NAVY EYES CUTTING RESERVE UNITS, BILLETS
By Christopher Munsey, Times staff writer

July 8, 2002

Budget planners interested in cutting costs might target several Naval Reserve units and thousands of reservist billets, according to a draft of the Navy's fiscal 2004 budget. A document called the Tentative Program Objective Memorandum 2004, or T-POM04, lists several possible cuts to Reserve programs.

The cuts being discussed include:

**Reducing P-3C Orion patrol aircraft manpower over three years.
**Reducing Reserve Seabee manpower by 25 percent.
**Decommissioning one of four Reserve fleet hospitals.

According to the document, the cuts amount to a 5.8 percent reduction in the Selected Reserve's manpower.

Cmdr. Tim Boulay, a spokesman for Vice Adm. John Totushek, head of the Naval Reserve, declined to comment in detail about the proposals but issued a written statement. "Our fiscal year 2004 programming and budget planning for the Naval Reserve is in the early stages and is very tentative. ... We're still working many issues and no decisions have been made," the statement said.

The T-POM shows how the Navy plans to spend its money from fiscal 2004 to fiscal 2009. It contains language stressing the information is subject to change.

According to officials, the Selected Reserve's end strength as of June 26 is composed of 87,913 drilling reservists and Training and Administration of the Reserve personnel.

As of June 25, 8,760 drilling reservists were mobilized in support of the war on terrorism, down from a peak of 10,000-plus. Most of those mobilized have force-protection and intelligence training, said Lt. John Filostrat, a Reserve spokesman in New Orleans.

Experts with the Naval Reserve Association and the Reserve Officers Association criticized the reduction proposals as lacking a larger objective than cutting costs.

Walt Steiner, a retired Navy captain and naval analyst for the ROA, has written about the proposals for the association's magazine. As Steiner sees it, concerns about the personnel costs of mobilized reservists and the Pentagonwide search for savings to invest in "transformational technologies" are driving the Navy to "look for money wherever it can find it." Between 5,000 and 10,000 reservists could be affected if all the cuts under consideration were carried out, Steiner said.

Marshall Hanson, legislative director for the Naval Reserve Association, testified against any Reserve cuts at a June 12 hearing of the Defense subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

"We suspect there are a number of people in planning who have their sights on Naval Reserve hardware units. Decommissioning ... would be a way to balance the Navy budget," Hanson said in written testimony given to the subcommittee. Navy planners should justify any Reserve cuts in the context of a larger strategy, he said.

The Reserve maintains 47 P-3C aircraft divided among seven squadrons, Filostrat said. Each squadron is staffed by about 340 drilling reservists and TARs.

Each of the Reserve's four fleet hospitals is staffed by 750 personnel. A fleet hospital is a deployable medical facility, with all the personnel and equipment needed to form a self-contained hospital.

For Seabees, the Reserve maintains 12 naval mobile construction battalions, eight battalion augment units, two construction battalion maintenance units, two construction force support units and four naval construction regiments.

In the past few years, the Reserve has had trouble filling its hospital corpsman and Seabee billets, Filostrat said.

For example, the Reserve estimates that between 80 to 85 percent of its 6,512 hospital corpsmen billets are filled.

For Seabees, 10,125 of the 12,484 officer and enlisted billets, or 81 percent, are filled.

Reserve manpower officials cautioned that those filled billet numbers don't include reservists in a unit who are not yet trained to the point where they can fill a billet, Filostrat said.

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Christopher Munsey covers the Naval Reserve for the Navy Times.
His e-mail address is cmunsey@navytimes.com.