by RADM Roger G. Gilbertson, USNR

September 1997

That is the conservative calculation of contribution that the Naval Reserve Engineering Duty Officers and our other Reservists in Program 29 made to the Naval Sea Systems Command last year.

This peace time support was distributed throughout NAVSEA. Each of the gaining commands where reserve units participate had resources freed-up to be used at the discretion of the commanding officer.

To the gaining command this is free help. The Naval Reserve budget is designed to train reservists to participate at 100 percent when emergency looms on the horizon. While they are in training the Reservist also does useful work for the gaining command. This is why I prefer the term “mutual support.” In other words two things are happening at once: training for the reservist and useful work for the gaining command.

The Naval Reserve Engineering Duty officer is unusual. Each NRED has an appropriate technical civilian job. This is taken into account for Navy promotions and in assignment to billets.

This is unusual because some other Reservists are in programs where a civilian job is not complimentary. It takes five years for a new NRED officer to become fully qualified. The NRED has the same Engineering Duty Qualification Program (EDQP) to complete that the regular engineering duty officer has.

That is why we fight so hard for billets. We know how difficult it is to find an appropriate candidate for engineering duty and how long it takes to bring that person up-to-speed as a member of the “high tech brain trust.”

Does the 30 million dollars we contributed to gaining commands really measure our worth? Of course not! We have a far greater value than that. The high-tech brain trust can work on any kind of technical contingency that may arise in the Department of Defense. We have such a wide ranging network of excellence in technology.

Every one of our fully qualified officers has either a master's degree in engineering or is a professional engineer (PE) as certified by a state, many officers have both. About 100 or our NRED’s have doctorates, and another hundred have MBA's. About 50 of our officers are employed in the National Laboratories of United States. And we have representatives working in many important private sector technology organizations. For example, we have NRED's at Microsoft, at Intel and at AMD. NRED’s have a first quality understanding of the personal computer revolution. We have experts in computer security and environmental science.

All are fluent in the use of computers. The future will be information warfare intensive - the NRED strong point.

We are worth far more than 30 million dollars but it is hard to put a dollar value on the ability to deal with any technology problem that may come up. And that puts us at a disadvantage when we fight for billets - because we see that in too-rapid decision-making when only the simplicity of a dollar figure is considered. The abstraction of value beyond the immediate dollar is trivialized.

We will continue to fight to maintain the billets we need for the high-tech brain trust. And it is your job as an NRED to be sure that each commanding officer of each gaining command is willing to shout, “I can not do my job without my ED Reservists.”

While a billet may appear insignificant, the person who needs it to stay in the Navy may be a Ph.D., working for a National Laboratory, and be an internationally recognized researcher in a critical core competency.

To the naive a billet may be just a number - and you, as a person, may appear even trivial. However, the fact is that we often have magnificent stealth skills that may only show up when they are desperately required by a United States in need.

Billets for NREDs are a NATIONAL RESOURCE.