No Reserve
[Phillip Carter,
Friday February 1, 2008 at 7:12am ]
The national Commission on the National Guard and Reserves released its much-anticipated report yesterday. According to Ann Scott Tyson in the Washington Post, the basic verdict was one we've been expecting: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the myriad homeland security deployments of the last 6 years, have stripped the reserves of their capability to respond. This is problematic for the reserves' support to overseas missions; it's absolutely dire for the homeland security support they provide at home. According to the Post:
The situation is rooted in severe readiness problems in National Guard and reserve forces, which would otherwise be well-suited to respond to domestic crises but lack sufficient personnel and training, as well as $48 billion in equipment because of deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a report by the Commission on the National Guard and Reserves.
Guard readiness has continued to slide since last March, when the panel found that 88 percent of Army National Guard units were rated "not ready," said retired Marine Maj. Gen. Arnold L. Punaro, the commission chairman.
"We think there is an appalling gap in readiness for homeland defense, because it will be the Guard and reserve that have to respond for these things," he said in an interview, noting that the reserves are present in 3,000 U.S. communities. The commission, which was established in 2005, has 12 members, including several other former military officers.
"Because the nation has not adequately resourced its forces designated for response to weapons of mass destruction, it does not have sufficient trained, ready forces available," the report said. "This is an appalling gap that places the nation and its citizens at greater risk."
Related Posts (on one page):
- No Reserve
- Raising Our Guard
0 Trackbacks /
Thanks for this WONDERFUL post. It is my fervent hope that some attention can now be focused on the disparate unit/resource allocation of the Guard and Reserve forces WRT to local population.
From a Homeland Defense perspective, It is insane that Mississippi with 2.9 million people is authorized 6,500 Army Guard personnel while New Jersey, with nearly 9 million people is authorized only 6,900 Army Guard slots.
North Dakota with 600,000 people has 3,100 Army Guard Authorizations while New York - with 19 million people has ~10,000 Army Guard slots.
We are failing to provide adequate Homeland Defense and failing to leverage the resources/strengths of our great citizenry.
The fact that the Bronx - with 1.4 million people - only has 2 NG Company-sized elements left is instructive.
Like ROTC allocation, the Guard/Reserve allocation issue MUST be addressed.
BRAC 2005 if implemented, will accelerate the retreat of Army Reserve and Guard personnel resources from "blue state" America.
there is an increase in the number of divorces among service members. And, in a bigger guess, an increase in the number of bankruptcies among guard members.
Like the bumper sticker says, "had enough yet?"......and while it is secondary, it is none the less vital, my guess is the equipment is showing signs of the stress at the same levels, if not greater, than the manpower. Oh, and we're heading into what is going to turn out to be a huge recession.
WRT the whole Reserve manning issue and manning allocation, there is an interesting budget angle here.
Why is it that we cannot have "unfunded" unit slots in the AR &NG? For example, we can fund the 6,500 soldiers in MS and 6,900 in NJ. However, based on population, NJ can have an additional 13,272 slots that is not funded at this time. (Based on 2 soldiers per thousand civies) Whenever NJ has recruited all of its 6,900 funded positions, it would have plenty of room to go beyond. [That is, if it ever does.] By the time it comes to pass, NJ TAG would have plenty of warning to put in the budget request / unit restationing.
The reserves are fundamentally different from the active in terms of manning. The reserves needs some slack in the system so there is room for promotions and recruiting. Whereas active duty can promote in place, the reserves have to promote against a slot. I mean, is it ever desirable to have a 100% manned reserves? 100% manning means that nobody can go anywhere.
In some sense, we can use the IRR and the individual inactive guard (ING?) to be the slack. However, it would require a different way to manage the individual reserve system. The TPUs and states need to allow the local individual reserves to drill with them, kind of a unit affiliation for the IRRs. The system should be flexible enough where the IRRs can drill w/ NG and INGs can drill w/ TPUs. Then, based on local "demand" from the individual reservists, NGB and USAR can plan on allocating more units to convert the IRRs/INGs into units.
As I've said before, I don't buy the whole "demand" argument.
In the past 25 years, no real effort has been put in recruiting and manning urban units. A cynical business efficiency model was used. The result? WE stacked units disproportionately in states with struggling economies and less educated populations. The result? These areas have been socked with a disproportinate burden of sacrifice in OIF and OEF. Less quality folks are joining which means we have to dig deeper into the waiver pool to man these units. In the long run, this is unsustainable.
I don't want to hear NGB sound bites. The strength of this country (educational, technical and heritage language skills) resides in the "blue states."
You cannot explain away the disparity of resources.
If you consciously underresource recruiting and retention efforts, failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Bergen County, NJ has over 800,000 people and is given a whopping TWO ARNG recruiters to canvass 71 municiplaties within the nation's largest media market. The Bronx, with 1.4 million people is also given TWO ARNG Recruiters. Manhattan, with 1.8 million people and our nation's financil and culturally "engine" has 5 or 6 ARNG recruiters - in the epicenter of a mega-media market!!!
This dearth of "resources" ensures failure ... the self-fulfilling prophecy the red state "good ole' boys" who run the NGB seek.
Stop questioning the patriotism of NJ, NY and MA! Folks can't join what they don't know about.
To cut through the media zoo that is Metro NY requires resources and people. The NGB is unwilling to spare either.
So, we enlist 41 year old drop outs with 4-5 arrests from Alabama.
That's because this administration's only real concern with WMD is to be able to claim a desired enemy has them to justify invasion.
If you haven't noticed, there is no consistency in the propaganda we receive from the GWB machine and their execution on the ground. Yes, we are threatened by WMD and homeland defense is vital, but we don't resource the first responders. Yes, wire taps are central to the war on terror. But we don't make provisions to pay the phone bill, having the taps shut off.
The findings of the commission are sad, but not in any way unpredictable. Failures like this are commonplace, so why the expressions of outrage. It's the new standard for our society. Exemplary ineptitude.
But, as long as we have a "Warrior Culture" affirmed, developed, and sustained by the Army, our nation's existence will be maintained!"
WASF
Al
Listening to the Democratic debate on the NY Times website, around the one hour mark Senator Clinton discusses her plan in Iraq and talks about bringing our soldiers and civilians home and also discusses how we need to help Iraqis that took our side. I support Obama but I really appreciated Clinton's comment, especially since that comment doesn't help her get elected except with a handful of people who have thought about this issue.
If CA &TX secede from NGB, they will have to pick up the tab for paying their people and all the vehicles. It's a pretty big bill.
Most of the states have this "State Militia" thing going on. Neither NGB nor FEMA can touch the militia for anything. If CA &TX have the money, they can afford to start paying their militia for their monthly drills. Then they don't have to rely on the NG for disasters. Plus, if they start paying for the drills, more people will join up.
>>>IRR, man I can feel the hate. When I'm out of ammo and theres a regiment of screaming Towelheads outside ready to add my head to their Resume, I'll take the 41 year old Alabamian with an arrest record over some EMO northern egghead who can write Haikus in perfect Arabic. I think any man worth his salt should have done something to warrant arrest while growing up, even Captain Kirk got court martialed in one episode<<<<
An there you have the entire mentality, in a nutshell. I especially love the Kirk reference.
For example: I would be willing to bet that about 60% of the 88% of the ARNG units reported as "not ready" were, in truth, not ready long before 2003 - their UMRs were artifically pumped up with people really working at the HQ-STARC, transferred, dead or in jail, their equipment "undeadlined" by unit commanders pressured not to report real readiness levels, their METL task list full of "P"s and "U"s - and only now reported publicly because it's politically safe to cry about the goatscrew that has been the ARNG since the end of the Vietnam War...
Don't get me wrong: there are individuals and individual units doing well out there, working their asses off to try and support the Army's overseas missions. But there's probably as many or more guard units are and were looked on as a form of uniformed welfare by the states they belong to.
The oddity this makes me think of is that practically the last thing the RA did for me was charge me with having a part of the loss of a pair of NVGs a troop let free-fall (he forgot to rig his lowering line) from 1,000 ft AGL. This damn thing chased me from Panama all the way back to the U.S. for years until (I suspect) the unit found a way to write all their statements of charges off as combat losses related to the '89 invasion.
I think this story is a similar situation, at least among the ARNG side. Like I say, I'll be a LOT of these problems were only heightened, or exposed, by the post-2003 ops tempo, and they were there, hidden, all the time...
Just wanted to add that I, too, think we need to rebalance northward. I am positing that there is an institutional failure in the reserves to use the tools they have now to make up for the budget shortfalls. Almost a failure of imagination.
[A failure of imagination because just about every reserve officer has to contemplate moving into the IRR for a promotion at some point of his career. Thus, they are all keenly aware of the IRR.]
The problem with this is that the slack in the system will be exploited and you'll see units with no one below E6 on the enlisted side and 04 on the officer. My last reserve unit (Air Force Reserve) had "slack" because of undermanning and had more LTC's than junior officers. The dick-swinging fest managed to make life unfun for the rest of us as the LTC's were constantly battling for alpha-male.
Still, your point about the problem of not being able to move until someone basically dies is valid. ISTM there should be a kind of "high year tenure" whereby if someone has top performance reports and has been waiting for a slot for a certain amount of time, that they be promoted. This should be reserved for the top performers, naturally, and would provide a powerful incentive.
As for the larger issue of BRAC and allocation of forces, ISTM Congress doesn't have much interest in it and Congress is the one who gets to decide. I might like a fairer allocation too, it seems like such a mandate would be about impossible to pass.
As for Katrina, etc., I don't know about the ARNG, but the AF reserve had dozens of helicopters deployed for rescues and support, not to mention airlift.
The report is focused on the current readiness of the reserve components to perform any mission, such as their domestic responsibilities. They "lack sufficient personnel and training, as well as $48 billion in equipment..."
Now, I must admit that while I finished my doctoral research, I did not complete and submit the written dissertation, so I am technically a dropout. Perhaps someone sharper can tell me how a report on the readiness of the reserve components, and in particular, their readiness to perform their domestic missions is "flawed if it does not include analysis of the readiness and increase of Iraqi forces". Are you suggesting that the Iraqis will respond to the next catastrophic flood in Louisiana? Or will Iraqi readiness deter Mother Nature from causing floods in the first place?
Also, please illumine me as to the "cold war with Isamist extremists". That's a new one.
Forgive me if the frailties of my advanced age have left me unable to find the mental acuity that might be buried somewhere in your posts.
Al
In short, the Army never had the maintenance personnel to support themselves in the first place, and only one contractor available.
The article goes on to cover the woefully inadequate oversight of contractor operations in Iraq. Finally, after some four years of massive contractor operations, attention is being given to staffing up to handle the contractor oversight, only because failure to perform seemed commonplace. It would seem to me that if DOD was going to increase contractor operations some ten or twenty fold, probably more, some genius might have thought that some additional compliance officers might be in order.
The leadership itself was not ready. Probably never had the mental ability in the first place.
Al
I think it's attributable to the sunshine, good food, wine and the ouzo on your Greek island paradise!
It sounds like Buck meant to reply to another thread, but who knows?
Toxic Boss Syndrome they used to call it in industry. They were expert at streamlining their own unit operating costs to make themselves look good. But all too typically those cost reductions were at the expense of increasing overhead costs, enlarging operating costs of other departments, decreasing productivity, declining product quality, and reduced sales.
The practice has migrated and is currently widespread in the federal government and in our military. And unfortunately there it is on a much grander scale than it was in the various widget companies of the world.
mike
PS - Re the Guard and Reserve personnel shortages: MG Bostick of USAREC and the recruiting honchos of the other services recruiting commands were on CSPAN the same day the Commission on the National Guard and Reserves issued their report. According to Bostick in testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, recruiting of Reservists is on track and going swimmingly. Guess he forgot to coordinate with the Commission.
Hopefully it will repeat this weekend so that I can catch the parts I missed.
Combat vehicles ITT declared as repaired and ready for action flunked inspections and had to be fixed again. Equipment to be sanitized for return to the United States was found caked with dirt. And ITT's computer database for tracking the work was rife with errors.
The current model of outsourced combat support is demonstrably failing and breaking already, in what is essentially a large LIC rather than a full-on war with a peer adversary.
It can be safely inferred that going into such a hypothetical high-intensity war against a serious opponent, while relying on contractor backup, would be a complete catastrophe.
This can't be said often enough: organizations which outsource invariably end up also *insourcing* all of the managerial and systemic dysfunctions of the firms to which they have handed the keys. And the services are now proving this axiom yet again.
--
I think you have just qualified for making the understatement of the year. Reliance on contractor support assumes that the contractor(s) are capable of mobilizing the properly trained manpower to properly get the job done immediately upon award of the contract, or activating an existing contract. The whole logic behind contractor support is that you only hire them when it is necessary to receive the support they provide, thereby gaining "savings" of not having to have this capability on hand in-house 24/7 prior to the need for increased optempo support. In this case, we had to continue to pay a substandard contractor because there were no other contractors available. In short a contractor's failure to perform did not preclude it from continuing to make a profit.
Part of this, I think, is the ignorance of the vital role that maintenance and logistics plays on the battlefield. As one of my mentors said, "To all too many people, maintenance and logistics is PFM (Pure F**kin' Magic). When it is provided properly, it is invisible. Everybody expects a fully functional aircraft to be there, and maint &log only draws attention when we fail to provide that fully functional aircraft."
I can see a role for contractors supplementing a robust in-house maintenance force. A buffer against exceedingly high demand. But I have grave reservations with contractors providing base line services, or the preponderance of services in maint &log. I prefer organic support because it is manned by personnel who are trained, in advance, to a defined standard on the equipment being maintained. When such personnel are on hand and equipped properly, the risk of failure is minimized. Of course, this capability has to be in the structure at a level sufficient to support wartime optempo, and that means that during non-war periods, they are not going to be worked to their max. But then, combat arms folks are not worked to their max when there is no combat, either. They may train rigorously, but they are not placed under the stress of combat.
Of course, maint &log is not the stuff that movies are made of. How many aviation maint folks were featured in Top Gun, or 12 O'Clock High, for example. Back in my pre-contractor days, a Chinook company (16 Chinooks) was manned with 38 aviators (three of whom were maint types) and some 225 aviation maintenance specialists. Does that give you a clue of where the bulk of the workload lay? And that does not include the Direct and General Support Maint backup, nor depot activities.
I could go on and on, but to what avail? This is the reward we reap when we practice war on the cheap and government on the cheap.
Al
Al
Now, when Joe Snuffy enters the Army (Active or Reserve), he is trained first to be a soldier and then to do a specific soldier's job, in a soldierly fashion, to accomplish soldierly objectives. He is then assigned to a unit, where everyone trains to do their soldierly jobs, in a soldierly fashion, as a unit to meet unit objectives. And so on, up to formations at the theater level. From day one, we train individuals, and then units at every level to accomplish their battlefield mission, to established standards, in a generally predictable manner. The desired result is a battlefield force where each player knows and performs their job, and also knows what to expect from those with whom he serves and what they expect from him. This "standardization" takes some of the risk out of the fog of battle. When the bullets and bombs are flying, the less you have to improvise, the less risk you face.
Now, if the reserve components do not have the personnel and equipment to train as they would operate, they cannot be ready. For example, if a Guard unit has 20% of the radios they are authorized, they can learn how to operate those radios, but they cannot maintain unit communications proficiency. Similarly, a maintenance unit needs equipment to work on in sufficient quantities to not only keep up on individual mechanic skills, but to keep proficient in production control ability. There is a huge leap from fixing things to managing a maintenance work force. And, if a tank company has only 20% of it's tanks, they cannot be expected to maintain platoon level proficiency, no less be competent in shooting, maneuvering and communicating at the company level. A gathering of people proficient in individual skills is not a proficient unit.
Back to contractors. Placing contractors into the direct support role disrupts collective training. They may be great folks, with a desire to get their jobs done, but they have not trained from day one to be a part of the Army battlefield team. There is no requirement for a contractor to PROVE collective mission proficiency PRIOR to being called upon to perform their mission. They aren't required to prove a given collection of employees' competence on field exercises or at NTC before being deployed and entrusted with vital battlefield support. They just have to document theoretically that they can do the job. I just have difficulty seeing where contracting is, when it comes to combat operations support, a optimal approach. It simply deviates too profoundly from "training the way we are going to fight."
You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand that an undermanned, under-equipped reserve component will not be able to execute the missions for which it is constituted. And from my point of view, if we are not providing these Guard and Reserve folks with the resources they require to be ready, then the money we are spending on them is a huge waste, as we are spending it on something that, by design, can not function to the standard. Either do it right, or don't do it at all.
But then, this is an administration, and an American public, that really thinks there is a such a condition as beingAl
LOL, but its a bad analogy, Al. You really can be almost (not) pregnant. Here's one that works just a little bit better
just a little bit pregnant
So here is something interesting to think about, something that I would post about were I still blogging here. Perhaps you might want to post on it, Phil. On the webpage of the Republican National Committee is the official RNC biography of our 43rd President, George W. Bush. It mentions his "service" in the Texas Air National Guard. It mentions Yale, it mentions the Texas Rangers, his MBA from Harvard. It mentions 9/11 and also says that the invasion of Afghanistan denied Al Queda "its safe haven of operations." It talks about his efforts to privatize social security. Of course it mentions his time as governor of Texas. It even mentions "two dogs, Spot and Barney, and a cat, India."
You know what the official RNC Biography of George W. Bush does NOT mention, not even allude to, not even hint about?
Yep. Not one fucking word about Iraq. I shit you not.
Not one word.
Thanks for your service in Iraq, Phil. I am sorry you lost friends over there, including Iraqi nationals. I am proud to know you, and proud of our Armed Forces.
And the RNC has a bio about the President that doesn't even mention Iraq.
Support the troops my ass.
Here it is in full, and here is the link:
somebody should really post something about his. Phil, perhaps Slate would be interested.
The White House bio doesn't even mention Afghanistan! It refers, apparently, to the two wars thusly:
And we haven't impeached him why? could the "terrorist surveillance program" (warrantless wiretaps) be a reason, perhaps discovering things that can be used to blackmail members of Congress into taking the "impeachment issue off the table"?
Nahh. We know this president would never use his powers in a partisan fashion like that, nor break the law. Would he? No way. I'm just a nutbag conspiracy theorist. There is no evidence that presidents would use information discovered in illegal wiretaps to blackmail political opponents. Don't know why I would think such a foolish thing. (those who don't detect sarcasm should read up on the Church Committee that lead to the FISA law, or read about Edgar J. Hoover - or about how most other governments, especially authoritarian ones, have used secret police and intelligence agencies against their own people and political opponents).
It could never happen here. Except, as we watch, it is happening.
And it isn't even being discussed as we all pretend an election in November will solve all our problems....
I was talking to a friend from my old reserve unit today. They are a tenant organization on an active-duty base. As a tenant, they are forced to rely on the active duty base services for some critical support - one of which is basic computer and network support to the unit's classified computer networks. Several years ago (when I was still with the unit), the based demanded and got full control over those networks making the unit (a wing-level organization with about 2000 people) wholly dependent upon base for any level of support from trouble-shooting, to new accounts, to resetting passwords, to setting up a printer, etc. No one in our unit was allowed to have administrator access to any of the computers.
This was mildly annoying, but worked out Ok until recently. Guess what happened? The active duty base contracted out all those networks services. The problem is that the contract did not mandate nor even mention any support for the reserve tenant unit. Since there is no requirement for support, the contractor has refused to do anything with the reserve unit's network, which is beginning to fall apart. The active duty folks cannot do anything either, because that would violate the contract. The reserve unit can't do anything because not a single person in it has administrator access to the network and the network is intertwined with the host unit, it's essentially "owned" by the contractor who will not provide any administrator rights either. So, my old reserve unit is fucked because some dipshit on the active duty side fucked-up the contract. Apparently, the issue has been elevated and is now somewhere around the 2-3 star level. Meanwhile, my old unit is preparing for a deployment later this year - or at least they're trying to!
I bet that several years ago when those network support tasks were consolidated that the base IT golden boys got big kudos from the base commander. And then recently when the network services were contracted out, some dork contracting officer probably also got a walk-on-water performance review or a promotion.
Sad story. The contractor is playing hardball. Any legit contractor would have at least provided administrator privileges until the contract was straightened out.
mike
The Army either needs to totally commit to organic maintenance manpower (Soldier mechanics) or totally commit to contractor maintenance. This half-assed setup we now have isn't working. Out of a 40 hour workweek, my mechanics are available maybe 12-15 hours a week to do actual maintenance work. There is so much mandatory Army bullshit training that we have only a few hours a week to actually perform our MOS. I see a gradual decline in competency for Army maintenance personnel. In their place, we are filling the gaps with contractor maintenance support. I guess this is OK if we plan on taking contractors (almost entirely ex-military) to the battlefield and hopefully the contractors plan on accompanying us to the battlefield. This setup works for now, but I worry about what would happen to our contractors if we went up against a Heavy Hitter and got some serious heat in the rear. Think what would happen if we pulled that thunder-run fiasco against the Soviets and left our logistics support flapping in the breeze? It wouldn't be pretty - think Jessica Lynch times 1000.
What I'm saying is that as time goes on, I see the big green machine relying more and more on contractor support for maintenance and Army mechanics becoming less and less competent, until we reach the point that we are entirely dependent on contractors for maintenance. I'm not sure this is good.
How did your unit get their deployment orders if they couldn't get on the SIPR? Must have been a big embarrassment to the base commander! :)
The guard and reserve mechanics are competent, but that's because they only have to meet the "Army Warrior Tasks" standard of an M-day soldier, while working as federal technicians or automotive garages during the week.
We're getting into this Deployability/Expeditionary brouhaha, but can we really "deploy" our depot level maintenance? It seems like that's the piece that's contracted out and that we're short on.
Andrew, are you familiar w/ how the Air Force handles the "deployability"/support of their depots?
Yeah, I think you have it about right!
Jimmy,
I'm not all that familiar with the maintenance trail for the Air Force. I think most depot level maintenance is contractors at state-side facilities and I think it's been that way for a long time (it's what I remember for the Navy as well). I do remember from my deployment in 2005 that one of our helos went down and needed a critical part. We tried to get one from the Army, but they wouldn't share, so I think the aircraft was down for over a week while we waited for the part to be flown in.
I also fail to understand how funding the various state ArNG units as a non-deployable "strategic reserve" for 60 years without a major combat deployment and then, you know, expecting them to go somehow is "punishing" them.
This isn't like an unfunded mandate. While one might dicker over how generous the feds were with the support the various ArNG units received over six decades, the reality is that it was basically a blank check: The feds gave the money and the states didn't have to do much fighting.
The bluster that the US somehow can't prosecute OIF/OEF without two state National Guard elements is idiotic. In terms of deployable numbers, we dealing maybe with a few thousand Soldiers in the ground component. A battalion or two possibly rotating over during the next two years.
Yeah. Couldn't "spare" them.
Yeah. Right.
The Faustian bargain of every half-century or so actually make good on the bargain of, you know, being a read deployable "strategic reserve" thus far has helped the states far more than the federal DoD.
1. ARFORGEN -- It's a way to restructure the Guard and Reserve so that those in these billets will be required to involuntarily mobilize for active duty for one year after every four, not 18 months every 60 years. Although this largely began during the Clinton administration in time for Bosnia (and the seeds were germinating in the 1973 TFP), it sped up in the Army under former CSA Schoomaker and Secretary Harvey. Their controlling 2003 memorandum came from SecDef Rumsfeld in 2003.
2. Switching the ArNG units to better reflect our "surge" needs for CS/CSS units, not frontline combat troops. In a real sense, we made our "strategic reserve" of the ArNG into a carbon copy shadow Army of the "Regular" military. Perhaps a smarter use of our resources would be to turn the ArNG into CS and CSS units. These, also, would be of far more use to the various governors than BCTs loaded with Strykers. We've alrady done this for the RC.
Because the implementing documents for the first plank came in 2006, the second part has been given little thought beyond my questions about it after mind-numbing PowerPoint briefings by pasty men from Fort McPherson.
I believe FORSCOM would be better served by discussing with Congress the possibility of the latter before implementing the former. It has worked for the RC (RA), so why not the ArNG?
No, not a misspelling. It's former Sec White's decision in 2002 (articulated in 2003) to modernize the ArNG along the lines of a lighter, modularized brigade/multifaceted division structure.
To me, I don't understand why Congress needs to be hamstrung by an OSD decision dating back to 2002 as articulated through a long gone Secretary of the Army. If Ike Skelton can signal that he's ready to tear up the Key West agreement, then why can't someone just say, "Let's get a win-win for the governors and the US Army?"
It's not as if we haven't realized that the current model for equipping the Guard with mainline tanks, Strykers and other cutting edge equipment isn't exactly paying dividends.
As if we even know the full extent of the problem.
Are you f*^)ing kidding me?
1. ARFORGEN is FANTASY. Anyone who believes that such a system is tenable when the USAR currently sits at 52% strength on CPTs and 58% strength on E-7/SFCs is willfully suspending reality. The "Operational Reserve" idea is DOA if we expect to retain/cultivate reservists with any kind of meaningful non civil-service career. If you want "winners in life", you're not going to find them in jobs that can just "spare them" 12 months out of every 60. The whole rationale of a Reserve/Guard as a "value add" of civilian skills is shot under this proposal.
2. Transform the Guard to CS/CSS. This was proposed in the commission report. Guess what? The DoD pitched a fit with Paul McHale and ole' "blood n' guts" LTG Blum in his ACUs at the Pentagon dais (how professional).
I wouldn't necessarily classify the USAR transformation as a success. We are seeing a real problem in a dearth of feeder MOS's/branches to truly populate the Drill Sergeant, institutional training and Civil Affairs communities. To get combat arms-trained CA officers in the USAR these days, you need to get a guy off active duty (increasingly unlikely) or pry a CPT with wide open promotion potential from the ARNG (they're not much better off in officers than the USAR). The USAR has lost ist ability to generate combat arms oriented NCOs or officers from within. Untenable in the long run.
Could/Should the Guard go more CS/CSS? Absolutely! That said, I would be very wary of losing an RC combat arms feeder program.
Guard combat arms slots need to be better dispersed geographically.
There was a lot of dead weight in the ArNG before 9/11. As it stands, what did we lose with the first California ArNG call up? Something like 30 percent couldn't deploy because of dental problems.
At least if we place our ArNG units on a set mandatory deployment schedule we can 1) cut back funding to the RA and put the cash into the Guard; 2) allow employers to understand exactly when we will be using their workers and for how long; 3) "surge" our family support operations to attend to the specific needs of each BCT being deployed, instead of the ad hoc state efforts underway now.
If you better take care of the third plank, you won't have as many mid-level bail outs.
Anyway, what's driving the train is the realization that transformation and legacy costs are killing us, and the only solution is to cut expenditures somewhere. Obviously, going to a temporary force that rotates every five years or so in the RA would save us some money.
What you term a "fantasy" is likelier than what is playing out now, simply because it's far cheaper in the long run.
Something out of South Park.
You know as well as I do that the ARNG was never contemplated as a "strategic reserve" in the fashion that it's being used for our current foreign adventures. I won't argue that the Krumper "general war mobilization reserve" wasn't unrealistic, but that was "the bargain". To tell a "citizen soldier" that his civilian life is going to be interrupted every two to four years by a year or two of soldiering until further notice (what did St. John McCain say...100 years? Damn, glad I'm not the Re-Up guy for THAT campaign...) is to make a mockery of the "citizen" part of the formula.
I have no problem with bitching that the Guard as it exists is a political boondoggle and a form of good-old-white-boy-welfare for the states. But you need to argue honestly - that's the deal that DoD made with the NGB to keep all those politically-connected AGs and senators and all the other federal Guard-whores quiet and happy. The problem isn't so much that the Guard took the cash and now doesn't want to play - the Feds changed the game and the Guard doesn't like it.
IMO that's tough titty, Guard. But that's my opinion - it doesn't change that fact that, given the way the game WAS played up to 2003, the Guard doesn't have grounds to bitch.
It's more complicated than that, FDC! LBJ certainly could've called up the Guard during the era of conscription and a major land war in Southeast Asia, but he determined that politically he couldn't touch either the ArNG or the AR (which also had become safeharbors for people doing their most to avoid the draft).
In a sense, it was McNamara's OSD that changed the rules by NOT calling up the Guard and Reserve. It was deemed politically expedient to draft 100,000 borderline recruitable men and send many of them off to Vietnam than to mobilize guys spending a weekend per month and two weeks in the summer protecting Iowa from invasion by Illinois.
Abrams was wise to tinker with that, but the reforms still didn't go far enough (notice above my mention of the 1973 regs). Regardless, we've known since the 1993 changes that ArNG brigades would be used overseas for extended deployments. By the time OIF kicked off, there was a (lost) decade that could've been used differently.
In reality, every ArNG volunteer (including re-ups) since 1993 realized -- or should've realized -- that the rules had changed quite a bit. Ten years is a long lead time, in my opinion.
That could be you, Phil.
And, hey, even McCain has stumbled on the set of MTV. Sort of. And the gals are ga-ga for him, too!
Fine words...but just words. When your brigades' deployment mission is reinforcement of Korea, the assumption is not unrealistic that you are going to fight a general war, not bopping around some sort of foreign expeditionary AO doing imperial grunt-work. You say "we've known", but I can tell you from the armories that "we" usually didn't include anyone or almost anyone below the STARC level. The deal was assumed to be that, unless you volunteered, you were a civilian until the PRNK crossed the DMZ.
McNamara wasn't the last word on the subject - if you remember the Reagan era DoD tried to pull this shit in Central America and got quite a bit of squawking from both the AGs and the governors.
And, realistically, telling guardsmen and reservists that they can expect an eighteen-moth deployment every four to five years for the next ten, fifteen - what, fifty? A hundred? ...years is the best way I can think of to ensure that you have an RA and a handful of guys who don't want to live in the barracks but don't want to get out, either.
Given that the official line is that the GWOT goes on until we have raised the Cross of Jesus over the Holy Sepulchre or something, to call this "changing the rules a bit" is "stretching reality a bit".
IMO the bottom line for countries engaged in imperial policing is that you can have a "strategic reserve" or you can fiddle away your citizen soldiers wog-bashing. The dirty business of killing brown people to serve national policy is best left to long-service professionals - the Brits, whose gift for empire was matched only by their ineptness at figuring out how to dissolve it successfully, stuck to this formula pretty rigidly. I'd suggest that we should think carefully before abandoning their example.
I don't see a peer foe on the horizon, but, there it is...
MSR, sir, contemptliber, whoever...
Getting called up to sit in a guard shack somewhere in Buttfuck Balkans - and a tiny minority of the RC, at that - is NOT the same as bashing wooly heads in Basra or sniping angry wogs in Mosul.
Direct Federal call-ups of the Guard for domestic emergencies are NOT the same as repeated overseas deployments in hostile fire zones.
I'm getting the same head-banging-against-the-wall sensation that I get a lot of the time we have these run-ins. Playing the "Clinton did it in the Balkans, too" card doesn't get you the pot. Putzing around Bosnia and fighting Gs in Ramadi aren't just apples and oranges, they're apples and hand grenades.
But if your attitude is the mindset up at the Five-sided Funny Farm, dude, have at it. You're not going to end up with any "citizen-soldiers" at the end. You're gonna have a full-time RA and a part-time RA...no civilian with a job and family and kids is going to be able to sustain this optempo for another decade. Good luck with that.
And, to add insult to injury, the FY08 budget is filled with the usual defense contractor welfare, the real costs of the warfighting for '08 is left off the table, and the whole thing is rented from the Chinese. God forbid a couple of millionaires may have to go shy a mojito or three the next time they cruise the Caribbean - better we jack the deficit to, how 'bout 400B?
Sweet.
What. F%$)ing. Horses#%t.
Stop spinning an alternate version of reality!
The 27th Enhanced Brigade (NYARNG) had a wartrace mission to Iceland! That was what was communicated to RA guys enlisting to the Guard in 2001.
Bosnia? Dude, being a full time college student was generally sufficient to getting out of those deployments that's reality.
To compare the (comparatively) infintessimally small 1999/2000 USAR/ARNG mobilizations with OIF 6 (or whatever) is pure deceit.
You anger me so much. Your "lifer" attitude is so contemptuous of the "citizen-soldier."
You love OIF so much? You should stay there on perpetual deployment with all the other true believers.
IRR: "You anger me so much. Your "lifer" attitude is so contemptuous of the "citizen-soldier."
Huh. One of the things this old lifer RA guy likes about this blog is the insight I get into how the part-timers view matters military. It's especially important these days because the part-timers have become much more important than they were in my day. They are now too important, given the commitments the U.S. Government has made, and given the realities of the situation. Fact is, like it or not, the RA is on its ass without the part-timers.
And the part-timers are pissed. Rightfully so, IMO. As FDChief so eloquently points out, what we've got now is not how it was supposed to be. I really like this: "IMO the bottom line for countries engaged in imperial policing is that you can have a "strategic reserve" or you can fiddle away your citizen soldiers wog-bashing." MSR can quibble all he likes, but if he's intellectually honest at all, he must admit that the term "citizen-soldier" is not consonant with having part-timers routinely being ripped away from family and career half of the time. Wog-bashing may be fun for a guy wanting a break from a dull civilian existence once, but doing it every couple of years has to get old. As FDChief suggests, that's a job for the RA. If there aren't enough of them, well, shit, maybe we won't do it.
ISTM that the current state of affairs is only going to end up giving us a seriously stretched and demoralized part-time force—with diminishing numbers and quality—while weakening our strategic reserve, which is what we should really care about. In fact, given well-known American ingenuity, I think we could end up without a strategic reserve at all. I see a time when an enterprising state government establishes its own paramilitary force without federal ties. Such a force would always be available to the governor as needed and would not be subject to federal call-up depending on the whims of whoever happens to be president. Such a force would not be available for overseas adventures, but would rather stay right at home. Bye-bye National Guard, bye-bye strategic reserve. Would it fuck the nation? Sure. Are the states being fucked right now? Sure. This is where we're headed, thanks to the fools and liars we now have running things. The National Guard is not graven in stone.
MSR/Contemptliber, I think I've come up with a better nom de plume for you. Flashman. As in Brigadier Harry Flashman. You specialize in the right part of the world and you remind me a great deal of old Harry. Flashman it will be.
I can't keep from coming back to the latest budget request. It's almost like a parody of a Great Power in the throes of the last dying phases of imperial overstretch. Billions for defense, not one cent (relatively speaking) for infrastructure, social welfare, education...
You'd think we were holding the GSFG at the mouth of the Fulda Gap instead of squabbling with a bunch of raggedy ass Islamic theocrats in the dusty nether regios of the Third World.
And this is what we've come to as a nation? What the fuck is wrong with us?
Really? That's interesting, considering that the statute was fairly clear, and the rules making crystal clear, about the very real likelihood of any major event requiring the full support of the Guard and Reserves. Much of the Guard was mobilized for two years of homeland security duty after 2001, so they could NOT deploy to OIF or OEF without COTTAD, which is very expensive for DoD.
If you were in the Guard in 2003 and you had watched one of your divisions lop off a brigade for routine duties in Bosnia and you never thought that you might be going somewhere, you're a complete idiot.
That's not an "alternative reality," that's simply real. Beginning with the 1992 commission report, following into the legislation and the DoD rules-making, every Guard command had MORE THAN A DECADE to get used to the new reality.
Obviously, some didn't. You included.
You wrote: "I can't keep from coming back to the latest budget request. It's almost like a parody of a Great Power in the throes of the last dying phases of imperial overstretch. Billions for defense, not one cent (relatively speaking) for infrastructure, social welfare, education... "
While I wholeheartedly agree with this I would argue that what REALLY makes us a parody is the following: only a gentleman regarded as crack pot, and with no chance at the Presidency, is willing to stand up and say 'we have to cut military spending'. I am no supporter of Ron Paul. Although I am tempted. My point is, that none of the Dems, were able, or will be able, to say in the future that someone needs to take a meat cleaver to the military budget. They may feel that way, they may try to do it by stealth, and trickery, but they won't say it to the American people. So, what and who do we condemn here? The people or the pols? Or both?
You're right, Publius. One combat deployment EVERY 60 YEARS is such a strain on the "citizen soldier." Where was the "citizen soldier" in Vietnam? Desert Storm?
Some went, sure. But these were truly small stuff compared to the commitment of the RA. In OIF/OEF, the typical Guard member has deployed ONCE in five years.
Want to guess how often the typical RA or USMC grunt has gone over?
The other problem no one wants to mention out loud has been the piss poor performance of the ArNG in OIF. For much of 2005-06, when things turned very bad there, it was the Guard playing its most prominent role in "counter-insurgency" since the insurrection in the Philippines.
The performance of the RA wasn't good at all in 2004 at COIN, but the collective competence of ArNG in OIF after taht was simply abysmal. Part of the problem stemmed from the various state Guards inability to even form functioning battalions (typically, it was a hodge-podge of units, even scrapping together platoons and companies from other divisions across the nation, people who had never trained together and had no unity of purpose or command), but there were other issues, too.
It's gone unmentioned, but we've turned to using the Guard for yeoman duties today, such as LOC security, guarding fixed sites, etc, rather than use them as expeditionary, maneuver elements.
In other words, the very reason for their existence as a "strategic reserve" has been compromised, and we are trusting them to the CS and CSS duties they weren't trained or equipped to necessarily do, but which we have found spots for them.
I don't like that. I wish it wasn't so. But it's the truth.
The NG, properly manned, trained, equipped and managed, provides a double whammy. A reserve force for the Army, and a viable force for the states to use in response to disasters and emergencies. And 99.% of the time, these two missions need not be mutually exclusive. By having the same force for both jobs, some money can be saved.
The focus of Phil's post here is that the reserve components "lack sufficient personnel and training, as well as $48 billion in equipment", which has a significant impact on their readiness to perform any mission, no less the homeland missions for which they are the primary "military" responders. This is a very valid concern.
The point being discussed is not whether the NG has "earned its bones" as you claim to have done. It's not whether the NG has had a free ride since WWII. Its the fact that we do have an NG, for which both the active Army and state authorities have expectations, and this NG has not been resourced to the point where it can meet those expectations.
This is, once again, the popular practice of "robbing Peter to pay Paul" while ignoring that Paul is being driven into poverty. If we need a "dual mission" NG, then we should suck it up and fund it to a proper level of resources for it to be able to function to a reasonable standard. The issue from a domestic viewpoint is that NG readiness for domestic missions has been seriously degraded in order to support a federal foreign mission. The Guard met its obligation to provide units to meet the federal mission, but the federales are not meeting their obligation to keep the units resourced for domestic response when they are off the federal roles.
Policy makers are not suggesting that we need to split off the federal mission from the state militia mission so that the states should suck up the cost of domestic preparedness. They are simply ignoring domestic readiness, even though the National Guard concept is supposed to provide for domestic readiness. Whether the states should establish, man, resource and train non-deployable formations is a discussion for another day. Today's discussion is about the administration and congress' failure to provide the necessary resources to make the NG what it is claimed to be.
Al
Cranky
Hint, hint: State defense forces are DISTINCT from the National Guard system under 32 USC 109 and cannot EVER be mobilized for federal service by the president.
Today, half of the states (plus Puerto Rico) have these units. The difference is that they have to pay for them.
The US government, on the other hand, pays for National Guard units under Title X. It has been understood since the Abrams reforms that National Guard units WOULD BE MOBILIZED to go overseas in the event of a major war.
It was hilarious above to read that California and Texas could withdraw from the National Guard. Guess what? California and Texas NOT ONLY HAVE ARMY-LIKE MILITIAS UNDER THEIR DEFENSE STRUCTURE, BUT ALSO NAVAL MILITIAS (two of only seven states with both).
Yes, California and Texas have state defense forces on land and water that are NOT part of the national system. They cannot be called up except by their governors.
So when you mention "enterprising" state governments, fair enough. I count 25 of them. They can use them for homeland security, disaster response, riot control or even repelling an initial invasion from space creatures before RA arrives.
It's a bit much for those of us who have spent much of our adult lives deployed overseas, while watching SIX DECADES of Guardsmen cash the monthly paychecks and save up their DD214s from two weeks of summer camp, going to college, funding new pick-up truck.
SIXTY YEARS!!!!!!!
Time to pay up with your deployment once every five years or so. If you don't like the arrangement, then get out of the National Guard. You've got better than even odds of joining a state defense unit (since it's the most populated states with them) and never deploying across the state line.
Ahem. Under Title X during wartime, the proper use of the strategic reserve is to use them at war. If a governor wants to use them primarily for his needs, he can start his or her own state defense units, LIKE HALF OF THEIR PEERS HAVE ALREADY DONE and fund them accordingly for solely a homeland defense or disaster response role.
This is getting annoying.
I would quibble with that, too. California, if I recall, lost close to a third of all deployable personnel to dental problems alone. In state after state following 9/11, we've been faced with ghost employees, profile-barring problems that should've been addressed years ago, substandard field performance (especially at the highest ranks of their BCTs) and a litany of issues raised by our training commands at JTC and NTC concerning their overall battlefield competence.
Let's just say that when you expected to use a BCT in the COIN fight, and instead you can only depend on them for limited FOB security, policing the MSR or guarding prisons, we're not exactly getting a good return on the investment, right?
Now, I'm more than willing to blame DoD for improperly funding the Guard for years. But I'm also more than willing to blame the various Guard units for insufficiently policing their own, making sure they had real employees and not ghost "Soldiers," et al.
I guess if you never ask them to do much for SIXTY YEARS, they get complacent.
And under the current practices, they are used some of the time to meet active military commitments. The rest of the time they have a domestic mission for which they are not being resourced. Further, we are not resourcing them to a level where they are able to maintain proficiency for covering your butt in Iraq without all sorts of nut rolls, cross leveling and predeployment training in basic mission tasks.
The NG never was, and is still not, a federal wartime only force. That is the role of the Reserves. When released from federal service, it reverts to state (Title 32) status and is supposed to be available for domestic missions while continuing to maintain a level of readiness for federal (wartime) service.
BTW, NY's Naval Militia is composed Marine Corps Reserve units with a secondary contract to accept mobilization in state service. They receive no pay from the state unless they are called up. Police and fire fighters are not permitted membership in the Naval militia.
Al
Guard. Which role trumps the other? Their federal obligations or state obligations? If using them for federal roles hurts their ability to perform their state roles, then perhaps the NG shouldn't be dual-hatted.
I see validity to both sides of the argument here.
I seem to recall that serving officers and NCOs of the US military don't get to pick which fights they must attend. Last time I checked, I go where my president and Congress send me.
Thus far in a nearly 20-year career, they've sent me to several CONUS duties from Hawaii to Drum, plus about half of my time overseas -- from now three combat tours in the Middle East since 1990 to two combat spins through beautiful Somalia, plus Okinawa, a time of travel and study with USMC joint command in sub-tropical Africa and even training missions in Tonga, Queensland, Malaysia and several other idyllic locales.
I don't recall choosing to go to any of these spots. I bet you didn't get to go opt for Germany, CONUS or Vietnam when push came to shove, did you?
That's the deal the RA officer or NCO makes. I don't see why you should belittle this career, considering you did the same thing. Sorry if the places my CINCs (Republican and Democratic) sent me aren't as cool or as strategically necessary as the ones to which I had to employ my expertise.
If you should wish for serving officers and NCOs to tell Congress and the president where we are willing -- or not willing -- to serve, and go and do what we please, then be prepared for the consequences.
MSR,
You have NO credibility on this issue. Zero. Your posts grow more fantastic (and fanciful) by the hour.
You live in the same delusional world as LTG Jack Stultz (Mr. Warrior-citizen) and LTG Blum (Let's wear ACUs to a Pentagon Press conference to show the Guard is "relevant").
