American Military History, Volume 2 by Richard W. Stewart

The Army's reliance on its reserve components changed the very na- ture of its active and reserve force structure and mobilization plans. The resulting Total Force Policy grew out of the closing days of the Vietnam War. In 1969 President Nixon established a policy of Vietnamization, under which the burden of the war was increasingly transferred to the South Vietnamese Army. This action and the eventual U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973 meant, among other things, lower defense bud- gets. Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird announced in August 1970 a Total Force Concept: there would be reductions in all facets of the active forces and concomitantly increased reliance on the reserve com- ponents for both combat and combat support capabilities. In 1973 this concept was declared policy by Laird's successor as Secretary of Defense, James R. Schlesinger. Thus the major reason behind the enunciation of the Total Force Policy was more budgetary and circumstantial than philosophical.

There were also modernization imperatives behind why the Army so readily accepted and institutionalized the Total Force Policy. Because the buildup for the Vietnam War had been accomplished by adding to the active forces instead of mobilizing the reserve components, there was a redundancy between the active force and the reserve components in certain types of units. Removing support capabilities from the active force and placing them in the reserve components not only solved the problem of duplication, it also saved money for the modernization of the active force. Having postponed modernization to meet the exigencies of the war in Southeast Asia, the Army could now afford to begin the long, slow process of becoming a more capable force but at the cost of increasing dependence on the reserves.