Except for Vietnam, Reserves Often a Major Mobilization Source
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From the birth of the American Republic until World War II, in the absence of a large standing army, the militia, which evolved into the National Guard, was the major mobilization source for trained military personnel. State militias supplied 96 percent of the Union army and 80 percent of Confederate troops in the Civil War. Around 400,000 Guardsmen served in World War I, representing the largest state contribution to overseas operations during the 20th century. And almost 300,000 Guardsmen served in World War II.
With the establishment of a standing U.S. force for the Cold War after World War II, the reserves came to be looked on as an expansion base for another European war.1 However, in 1950, the United States was faced with a new contingency: a “limited war” on the Korean peninsula. Reservists accounted for more than one-third of the first-year mobilization for that war, which lasted until 1953.
But the Vietnam War changed military policy toward use of the reserves. First, the manpower supply available in the baby-boom generation for conscription was deemed ample for the war effort. Second, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson wanted to communicate to the American people their intent to limit U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Thus, the reserves were not mobilized during the Vietnam War except as symbolic responses to the Pueblo incident and the Tet offensive in 1968.
Indeed, joining the reserves came to be seen during Vietnam as a way to avoid conscription, fulfill the citizenship responsibility of military service, and avoid going to war. The generation now leading most American social institutions remembers the Vietnam role of the reserves as nonwar fighters—rather than the pre-Korea role of major mobilization base—as the norm for American reservist policy.
But military conscription became a casualty of the Vietnam War's unpopularity, and the decision not to use the reserves was judged by military planners to have been an error. After the end of U.S. military conscription in 1973, the services were reconfigured into a “total force” including both active and reserve components.2 Reserve units, including elements of the National Guard, were mobilized for the first Persian Gulf War, although no National Guard combat brigades actually took part in the relatively short period of combat. |
