The U.S. Army Reserve is on a strategic path to grow its force, enhance its capabilities and effect the cultural change needed for the Army of 2030 and beyond, the component’s top officer said.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, when recruiting plummeted and the Army was forced to make big changes to the way it trained soldiers, the Army Reserve saw its troop strength flag, and many of its soldiers were unable to make it to battle assembly weekends.

After weathering the circumstances for more than two years and instilling a new ethos that empowers leaders to forgo repetitive paperwork in favor of field training, the Army Reserve has steadied its pace and made gains in its effort to grow the force.

“We’re stable now, and I have optimism that we will continue to grow,” said Lt. Gen. Jody Daniels, who has been the 34th chief of the Army Reserve and commander of the U.S. Army Reserve Command since July 2020. She is the first woman to hold the job.

“We were declining month over month over month, week over week for a while there,” said Daniels, whose four-year assignment is slated to conclude next July.

The Army Reserve’s end strength goal of 177,000 for fiscal 2023 was achieved ahead of schedule and holding for at least three months through early August, “plus or minus 500 or 1,000, depending on the week,” she said

While end strength was holding steady, Daniels predicted the Army Reserve most likely would not meet its fiscal 2023 recruiting goal of 14,650. This was in line with the Regular Army’s forecast that it would miss its recruiting goal of 65,000 new soldiers by about 10,000.

For the first time in its history, the Army Reserve in April adopted a new logo, and the component has benefited from the Regular Army’s renewed recruiting campaign with the retro slogan “Be All You Can Be,” but reaching the youngest eligible generation has still been a challenge.

Robust Retention

Despite those challenges, Daniels is optimistic that the Army Reserve’s growth will continue its upward trend. She attributed the encouraging rise in troop strength to steady retention numbers and other factors, including moves by more active-duty NCOs and officers into the Army Reserve through the Active Component to Reserve Component program.

The active-duty soldiers who switch to the Army Reserve through this program already have learned the art of soldiering, which “helps the Army Reserve because we have less training that we need to do for folks that are already coming in with some number of years of service,” she said.

Enrollment in education benefits, such as the generous Minuteman Scholarship, which helps attract highly qualified ROTC cadets, is up for the coming year, Daniels said, even though scholarship recipients aren’t in uniform right away as they work on their education.

Also contributing to the influx of new talent is the direct commissioning program for people with professional skills such as civil affairs, law, medical, cyber, logistics and chaplaincy. The program helps build the ranks of combat support and combat service support officers who make up the bulk of the Army Reserve. Direct commissioning, Daniels said, is “doing really well.”

“Last year we were probably at 30 or 60” direct commissions, she said, noting that “this year we’re probably several hundred.”

In her first three years as chief, Daniels pushed to streamline the direct commissioning process, which could take up to 18 months and potentially put a chill on candidates’ willingness to join the Army Reserve. Now, she said, the process is “down under a year … and improving.”

“Historically, we always do medical and legal, and now, the civil affairs team has done really well,” she said, adding that civil affairs commissions “are probably close to a hundred or better this year, and it’s great because they come in as a captain or a major for the most part, and that’s where we really need them.”

With soldiers and officers coming in at higher numbers and a stable end strength heading into the end of the fiscal year, Daniels said, “it’s not massive, but stable is good, and trending positively is encouraging.”

Future Force

With a new post-pandemic energy, she said, Army Reserve troops are in the field dusting off atrophied skills and, working with the Regular Army, the component is pursuing organizational efforts that will boost its ability to support large-scale combat operations.

It is with a view toward the Army of 2030 and beyond that Daniels has continued evaluating what the Army Reserve can bring to the fight. In addition to training the right talent, it means modernizing gear and tactics, and reorganizing or growing some formations such as cyber, space and engineers.

“We have a cyber brigade, and we’re going to flesh it out more fully. We’re going to add more cyber protection teams,” she said, pointing out that the Army Reserve can attract the right people. “We actually have more of a challenge in the training pipeline than we do in recruiting,” she said.

