Over the last two decades, the Army has made decisions to make its reserve forces “operational” ones that participate in contingencies around the world even in peacetime, rather than calling them up only in times of emergency. But the chief of the Army Reserve says funding cuts are already beginning to relegate his force to the “strategic” reserve of years gone by.

The parity in training and equipment between the Army’s active duty and reserve units grew especially during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — a period during which officials have proudly proclaimed that active and reserve units became indistinguishable from one another on the battlefield.

While the active Army has readiness challenges of its own, he said the reserve forces are in danger of becoming less ready to deploy than their active duty counterparts. That’s a problem not just for the overall Army, but for all of the military services, he warned the Senate Appropriations Committee, since the Army made the decision long ago to house many of its technical “enabling capabilities” in the reserve.

“That decision to put combat support and combat service support in the reserve committed the nation to maintaining the Army Reserve as an operational force,” he said. “When sustained land operations are required, the Army as a service integrates and synchronizes all of the military services, but they can only do that with the Army Reserve. Currently, our annual demand signal from the Army to meet contingency and combat requirements is about 27,000 soldiers. These are forces that must be maintained at the highest level of readiness. Unfortunately, the current funding model for training produces only a strategic, non-operational force. It’s not sufficient to train and equip the Army Reserve to meet mission requirements.”

Reserve officials said that’s in part because the Army decided to increase the length of its combat training center rotations by four days without securing the funding needed to keep reservists in active status for that added period of time, so the Reserve can only meet the requirements by sacrificing training for “lower-tier” units.

Talley said the Army can’t afford to give up its reservists’ training days at any level, since the Reserve is responsible for a bulk of the critical functions the service needs in a contingency, including medical, logistics, transportation, engineering and civil affairs.

“The Army can’t execute its daily mission without the Army Reserve, and we’re becoming a strategic reserve as we speak because of funding reductions. We can’t afford that,” he said. “The Army will fail its mission if I don’t have my combat support ready to go. It’s as much as an operational tempo and funding issue as it is a force structure and end strength issue, although I would argue we probably should put a pause on reducing the total Army based on what’s going on around the world.”

The active duty Army, currently sized at about 490,000 soldiers, is on a path to shrink to 450,000 by 2019. Under the Budget Control Act caps set to be triggered at the end of this fiscal year, it would shrink further to 420,000. The Reserve is authorized 202,000, a figure that would drop to 185,000 under a return to sequestration. Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army chief of staff has already signaled that he, too, is uncomfortable with the current drawdown plan given recent demands placed on his force by events ranging from the Ebola crisis to the invasion of Ukraine.

The Army says that since its manpower-intensive budget can’t shed personnel quickly enough to meet even previous rounds of budget cuts, other areas have suffered a disproportionate toll. Besides training, modernization spending has been cut by about 25 percent across the Army.

But Talley says as a proportion of overall modernization spending, the reserve has been hit especially hard. It got less than a 5 percent share of the Army’s overall procurement budget last year. Under the Pentagon’s proposed 2016 budget, that share would fall even further.

“Today, the Army Reserve comprises 20 percent of the total Army, yet our share of the Army equipping budget is less than 3 percent,” he said.

In last year’s defense authorization bill, Congress created a commission to study the Army’s future. It’s already held its first meeting and selected former Army Gen. Carter Ham as its chairman. It’s not due to report its findings until next February, but its decisions are expected to help shape Congress’ decisions about how to allocate funding between all three elements of the Army: the active force, the National Guard and the reserve.

Gen. Frank Grass, the chief of the National Guard, urged members to hold off on any decisions about future drawdowns until the commission reports back.

“This commission has to look out 20 years and look at the ground force under sequestration, and determine if that’s what we need as a nation. The turbulence that’s creating out on the force right now is going to have an impact on readiness, on people’s lives, on full time manning. If we could wait until the commission reports out before we make any changes, that will reduce the turbulence at almost no cost,” Grass said.

That’s because it the Army incurs costs simply by separating soldiers from its ranks. Grass argued delaying the Army’s planned drawdown by one year — at least in the case of the National Guard — would mostly pay for itself, while keeping about 8,000 citizen-soldiers in its ranks.

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