Lieutenant General Sir Reginald George Pollard, KCVO, KBE, CB, DSO (20 January 1903 – 9 March 1978) was a senior commander in the Australian Army.

Pollard joined the Second Australian Imperial Force in 1940, and the following year saw action with the 7th Division in the Middle East, where he was mentioned in despatches.

In 1957 he was promoted to lieutenant general and took charge of Eastern Command in Sydney; two years later he was appointed a Companion of the Order of the Bath.

Knighted in 1961, as Chief of the General Staff he presided over the Army's reorganisation as a pentropic structure, and worked towards making Duntroon a degree-granting institution.

[2] Schooled in Bathurst, Reg entered the Royal Military College, Duntroon, in 1921, and graduated with the Sword of Honour for "exemplary conduct and performance" in 1924.

[2][8] Pollard departed for India on attachment to the British Army in September 1927, serving with the Royal Fusiliers and the York and Lancaster Regiment.

[6][11] In November 1938, Pollard travelled to England to attend Staff College, Camberley; he graduated in September 1939, the planned two-year course having been curtailed owing to the outbreak of the Second World War.

[2] Following the declaration of war, Pollard served as Assistant Military Liaison Officer at the Australian High Commission, London; during this posting he spent two weeks attached to the British Expeditionary Force in France.

[2] The provisions of the Defence Act (1903) prohibited members of the PMF or the CMF fighting outside Australian territory except as volunteers in the AIF.

[2][14] On 24 April, during the campaign in Cyrenaica, Pollard led a raiding party on Giarabub, Libya, to remove Senussi civilians and destroy wells and ammunition.

[2][18] He was raised to temporary colonel in March 1942 and posted to the AIF Staff in Ceylon, where the 16th and 17th Brigades had been garrisoned while on their way back to Australia from the Middle East.

[2][23] He was Chief Instructor of the Senior Staff School at Duntroon from December 1943 until February 1945, when he became deputy director of Military Operations at General Sir Thomas Blamey's Allied Land Forces Headquarters in Melbourne.

[6] Inspecting conditions for Australian troops deployed to Malaya in December 1955, Pollard was quoted as saying that there were "one or two" serious complaints but that he was "amazed how few there were, considering that the average soldier complains considerably all the time".

[41][45] According to historian Chris Clark, Pollard was "personally ambivalent" about the change, which was intended to rationalise resources and strengthen the battalions for overseas deployments but also resulted in the disbandment of the citizens' brigades and many other militia units.

[2][44] The US in any case abandoned the pentropic system in June 1961, and the Australian Army ultimately returned to the triangular formation following a review commissioned by Pollard's successor as CGS, Lieutenant General Wilton, in October 1964.

Concerned that Duntroon graduates would begin to fall behind their tertiary-educated peers in the community, he worked to make the college a degree-granting institution, though this did not come to fruition until 1968.

The CMF, he contended, was not properly equipped to provide relief for regular forces deployed overseas, and conscription "would appear to be politically and economically out of the question".