Description: "In Send In the Reserves!, Andrew Chadwick looks at the evolution of army reserve forces over the past century and a half of warfare using a mixture of archival sources, historical field manuals and press reports, memoirs, and secondary sources. Chadwick examines the U.S. Army National Guard and the Israel Defense Forces' army reserve, because a focus on these two service units provides valuable insights into training, methods, and experiences. In doing so, he identifies a core--and often overlooked--challenge in contemporary defense policymaking: how does one build and maintain effective army reserve forces at an affordable cost and in a way that does not cause undue stress on reservists' civilian lives?"--
Brief description:
Andrew Lewis Chadwick is an intelligence analyst with the U.S. Department of Defense.
Review Quotes:
"Andrew Chadwick presents a very important assessment of the structures and uses of armed forces reserves in contemporary history and he posits serious questions about the readiness of the US military. Part-Time Soldiers shows that the US could, in the wake of the wars of the draft era, return to its traditional volunteer system while stressing professionalism and preparedness. Yet that created a situation wherein reservists have become an integral part of the fighting force despite limited training and incomplete mastery of increasingly complex technology. Chadwick's broader point is that we now have a system in place that has solved the challenges of the nineteenth and early twentieth century (mechanization; firepower and movement in conventional war) but that has not rendered reserves well prepared for what faces them in the twenty-first century. This is a deeply researched book with great insights for military historians and students of the World Wars, the Cold War, and the post-Cold War era."--Ingo Trauschweizer, professor of history, Ohio University, and author of Maxwell Taylor's Cold War: From Berlin to Vietnam and The Cold War U.S. Army: Building Deterrence for Limited War