I'm sure many members of the committee are aware, and I'm sure that people from the reserves have been here—I would hope some of them have been here to talk about these issues—there has been a long-standing set of issues and tensions between regular forces and reserve forces, if you go back to the 1950s and 1960s and issues about what to do.
When you look at what happens in eras of constrained fiscal resources and investments, the initial target is always the reserves, the citizen soldiers, if you wish, the militia. We have to be very careful because the army reserves are not the navy reserves and they're not the air force reserves. As I alluded to in my report, you can't have one solution here for the reserves, or for any of them, because they are are somewhat different beasts, notwithstanding the jointness idea.
The target is always to protect the regular forces, or what I call the first responders. To protect their readiness, where are we going to then turn and cut or deal with...? The vulnerability ends up being the reserves. At best, in my view, if you go back to pre-Afghanistan and look at what the reserves were doing, and then as Afghanistan geared up and that became the focus of attention, particularly for the army, but for the whole forces, which started to pull personnel away, what happened? The reserves started to backfill, started to go overseas. They became vital to the long-term sustainment of Afghan and Canadian defence.
The idea, at least in my mind, is if you want to be immediately ready in the future, then reserves can be put on the back burner, because what they will end up for us—if we go overseas again with a major commitment, we hope we will have time to backfill them and to train them, equip them to sustain the existing forces.
The problem is, however, to make sure that some of those backfilled roles aren't entirely eliminated. It's a bit of a catch-22. My understanding is a lot of the reserves are full time in training and education establishments. You have to keep those positions because they're vital for readiness, and if you lose them and you don't replace them, then you have a problem down the road. You start to eat away your tail, and the next thing you know, you disappear. That's my view.
I'm not an expert on the reserves, but I think the reserves are an important issue with regard to understanding how the Department of National Defence and the military should deal with the readiness problem in the future.