Not that I know of, and I'd be awfully surprised if it was. The UK reserve forces really don't do that sort of thing. Even the very niche skills (neurosurgeons,

Not that I know of, and I'd be awfully surprised if it was. The UK reserve forces really don't do that sort of thing. Even the very niche skills (neurosurgeons, specialists in obscure dialects, that sort of thing) aren't any kind of civilian under contract; they're in the reserve forces, like everybody else. How else would it work? They need to be able to mobilise people at very short notice and deploy them anywhere in the world under military discipline for the best part of a year. It's no good if they can just say "Oh, I'm busy next week." (although the number of reservists who effectively do say just that when they get the call is astounding :p ) To fit into the military environment they'll need to have undergone the same basic reservist training as everyone else. Certainly in the naval reserve, it's just another branch, like all the others. If you joined the naval reserve for this, expect to go through the two years or so of navalisation and basic training first, like everybody else. There's also the legal aspect; if you're attacking another nation as part of a military effort, and you're not on the books as an official military combatant, what are you? A mercenary? A terrorist? War criminal? Whatever you are, you don't get the legal recognitions and protections that official armed forces get. As I understand it, part of the justification for not treating properly all those chaps wearing orange boiler suits in Cuba is that they weren't proper official military soldiers; if that's what happens to people who aren't official soldiers, I certainly wouldn't be interested! I did once see someone recruited specifically for his ability to speak Arabic; he was rushed through as fast as they could and given special dispensation for some courses before being mobilised (took about a year from identifying him to giving him a pit in Baghdad, where he had some mutant officer rank because nobody quite knew what rank he should be) but he was in all legal respects just as much in the armed forces as all the other reservists being mobilised. Given that this information infrastructure operations branch is something the MOD are actually planning properly, they are not planning to have it as what you seem to think; essentially a bunch of phone numbers of civilians to ring and hope they don't mind leaving their life for a year at two weeks' notice. Their civilian specialist team available for consultations and non-military deployment already exists; GCHQ. ADDENDUM: All the above is based on my knowledge of how things ARE now, and how they HAVE BEEN in the past. The future is an unknown and hey, maybe the MOD does want a ragtag bunch of IT admin staff to partake in military operations.