The fact is that reality tells a far different story than the picture you paint. Our Reserve components are desperately short on both officers and NCOs. On top of that, the "quality" of new USAR hires is considerably lower than that of their RA peers. In some Recruiting Battalions during FY07, only 1/3 of USAR enlistees were considered "quality."
Not many folks want to serve or stay in your "vision" for the Guard/Reserve. The numbers bear this out. It's why I want nothing to do with drilling unit and why friends who are leaving active duty as CPTs and MAJs are not even considering any form of Reserve service - to include the IRR. It's why the USAR Civil Affairs community is BROKEN from overuse. No one wants in. There aren't even CPTs to recruit from within the RC.
I'm tired of Guard/Reserve lifers, established in their civilian careers and family situation before the insane post-2001 OPTEMP started, lecture me about how attainable ARFORGEN is. I'm even more tired of RA know-it-alls who've never spent a day as an M-day soldier lecture me on what service expectations are manageble and which are insane.
If you (the USAR) are sitting at 52% fill on CPTs, 58% fill on SFCs and don't EVEN HAVE ENOUGH QUALIFIED MAJORS TO MEET YOUR (hard number) HRC PROMOTION GOAL TO LTC, you cannot execute ARFORGEN.
Ditto when you consider that somewhere on the order of 1/2 of Guard/Reserve enlistees don't stick around in a drilling status to satisfy the "6" years of their "6x2" enlisted option. Granted, this number is down from around 65% pre-OIF, but it is significant.
See? If you don't have 1/2 your CPTs and SFCs and you know that 1/2 of your new Privates won't even be drilling in 5 years, how do you execute a 5 Year ARFORGEN model?
You don't. You knew that though, but you're too invested in defending a collapsing system that jeopardizes our national security to speak up.
I really pitty you. You were silent as GEN Schoomaker ran the Army into the ground while now you purport to "talk truth to power" to fix the system. What nonsense. Very O'Hanlon-esque of you.
I'm disappointed in your half baked analysis more than angry.
Under Title X, during wartime the federal role overseas trumps homeland security issues. It has been thus really since the Militia Act of 1903, and it was further articulated by the National Defense Act of 1916.
From the insurrection in the Philippines to the Korean War, the model was basically to use the National Guard as a deployable, expeditionary strategic force.
What was abnormal, therefore, was the decision during Vietnam to NOT use the National Guard (and AR) for what they'd always been used to do. This was tweaked by the Abrams reforms in 1973 to return the National Guard during the Cold War to become an expeditionary, deployable strategic force.
These reforms have continued to build until, shortly after Katrina, Congress did the unbelievable and even granted the president the authority to activate National Guard units to respond to domestic natural disasters, et al (I linked above the relevant information).
The trend since 1903, therefore, has been to turn the National Guard into what it's being used today to do. The only difference was the 60-year pause between WWII (for most units, some were called up for Korea) and OIF, with the limited rotations during Bosnia/Kosovo that should've been a wake up call but apparently wasn't.
Ironically, this is what the various state commanders WANTED. They wanted to have tanks, planes, et al, everything that the RA and USAF had. Why? Because they liked to play Soldier, which is why they have opposed turning their units into CS and CSS elements (which actually would better serve that dual role, because why does a governor need a Stryker brigade?).
The most powerful defense lobby in DC, ironically, is the National Guard and the governors who support their commanders.
And why the USMCR CAG is reporting the exact opposite?
And your point is? What?
You want to talk USMCR officer manning big guy? Bring it on.
Overall, the USMCR officer situation is pretty dire. I know of some battalions that have as few as 7 officers O/H.
Eventually, the crisis will catch up with CAG as fewer and fewer seperating active duty Marines opt for the Reserve.
Thats said, the USAR Civil Affairs role is significant ... the USMC is chump change in comparison. If the USAR's system is broken (and it is), the nation's capability is diminished.
I didn't know you read the publications. You don't seem particularly curious about the actual Army, beyond recruiting issues.
Most of us have to consider that we're ACTUALLY FIGHTING TWO WARS at the moment. But what do we know?
The reforms concerning the National Guard will go forward because they will, eventually, do several things: Cut AR, RA and ArNG real numbers (which saves money); give governors, employers and employees a real timetable that they can use to fill their own needs; and bring realistic funding to the various guard units to respond to their mobilization.
If you actually had some interest in the real Army, you might have noticed that we've basically structured the next Guard deployments to OIF and OEF based on an ARFORGEN-lite model rather than the ad hoc system we had from 2003 - 2006.
Something that often isn't discussed in here is that the master plan for the ground component (especially of the US Army) will SHRINK the force considerably over the next decade (there are many documents that speak to this, from QDRs to "Army Vision" to the capstones). You will NOT need so many officers because we won't have as many troopers.
This apparently isn't setting in, but it's real.
The other thing no one seems to have noticed is that many of these officers, especially in civil affairs, SoF, et al, in critical need within the Army have found slots where they do their job for considerably more short-term money.
They're called "Private Military Companies" (PMCs) and they're playing a very large role in the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan. Andrew, I believe, left at mid-career and found a job with one of them.
This is NOT unusual. In a sense, we've created a shadow CS and CSS that could be the Guard and is, instead, a coterie of PMCs.
Instead, the Clinton Administration signed $300 billion worth of longterm contracts with PCMs doing logistics, civil affairs and other behind-the-lines duties, continuing a trend that began in the George H.W. Bush administration to shrink the size of the military and return many duties of the AVF to PCMs.
Cranky Observer
Military personnel issues are my "interest." I wish more intellectual bandwidth was spent examining them within the service. I'm also interested in civil-military relations as our military demographically and geographically retreats from the populations/locations/universities that nurture the leaders for all the "instruments of national power." I guess this isn't "good enough" for you, but frankly, I'm "just an IRR guy" and after attending my branch CCC last summer, I'd place my knowledge of "Army issues" and operations within the 90th percentile of our 400+ student class - at least that's what my AER said.
Iraq? Well, I'll confess to heresy I guess. I really don't have much of an interest in the middle east. There. I said it. It's never captured my imagination. I have no desire to deploy or visit.
Sub-saharan Africa/global health is my geographic/operational area of interest and where I devote a lot of time to reading about. I get several periodicals at home which deal with sub-saharan Africa current events.
Now, If I could just find a way to get to 2/2 in French, I might even consider the new USAR FAO program and become a 48J.
It's not too late for you, FastEddie.
See today's NYTimes:
mike
How does Title X define "wartime"?
I've been on both the active duty and reserve side of the force and the motivations and expectations for those in both are quite different. When I came into the reserve, I really had an active-duty mentality where the military remained my biggest priority - it took a while for that to change. I found there is a pretty big difference between those in the reserve who have prior active service and those that don't and that divide can be quite large and divisive at times. For those with no prior active time, they really do see it as a secondary, part-time job. That's just the reality.
Now, going back to optempo for a bit, MSR, you have to realize the difficulty of managing a civilian life and military life for those in the guard and reserve. The perception now is that the reserve and guard are gonna deploy for one year out of every five at least - which is 20% of your time. There are so many issues to deal with when serving two masters - pay differential - health care, job security, etc. to go along with all the regular challenges that anyone deploying for any length of time faces. I found my reserve deployments to be much more difficult and stressful than any of my active-duty ones. On active duty I had a good idea of when and where I'd deploy and when a sudden deployment came up it's wasn't a huge issue because that wasn't exactly unexpected. In the reserve I found that process much more complicated and difficult.
