Optimal management of the Army's operational reserve involves reconciling quantity, quality, availability, and sustainability of the human resource. Many incantations have been uttered to celebrate the virtues of this indispensable resource, without realizing that the professionalization of our army was leading de facto to a concomitant revolution in the model of consubstantial reserve in the conscript army. Without realizing, in concrete terms, that the same leaders, the same services, the same men would have to ensure this simultaneous mutation. The latter requires at least as much attention given its specificity. The hesitation that occurred between 1997 and 2002 in the management of the reserves, which were largely neglected, revealed the difficulty of the exercise as the command was so absorbed, one can imagine, by the reformatting of the active army.

Six years later, at a time when the Chief of the Armed Forces is himself talking about the likely prospect of further downsizing, with its inevitable consequences for the military community as a whole, can optimal reserve management be reasonably achieved? When we look at current trends, we can sometimes doubt it, so much so that the luster of the figures announced masks a more prosaic reality.

The "supplement or complement" debate leads to questionable trade-offs

The Army's operational reserve offers a dual profile due to its dual component: approximately 60% of volunteers from the contingent, whether or not they are from the contingent (but inevitably less and less), and 40% of "available" volunteers who are former active servicemen and women who are required to be available for 5 years after leaving the institution. From this dual structure, the trends in current reserve management flow. Two options are possible and sometimes even combined.

• Either priority is given to the use of the reserve as a "supplement", i.e. as a quantitative reinforcement of personnel with a profile very similar to that of active personnel.
• Or use is made of a "complement" reserve, i.e. staff with profiles that are different and complementary to those of permanent staff, in order to best adapt the allocation of human resources to the specific nature of the missions.

Depending on the option chosen, the same results in terms of the efficiency of the tool are not achieved.

The management of reserves in the professional army is therefore carried out for the best but also, in some respects, with much less flattering results.

For the best, when it comes to "sticking" to the objectives set by the military programming law, which aims for the Army alone to have 21,000 reservists in 2008 and 29,000 by 2012, with each soldier completing an average annual period of twenty-seven days of service. These objectives are mainly quantitative. No one will deny that the current rules, as well as the incentive policy of companies, have made it possible to achieve the objectives of increasing the reserve force. The number of reservists in all armies has thus risen from less than 10,000 under contract before 1999 to 32,500 at the end of 2002 and 53,300 at the end of 2006[1] (for a target of 56,000). And the average activity rate reached just over 21 days at the end of 2006. These performances are to the credit of the institution, which has been able, most of the time with pragmatism, to mobilise the necessary staff by using the most immediately available personnel to meet the needs. This easily mobilized staff is primarily among those who are "available":

• former active military personnel, now retired, who aspire to a "gradual" and less abrupt retirement than that imposed on them by the age limit or simply by the development of their career,
• but also reservists whose civilian working life leaves them with a lot of availability, because they are employed part-time, seasonal, in precarious jobs or sometimes unemployed.

In view of the objective to be achieved by 2008 and the employment possibilities of up to 150 or even 210 days, under the terms of the recent decrees implementing the Act of 18 April 2006, the Commission has decided to raise the number of reservists in the civil service.e of the operational reserve under the same conditions for the next seven years naturally leads us to amplify this management with a high immediate return.

However, the results are also less convincing, when it is noted that qualified personnel, who are certainly more difficult to find, but who are willing, barely manage to provide two thirds of the average time of activity desired because they are not regularly called in by their unit of assignment. Such a phenomenon is not without consequences for their careers as reservists and therefore for their motivation to make a long-term commitment. The system in force favours, in a commendable effort to draw a perfect analogy with the management of active personnel, linear career paths marked by assiduity and therefore regularity over a long period of time.This is to the detriment of more chaotic career paths, as they are dependent on the professional or personal vicissitudes of men and women who are highly committed to working life and therefore more open to a variety of opportunities.

