics, health care workers, cooks, supply technicians, even engineers, etc) and in some cases even offering short periods (a year or two) of full time employment to make them more desirable as new hires;
4. Incentive programs for employers that provide concrete financial support in finding and temporarily replacing reservists called to active service;
5. A robust education program for employers that helps them to understand the benefits that they receive by having a trained reservist work for them (especially a no-cost-to-employer ongoing skills and leadership development program that benefits them as well as the military)
Brian, I know that no system will ever be perfect (except maybe conscription) but at present we are failing miserably in that the bulk of our reservists never show up for training and are incapable of any deployment without a long and lengthy pre-deployment training phase. The reserve units are overloaded with marginally capable leaders, have virtually no equipment to train on or deploy with and in short, are not fit for purpose except for some of the most simple of tasks. They've been in this shape pretty much since WW2. They should be a great low-cost option to allow our government to rapidly expand the size of our force both in breadth and depth in an emergency. They aren't and no one wants to do anything about it.
To get back to the topic of a replacement for the C3. There are literally dozens of options for equipment (both guns and other) that could go to the reserves that I would agree with. My single requirement is that it isn't merely a training tool but something that you can go to war with. However, regardless of the kit we eventually select, unless there is an across the board, fundamental change on what we want the reserves to do, how they are organized, what their terms of service are and how they will go about getting there, all we are really doing is putting lipstick on a pig.
Personally I'd rather have one viable reserve manoeuvre brigade, one viable combat service support brigade and one viable artillery brigade of 10,000 or so trained and equipped reservists in total than 20 - 30,000 of what we have now. But give me 22 - 25,000 reservists and you can have the five brigade structure I laid out in the book.
:2c:
