Unreserved: The misuse of America's reserve forces.

Once upon a time, the reserve forces of the U.S. military were exactly that: reserve forces. Our country held them back like fire extinguishers in the basement, hoping we wouldn't have to use them but knowing where to find them in case of an emergency. Today, however, the reserves are more like an air conditioner, turned on whenever the temperature hits a certain point. And with a proliferation of military missions sending the reserves around the world for every imaginable reason-from keeping the peace in Kosovo to fighting forest fires in Indonesia-it must feel like a hot and humid summer all the time at the Pentagon.

Just a decade ago, the reserve forces-a term that includes the traditional U.S. Reserves, plus the National Guard-put in a bit more than one million man-days toward operations each year. These men and women led civilian lives, but volunteered for a form of limited service in the knowledge that they had certain skills to offer their country in a crunch and the will to do it. They also trained for their roles, as the famous slogan put it, one weekend a month and two continuous weeks per year.

That slogan is dead. "We don't talk about it much anymore," admits Air Force Lt. Col. Marty Hauser, a reserve spokesman. That's because many reservists today face a much heavier burden than ever before. They now put in nearly 14 million man-days each year, even though there are about 20 percent fewer of them than there were ten years ago. "We are no longer a force in reserve," announced Major General Thomas J. Plewes, head of the Army Reserve, in March 2000. Many units, in fact, are closer to a cheap source of contract labor for the Pentagon. This disturbing development has placed enormous stress on the families and civilian careers of these supposedly part-time soldiers-recruitment for the reserves is in even worse shape than it is for active-duty personnel-and it threatens to leave American interests and assets unnecessarily vulnerable.

The modern military simply is unable do its job without the reserves. This is deliberate. Whole functions are given almost exclusively to them, especially in areas where skills acquired and sharpened in civilian professions have military applications. The military police, for example, are often city cops. Air Force adversary squadrons are full of airline pilots. "We cannot go to war, enforce peace agreements, or participate in humanitarian missions without calling on Guard and Reserve forces," wrote secretary of defense William Cohen in a memo earlier this year, before leaving office. Pentagon bean counters also know it's less expensive to sustain a reserve force than an active-duty one.

The reserves-who-are-no-longer-reserves, however, find themselves spread thin as never before. They have been used more in the last ten years than in the previous fifty. Hurricane relief in Central America? Been there. Anti-narcotic operations in the Caribbean? Done that. Last December, the Army announced that it would turn over almost total responsibility for peacekeeping in Bosnia to National Guard units serving six-month rotations. It's hard not to believe the reserves have become a mere temp force, called up at the convenience of an employer who has taken on more work than his existing staff can handle, and lacks the competence to solve the problem that put him in this bind.

Reservists face particular challenges at work. Employers must let reservists coming back from deployments return to comparable jobs and salaries, and they are forbidden to discriminate against them in hiring. Yet it surely goes on all the time. Workers who go missing in action for weeks or months can hit small businesses particularly hard. While many bosses are supportive of their reservist employees, others occasionally feel like someone is taking advantage of them, even though they're publicly reluctant to criticize because they don't want to appear unpatriotic. A Defense Department survey of employers in 1999 nonetheless found that 62 percent considered the absences of their reservist workers too long or inconvenient. The situation is bad enough that the Pentagon sometimes flies employers to Bosnia on "boss lifts" to show them why their workers need some time off-except that anybody able to go on a "boss lift" probably isn't too worried about people spending time away from the office.

The Pentagon is aware of the problem, but apparently unwilling to address it with a full-frontal assault. The Army recently announced it wouldn't permit non-combat reservists to serve overseas for more than six months at a time in order "to ease the strain of deployments on troops, their families, and employers"-as if 180 days weren't a very big deal. When the 49th Armored Division of the Texas National Guard returned from Bosnia last year, there were news stories about how many individual members returned to lost jobs and broken marriages.

These hardships have led, predictably, to manpower problems in the reserve itself. The reserves face all the same challenges as the regular services when it comes to recruitment: a strong economy, high- school graduates herding off to college, and so on. Yet the reserves are even worse off. With their promise of "one weekend a month, two weeks a year" now a piece of history, they've abandoned a great marketing line. Over the last three years, the Army, Navy, and Air Force Reserves have all missed their recruiting goals, even as active- duty recruitment goals were met in 2000. (The Marines-both active-duty and reserve-have not had a recruitment problem, probably because they attract a self-selected group of people inspired by its warrior ethos.) Retiring active-duty personnel have long been the best source of new recruits, but these people are less inclined to sign up than they were in the past. The predicament is dire enough that the Army Reserve has started running ads aimed at teenage girls in Seventeen magazine.

The most immediate dilemma-and perhaps the most important one-involves combat preparedness. Reserve soldiers are often better able than active-duty personnel to perform certain jobs, especially when there's an obvious crossover with what they do in civilian life. One thing the reserves cannot do as well, however, is train recruits for all the complexities of modern warfare. During the Gulf War, an infantry brigade of the Georgia National Guard was found unready for combat even after it had spent two months working on it in the Mojave Desert. That's why high-speed combat functions remain primarily an active-duty responsibility-and why putting reservists in harm's way carries special readiness risks.

In a few areas, the line between combat and non-combat has started to blur. Some duties are given to the reserves explicitly because they are wartime-only jobs; reservists can concentrate on them, and thus leave active-duty personnel free for other assignments in peacetime. Minesweeping is a good example of this. The Navy generally doesn't need to sweep for mines except during actual hostilities, so it makes sense that reservists would train for this duty and then be called up if their special skills suddenly were needed.

The same rationale has been applied to security in foreign ports: Only a belligerent, it was thought, would attack American ships in port. If an enemy did so, it would mean we were actually at war. Why devote active-duty personnel to this chore when they could be piloting warships around the South China Sea?

Then came the terrorist strike on the U.S.S. Cole off the coast of Yemen last fall. The reserves did not participate in defending the Cole when the suicide bombers attacked it-but thanks to that incident, they'll be deeply involved in Middle East port security from now on. Several units already have been dispatched for extensive assignments overseas. Perhaps they will perform as well as active-duty personnel. "If you do something every day, you get better at it," says one Navy Reserve officer.

But that's not the theory the Pentagon has used in the past for combat readiness. In a world in which the Navy goes to port in places like Aden, and where American assets are within reach of figures like Osama bin Laden and his slow-motion war against the U.S., perhaps some rethinking is in order.

Unfortunately, that doesn't appear to be going on. There's no indication this type of port security will be anything other than a reserve duty. It's just another job for the reserves, and the Pentagon surely likes the fact that it can be accomplished on the backs of inexpensive part-timers who come and go every six months, without the need to divert full-time personnel from their current assignments.

That's a certain recipe for depleting the reserves-bleeding them dry over time. The recruitment figures suggest this has started to happen already. The reserves may be an important part of the military right now, but they may not be available at the same strength in the not-so- distant future. President Bush has said he wants the reserves "more involved in homeland defense," but so far nothing formal has been done to realize this goal. It's one plan Bush should transfer to active duty, on the double.