In so doing, the overly strong preference for availability and integrability (the one that requires the least training or adaptation time), is also not efficient in terms of the use of the appropriations allocated to the reserve. The attentive observers, whether management controllers or parliamentary committees, have often stressed the inadequacy of the appropriations allocated to the reserve activities but also, and above all, their rapid exhaustion from the first half of the year. This inevitably reduces the number of mission days allocated over the whole year.If we take the example of staff reserve officers, most of whose activities are devoted to participation in exercises, it is clear that the number of mission days allocated to them is very low.It is clear that the preference for availability mechanically leads to the priority mobilisation of retired active army personnel. The choice of these personnel, at the highest hierarchical level and therefore at the highest level of pay, to carry out missions that could have been carried out by equally qualified junior officers, is a matter of great concern.The choice of these personnel at the highest hierarchical level, and therefore at the highest level of remuneration, to carry out missions that could have been carried out by equally qualified junior officers (or even more so in the IT and language fields) at a much lower cost, contributes very directly to saturating the consumption of credit, which is moreover insufficient, more quickly than it should. As a result, the average annual level of activity of 21 days masks very wide disparities between highly mobilised staff, who sometimes exceed twice the 30-day ceiling, and other under-stressed staff who have difficulty in obtaining more than 10 mission days.

It is thus clear that the rationalisation of resources, which is expected in the armed forces, calls more than ever for an intelligent use of reserves.

The relevance of the reserve depends on the reinforcement of its operationality.

In the long run, which reserve do we want?

• A reserve made up of called up personnel who can at best commit themselves for only 5 to 7 years, with no offer different from that of active personnel, and even increasingly out of step with increasingly rapid technical developments?
• Or is it a long-term, professional and complementary reserve, which is enriched by individual experience acquired in a civilian environment and whose adaptability to the complex realities of contemporary theatres of operation is undoubtedly stronger than is generally accepted?

An effort towards the second option, without prejudice to recourse to the secure resource provided by the first, is undoubtedly better able to guarantee that armies will achieve the objectives assigned to them by the new White Paper.

Four orientations should contribute to this:

• Firstly, priority will have to be given to competence in the selection of personnel to participate in operational activities. It is not the aim of armies to have all the skills available permanently, in sufficient quantity and in all places among the active personnel. This would be costly, unnecessarily ambitious and probably unrealistic. On the other hand, they can aspire to have them all, according to their needs and for set periods of time. This is probably one of the keys to the success of the missions entrusted to them tomorrow. In order to do so, while bringing the individual management of reserve personnel closer to the duty stations, it is necessary to create and keep up to date a national roster of reserve personnel accessible to all duty stations, in which the detailed profiles and experience of the persons concerned would be recorded. Once the profile has been defined in a search engine, it would still be necessary to check the availability of each person on the list of staff best suited to carry out the mission.
• It will then be necessary to ensure that reservists receive specific training throughout their careers so as to enhance the military knowledge and capabilities of personnel whose "professional" experience will necessarily be less in-depth than that of their elders trained for active service. Apart from occasional on-the-job training, the institution is far from offering this prospect today. The systematic and proportional opening up to reservists of all the training provided in the armed forces would facilitate their operational integration and help develop a shared culture.
• It will also be necessary to adaptthe rules for promotion to the reality of the services rendered. To promote intelligent management of the resource, entry into the reserve will in future have to take account of the age, training and career path of the candidate; which means that it will eventually be necessary to agree to challenge the principle of appointment to the first step of the first grade of the category on entry into service. This also means that the realities of civilian life, which can lead to interruptions in service for several years, should no longer penalise those who, once stabilised, would like to resume their activities in the armed forces. Finally, this means that a one-off mission of a few days' duration with high added value for the institution must be able to provide as many points for advancement as a traditional and regular activity of longer duration.
• To achieve this, it will be necessary to strengthen the human resources dedicated to the management of the reserves by assigning specialised staff and by fully integrating the "reserve" cells into the decentralised management structures for military personnel. The management of reserves must be part of the overall forward-looking management of posts, thus enabling the resource to be adapted as closely as possible to the needs of the units. An army that wants to be modern, open and attentive to a constantly changing environment has everything to gain from this.

1] Source Conseil supérieur de la réserve militaire (High Council of the Military Reserve) 2007