"We could not have fought this conflict without the reserve force"

As I mentioned when I started collecting these links, the story of the Navy IAs is one that I hope is written some day. When it is, I think the following quote from Admiral Mark Ferguson, Chief of Naval Personnel, should figure quite prominently: "We've had 55,000 individual mobilizations for IA deployments compared to 20,000 deployments on the active-duty side. We could not have fought this conflict without the reserve force."  In the same speech, the admiral predicted that numbers of IAs would begin to wane in 2011 or 2012.

A significant point not reflected in the Navy Times article, in my opinion, is that many of these reserve mobilizations have been people who did not have to go. It is now more than seven years after the invasion of Afghanistan and six years after the invasion of Iraq. I suspect that most reservists who are currently serving in either location have passed up at least one opportunity to walk away before they were called up for their current deployments. Despite the fact that it became clear years ago that this was no longer a one-weekend-a-month reserve force and that being a Navy reservist means the very real possibility of a year in the desert carrying a rifle, our reserve Navy keeps at it. And I have it on good authority that the Navy actually has more reservists volunteering for IAs right now than they have billets to put the volunteers into.