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Donald Trump the Megathread part II - Mod Warning updated in OP 12/2/26
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Sortof. It's more that the IRR has become more relevant with the shift in military needs.
All US Army contracts are for an eight year minimum obligation, be they active or reserve. The difference is how long one is expected to show up for regular duty and training. If you sign up for a 'three-year-stint', you are, in fact, signing up for three years of duty, and five years of mobilization eligibility. As members of the Individual Ready Reserve (emphasis on 'individual'), they are used to augment units to fill various gaps. However, as needs over the past years have been very generic (eg stand around with a rifle), there has been little requirement to call up IRR personnel. We had one with us in Afghanistan, but that was an exception.
However, as the requirements have shifted back to conventional warfighting from general counterinsurgency ops, various gaps or potential gaps in skill-sets can be identified, and the policy isn't so much to 'move them up the call-up chain' as much as 'keep better track of what skills are where so we can pull them in as needed'
https://taskandpurpose.com/news/individual-ready-reserve-policy-2026/
By way of a practical Irish example, consider the time a little over a year ago that the Naval Service put its ship to sea without a working gun because almost all the people trained to maintain the thing had left the military. If the Irish military had felt it was important enough to have a working gun, they could have called back a single technician from the First Line Reserve to fill the capability gap.
Although this IRR thing has been the case for some time, another reason it's come into the news of late is that Congress has recently mandated doing an assessment of the actual capabilities of the US mass mobilisation process, the first time since the '70s.
This is basically just automating what is already law, courtesy of President Carter in July 1980: All men must register by age 25, but it requires going and filling out forms to do it. Some folks don't, for various reasons. I only barely made the cut by being registered without my knowing it when I joined the Army two months before my 26th birthday. I got lucky.
Although in theory failing to register is a felony offence, nobody has been criminally indicted for it since 1986. However, the question "Have you registered for selective service" is very common on government forms for anything from job applications to financial aid. A 'no' removes the eligibility, thus providing a very strong incentive to do so.
Automating the process thus benefits everyone: The military gets a full accounting of eligible personnel for the federal militia, whilst persons who would not otherwise be eligible for various government benefits or opportunities will automatically become eligible for such (Or at least, will no longer have that block to eligibility).
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