The Army Reserve’s 2nd Space Battalion, 1st Space Brigade, in Colorado Springs, Colorado, comprises soldiers from the Army Reserve, National Guard and active Army, and is slated to grow, she said.

Also set to expand is the Houston-based 75th Innovation Command, an Army Reserve organization that focuses on operational concepts, innovation and capabilities. “They’re doing a lot of interesting stuff. They’ve worked with Project Convergence; they’ve supported the XVIII Airborne Corps in Poland with some data management,” Daniels said.

The Army Reserve also has had “some exploratory conversations” with the Army’s Security Force Assistance Command about what Reserve soldiers can contribute to the mission of advising and assisting allies and partners, Daniels said.

As an example, Daniels pointed to the basic training capabilities resident in the Army Reserve, along with other skills such as professional military education and building an NCO corps. The Army Reserve’s capabilities could augment the security force assistance brigades’ capabilities as they help allies and partners grow or educate their forces, she said.

The Army Reserve also is ready to adapt, taking its cue from the Army as it transforms and reorganizes for the future. “We’re a part of that conversation, you know, how can we help from a Reserve perspective,” Daniels said.

“We’re already doing some reorganization of some of our engineer units because their skill sets are needing to adapt as well,” Daniels said as an example. “We’re looking to change their structure a bit and how they plan to be used for the future.”

Street-Level View

Daniels’ visibility of the health of the Army Reserve and her conviction for the way forward comes, in part, from a midtour review she conducted last year to see if she was on the right track. Her view also is informed by pounding the pavement.

As the Army Reserve’s cheerleader-in-chief, Daniels takes to the road and, sometimes unannounced, shows up and puts her ear to the ground with unit leaders and individual soldiers. She fires up morale while learning who needs what, how things can be done better and whether soldiers are getting needed training.

During recent annual mission readiness briefings, Daniels said, she learned from leaders that field exercises, which had slowed substantially during the pandemic, are back in full swing, building palpable enthusiasm among soldiers.

Responding to her drumbeat to discontinue the practice of reporting unit metrics each week because “it’s too much, and nothing changes that fast,” Daniels said, units have eagerly moved away from the stagnation of telework during the pandemic and into the field to drive and maintain their vehicles, fire their weapons and use their equipment as it was meant to be used.

“Sometimes I’ll tell them, ‘Don’t break it, break it in,’ ” she said, though at times things do break. “It happens, but, OK, fine, get after it. We know the maintenance bill has the potential to go up a little bit, but that’s OK. We’re planning on that.”

As a result, she said, soldiers are becoming more confident in their abilities because “they’re just more excited about learning skills and going out and doing missions that have purpose.”

Daniels cited as an example the Army Combat Fitness Test (ACFT), a six-event test whose movements are designed to replicate the demands of combat. “Fear of the ACFT was huge,” she said. Initially, many soldiers thought, “We’re all going to die, we’re going to fail, we’re going to have to leave the service, we’ll never pass the test,” Daniels said. But once they got out and did the test, they realized, “I’m in better shape than I thought I was,” she said.

Sharing Stories

Above all, Daniels said, she wants Army Reserve soldiers to be able to go back to their civilian lives on Monday mornings after battle assembly weekends or summer training and tell great stories about their service in the Army.

She has worked to instill an ethos of pride in service, reasoning that Army Reserve soldiers should be less modest about their role in the defense of the nation. “This just goes back to my basic philosophy of, if they’re engaged in doing interesting, purposeful work, that will help retention,” Daniels said. “If they’ve got something to talk about, then they can talk about it, and that’ll solve recruiting, because we are our own best advocates if we tell our stories.”

“We’re very modest about how we talk about ourselves to the public, particularly the Army Reserve, and this 1% have done some amazing things,” Daniels said, explaining that she works to help soldiers recognize that what they’re doing “is unique from the other 99% of the population.”

Enhancing their training experiences, she said, could mean that “we’ll have more people that know about it and might in the future be interested in coming and being a part of service.”