Conceptually Ambitious, Hardly Novel, and Currently Failing: The Irish Army Reserve in the Single Force Concept.

Conceptually Ambitious, Hardly Novel, and Currently Failing: The Irish Army Reserve in the Single Force Concept.

Ireland

Irish Defence Forces

Reserve Defence Forces

RDF

Single Force Concept

In 2013 the Irish Defence Forces went under significant reorganisation. Part of this organisation entailed integrating the Irish Army Reserve into the Defence Forces, as part of the ‘Single Force Concept’. Ostensibly, the Single Force Concept sought to provide a more reliable, fit for purpose, reserve force. However, this article argues that the concept has failed and that the Army Reserve is almost unusable. The article evaluates each service corps and provides an analysis of Reserve capabilities.  This shows that the training of the force is suboptimal for augmenting the regular army in an emergency, and that a gap exists between what government policy wants the Reserve to do, and what it is actually capable of doing. This has resulted in an unusable reserve force with questionable utility. This article also highlights the difficulty of establishing the qualitative strength of the Army Reserve in the absence of appropriate means of defining what is meant by an ‘effective’ reservist, and explores the detrimental consequences of paltry financial investment in sustaining, developing, or enabling the Reserve as an effective force. It argues that the Single Force Concept has failed because it did not remedy the fundamental pre-existing flaws that plagued the various iterations of the Irish reserve land component prior to 2013, nor did it attempt to bring the Army Reserve into line with international best practice regarding reserve forces. The article concludes by arguing that the current Irish reserve model is unsustainable, and that fundamental changes are required in order to make the force usable to the State, and to prevent it from collapsing altogether.

Carroll, Jonathan

Journal Of Military History and Defence Studies; Vol. 1 No. 1 (2020): Journal of Military History and Defence Studies, January 2020

2712-0171

Maynooth Academic Publishing

2020-02-09

Copyright (c) 2020 Journal Of Military History and Defence Studies

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

application/pdf

eng

info:eu-repo/semantics/article

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Peer-reviewed Article