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Cotton: If war cools, expect more IA tours

A slowdown in Iraq combat operations could lead to a spike in the number of Navy reservists deployed there, the Navy’s top reservist said Tuesday, because reservists tend to fill individual augmentee billets assigned to reconstruction teams that would be called upon to help in recovering from combat operations.

Vice Adm. John G. Cotton, chief of the Navy Reserve, said that commanders in Iraq would likely use more Navy IAs in operational support roles if rebuilding efforts stepped up after an overall decrease in violence. Still, increases would be only be “incremental,” he said.

The Navy Reserve would need about 9,000 reservists to fill individual augmentee billets over the coming year. About 28,000 reservists have yet to deploy, Cotton said.

The admiral touched on IAs and a wide range of other topics in a nearly two-hour discussion Tuesday with Navy Times editors and reporters, including reserve recruiting and bonuses.

Cotton said Navy Reserve officials have cleared administrative hurdles that had blocked them from paying bonuses to reservists who want to transition from overmanned communities to deployment-intensive ratings, but now they must wait for the Defense Department to fund the effort before any bonuses can be paid.

Cotton said requests for about $74 million to fund a variety of bonuses — including those to entice reservists to change ratings —and other recruitment incentives for reservists, were pared to $20 million by Defense Department officials.

Bonuses for already-serving reservists lost out in the fight for those dollars, he said.

Bonuses of up to $20,000 are offered to lure active-duty sailors and civilians into the Navy Reserve for six-year enlistments in Seabee, hospital corpsman, master at arms, some intelligence ratings, and other high-deployment expeditionary ratings, but bonuses for reservists willing to leave overmanned ratings to serve in these same communities have yet to materialize despite talked about for several years.

Cotton said paying bonuses to reservists might not be the most efficient use of resources in some cases. He pointed out that reservists might want to leave ratings where there is already a need, meaning that Navy Reserve officials would have to pay two bonuses – one to the first sailor, and a second to the sailor it must recruit to fill the position he left.

Even in cases where reservists wanted to transition from an overmanned rating to a critical skill, paying that reservist a bonus and taking on the cost of training him might not be in the force’s best interest, particularly if that reservist was nearing retirement.

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Cotton: If war cools, expect more IA tours