The lethality and complexity of today’s battle space present new challenges to the Army Reserve, where readiness levels have relied on a well-worn rotational schedule.

Instead, the Reserve must prepare for a full-spectrum operational environment that includes making ready significant portions of the Reserve force to move quickly, in some cases in days or weeks, so it can effectively complement active-component formations that rely on its capabilities.

“We have not faced these conditions for over a quarter of a century, and the Army Reserve must take action, along with the rest of our Army, to meet the new and evolving threats,” Lt. Gen. Charles D. Luckey, chief of the Army Reserve, said in testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee’s defense subcommittee. “This immersion environment and operational reality … presents new challenges to our Army.”

Luckey described a “new threat paradigm” in which approximately 30,000 soldiers in some 300 units would need to be able to deploy downrange in less than 90 days, many in less than 30. And those units would need to be equipped and delivered with the “mobility, survivability, connectivity and lethality needed to win on the modern battlefield.”

He told lawmakers that the Reserve’s top priority is readiness, but cautioned that the essential training, equipping and modernization critical to ensuring capabilities and readiness can only be achieved with predictable funding.

“With the committee's help,” Luckey said, “we will continue to provide the capabilities, the readiness, live the example and exude the ethos that the people of the United States expect.”