Who Serves in the Reserves? Shifting Public Perceptions of the Reserve Component

• In Event: The Military and American Society

Abstract

At the time of the Vietnam War, the general perception was that mobilization of the Reserves and National Guard would be a politically significant signal to both foreign and domestic audiences. It was also thought that mobilization would cause significant domestic pushback because of the citizen-soldier nature of the reserve component. Since the first Gulf War in the early 1990s, however, the Reserves and Guard have been mobilized and deployed almost continuously, with little apparent political cost. While acknowledging the structural changes to the role of the Guard and Reserve post-Vietnam, we posit that there has also been a socio-demographic shift in the make-up of the reserve component, such that it is perceived by both politicians and the general public less as a force of citizen-soldiers and more as an extension of the all-volunteer active component. We use demographic and other descriptive statistics to examine changes in reserve component composition over time and to determine the extent to which the reserves have come to mirror the active component more than the general public.

Authors

• Lindsay P. Cohn, Naval War College

• Jessica D Blankshain, Naval War College