The Effective Use of Reserve Personnel in the U.S. Military: Lessons from the United Kingdom Reserve Model

The U.S. Army and the British Army are undergoing similar processes of rebalancing between regular and reserve personnel.

The British armed forces are currently at a more advanced stage of this change than the United States, and consequently there are useful lessons to be drawn from their experience to date.

This is particularly the case in a time of growing defense austerity; in addition to their smaller scale, the United Kingdom's (UK) armed forces have great familiarity with undertaking missions and maintaining close to full-spectrum capability while subject to severe and apparently insurmountable resource constraints.

Studying how this is made possible may also provide valuable pointers for a U.S. defense force in an era of sequestration and budget cuts.