"Transforming the Reserve Component: Four Essays" contains four essays on various aspects of the Reserve Component. We publish it at a time when Reserves are serving overseas at historically high rates and when new missions like homeland security demand their attention. In these essays, the authors explore ways in which the Reserve Component might be transformed to face these challenges. The first essay calls for a fundamental restructuring of the Reserve Component in light of the largest mobilization since the Korean War, which has been fraught with problems in terms of combat readiness as well as pay, morale, and retention. Hans Binnendijk and Gina Cordero argue that a high-level national commission may be needed to design and gain support for that restructuring. In the second essay, Stephen M. Duncan calls for a complete re-thinking of U.S. security requirements and the related force structure, with an emphasis on the homeland security mission. In the new security environment, the American homeland needs to be considered as part of the battlespace. Duncan explores which conventional and homeland security missions should be assigned to Active Force Units and which to Reservists. Raymond E. Bell, Jr. argues in the third essay that one of the challenges facing Army transformation is the lack of a shared culture between the Active and Reserve Components. Bell examines how these separate cultures have negatively affected the Army's effectiveness as an organization and offers recommendations that move towards cultural change. Civil Affairs units are a central element to stabilization and reconstruction operations that require an integrated military and civilian response. The final essay by Michael J. Baranick, Christopher Holshek, and Larry Wentz proposes several ways to improve the overall effectiveness of Civil Affairs units.

The six-nation Contact Group on Kosovo, lead by former Finish President Martti Ahtisaari, is now engaged in discussions about the future status of Kosovo. If the Contact Group's current guidelines are followed, Kosovo may become an independent country with no formal partitions. Under those circumstances, the treatment of the Serb minority in Kosovo (which currently makes up about 5-7 percent of the population) will be a critical issue in the negotiations. The largest concentration of those Serbs is north of the Ibar River, in and around the city of Mitrovica.