Expanding Our Deep Bench: Possibilities for the Individual Ready Reserve
If the war in the Ukraine has shown us one thing it’s that high intensity conflict over a prolonged period is still possible and it still produces large numbers of casualties. The US Army has not had to deal with sustained high casualty operations since the Vietnam war. Critically, the US has no experience replacing sustained casualties in high intensity combat since the advent of the All- Volunteer Force in 1972. Every conflict since Vietnam has either been too brief to stress the replacement system or of sufficiently low intensity that the volunteer force could still cope with the ca...