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Friday, April 11, 2008

The Reserve

This is Steven Petrick Posting.

Most gamers are aware of the concept of a reserve, but in game terms you usually do not treat reserves the way you would in real life. Most games make it pretty easy to just pull units from different parts of your fighting front and move them to where you need them. Very few games will reward you for holding units out of combat to be committed elsewhere when needed. This is because games often do not cover things like rest.

In real life, you need to have a reserve. You would like it to be as large as possible, and you would hope that it can be at a place that you can rotate your sub units to for a rest. This is not just a matter that the men can get a night's sleep, they have to be doing that on the fighting line, but it is case where they can get a night's sleep without worrying that an enemy raid will hit their part of the line. So they can get real sleep as opposed to a drowsy semi-alert sleep.

Sure, they are on standby to go into combat, but they are out of the more immediate combat zone for at least a little while. Rotating through the reserve job keeps everyone a little fresher and better able to handle the stress of the front line.

You must always have a plan to use your reserve, and you want to make sure the men on the reserve know what they may be called on to do (most often a hasty counter attack, but it could simply be to move up and reinforce a threatened position.

Battles are often won by the commitment of a reserve force.

They are also frequently lost by running out of reserves.

And that is the other aspect of the reserve.

While it is a tool a commander can use to fix a problem, he must not only be careful about where and when to use it, he must have a plan how to reconstitute his reserve once he does commit it. Even if the next reserve he has is just the Clerks, Cooks, and Mechanics, he has to be ready to call them into formation and readiness to deploy the moment he commits his previous reserve.

Always have a reserve, and always have a plan to create a new one if you have to commit your current reserve.

Wars are chaos, the unexpected and unanticipated happen, and the reserve is often what you use to solve the problem. Not creating a new one as quickly as you can simply means the next problem could be unresolvable and lead to disaster.

And, yes, sometimes all the reserve can do for you is provide the organized force that covers your retreat from a situation that has become something you cannot handle with the forces at your disposal.

Even so, always have a plan for how to create a new reserve. If you cannot create a new reserve, and have committed your existing reserve, you may have already lost the battle.