At my old unit, I used to interview people wanting to join our unit and the USAFR. My unit was LD/HD so even before OEF/OIF we'd do 4-month rotations to Northern or Southern Watch every couple of years - not the entire unit went and we were able to manage it almost totally on a volunteer basis. Anyway, whenever we interviewed someone who owned their own business or were otherwise a critical component of their civilian job, I would immediately ask them if they could handle being completely absent for six months. Most small-business owners and others who worked for themselves could not, so I told them flat out that they probably shouldn't join. I couldn't afford the effort to train someone who couldn't deploy without committing financial seppuku on the civilian side.
And then there are the civilian employers to consider. Their support is needed to make a NG and Reserve work. If the optempo is too high, employers will simply not hire those in the reserve/guard. I'm sure that is happening now. Ironically, in my experience the most supportive employers are those in the defense industry and larger corporations - small businesses not so much.
Anyway, this comment was kind of rambling and incoherent, but the point I want to make is two-fold: First, expectations management is critical to having a successful NG/reserve. Secondly, when push comes to shove, reservists/guardsmen are more likely to say "fuck this" and GTFO in the face of conflicts between their civilian and military lives. That's just the way it is and why a sustainable optempo is so important if one wants a guard/reserve force.
1. the United States, or any of the Commonwealths or possessions, is invaded or is in danger of invasion by a foreign nation;
2. there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States; or
3. the President is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.
It's the third one that nets the Guard. Congress and the president have resolved to commit troops lawfully to prosecute wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Ergo, the governors have no choice but to submit.
In reality, more than half of the ArNG was used NOT for OIF or OEF initially, but for homeland security missions (guarding nuclear plants, airports, subways, etc). The air component took in a third of its personnel for these duties.
GAO began to notice chronic problems with the actual numbers available for overseas deployments after two years of homeland security duties as early as 2004.
Texas actually was a GAO case study.
What's gone unmentioned is that the majority of National Guard personnel are far more likely to have "deployed" within their own borders for two years in support of homeland security missions after 9/11 than they have for OIF, and still others were diverted to "Noble Eagle" and other peacekeeping missions with a very low risk of combat.
I won't even mention the idiotic "border defense" use of the ArNG when we have, you know, a BORDER PATROL that gets paid to do that service.
Many of those who have gone to OIF or OEF typically have been volunteers under Title X because they already had fulfilled their TAD duties, and thus fell under COTTAD.
What IRR is right about in regards to both the AR and the ArNG is that it's been unsustainable in certain career fields (MPs, Civil Affairs, et al) to deploy very high rates of these MOS holders for very long times.
My beef, however, is different: By 2004, we knew that close to 32 percent of the Guard personnel were considered "not proficient" in their chosen MOS. That's completely unacceptable and largely the fault of the various state guard commands.
Moreover, when you lose up to a third of your potentially deployable force to dental recall, and another large cohort for medical problems that were identified many years ago but allowed to "remain on the books" simply to fill a quota and receive federal largesse, you should really be prosecuted for fraud and not applauded for your steadfast support of our national defense.
The formula that was used before OIF was 17 percent of any career MOS in the ArNG or AR could be exploited for overseas deployments in a given year.
Obviously, with many units (MPs, SoF, et al), we have long crossed that line! At the same time, however, one of the reasons for relying so much on this shrunken cohort is because their commands didn't have accurate numbers. When I can't depend on a given state's Guard for a full third of its personnel because they are not proficient at their MOS, lose another third or more to long-standing medical and dental problems, and even more because they've served two years already on their TAD and can't be recalled, what am I getting out of the ArNG for overseas work?
In 2007, we used only about 19,000 members of the ArNG and air components for OIF and OEF. That represents about one out of every 24 Guardsmen. By 2007, of course, we had deployed a little less than half of the National Guard to either OIF or OEF (again, the majority were sent to missions in CONUS or the Balkans).
For the so-called "Surge" in OIF, only about 11 percent of the forces came from the combined Army/Air NG, and they were mainly employed (but not solely) with perimeter security, MSR protection and CS/CSS duties.
For all the kvetching in here about the poor, poor ArNG, we've still used LESS THAN HALF of that force for OIF or OEF.
Want to guess how much of the RA and AR we've used?
That sounds like a leadership problem within the Guard. Where is the accountability? I haven't seen anything like that in the AF Reserve or guard.
To add to my last comment, I'll explain the reasons I eventually left the Reserve. First was that my wife is active duty and PCSing every 2-4 years makes obtaining quality civilian employment challenging enough - but that was doubled when I also had to find a local reserve job and when I couldn't, had to commute to my old unit out-of pocket. For a while there I was losing money being in the reserve simply because of travel costs which are not reimbursed for drills. Finally, deployments became a factor as well particularly when the wife is also deployable and with two young kids to say nothing of the added burden on civilian employment. I actually love to deploy - I loved doing my military job but it became untenable to do so.
We are due to PCS again this summer and it looks like we'll be in an area where I could find a reserve or guard position and so I'm exploring rejoining atm. We'll see what happens.
It would be interesting to know how much of this was filled by full-time civil service technicians or AGR's (for those not familiar with the guard/reserve "technicians" are GS civil service employees who essentially run reserve/guard units day-to-day and AGR's are essentially full-time military personnel (not civil servants) that stay with one unit and don't PCS).
In my last unit a large number of deployers were technicians. One might call them a sort of pseuodo-active force because their civilian job IS their military job and because of the shitty GS payscale many made more money in a military status.
Back in the good old days of 1990s, almost all of the deployment was done by semi-ad hoc units. Basically.
What they used to do was that a BN would deploy 1 company, which is made up of volunteers &critical personnel from all of the companies. The unit cohesion is usually okay, because they've all known each other for a long time. So the ad hoc unit was fairly effective.
So what happens when you had something like the Balkan tours? It's usually the same volunteers, who're also the ones who man the post-9/11 security missions, who don't have a steady civilian job, who dream of going on AGR/Technician duty.
So, no, there was no expectation of the OIF-level mobilization. OIF/OEF's demand was too big. The volunteers were always the ones to deploy so everybody else had the expectation they wouldn't go. The active guys only knew that the guard/reserve were deploying units, but they never knew that the part-timers were playing a shell game.
About those people on profile/flagged that you talk of, MSR, they're deployable CONUS and went to Katrina, et al. So don't knock them.
Another point Andrew brought up was the time table involved. On the reserve side, the biggest beef w/ the Pentagon is how late they are in cutting WARNO/Deployment orders. Until very recently, the reserve guys cannot know for sure who is going that year until the February sourcing conference by JFCOM/Forces Command. Therefore, the units only have about 6 months to gear up for a deployment. The months before a deployment is always a mad scramble to scrub the roster and get rid of the slugs, requesting fills from the state HQ, etc.
Now we're at 1-yr warning orders for the guard BCTs, and that's very nice, but we're also having these BCTs meeting the deployability criteria at home station. The mad scramble continues.
ARFORGEN is nice, but you still don't know who is deploying that year. Until the active guys can post warning orders 5 years out, these OIF deployments will continue to drive people out of the guard/reserve.
The manning theory of the Guard/Reserve was that you had the personnel stability. All of the guys have been w/ each other for 5+ years. They've gone hunting, camping together. Went to parties together, survived hardships together. Therefore, when they do deploy, they don't have to worry about the psychology, the bonding part of the preparation. They already can work together, so at mob station, they just need to focus on learning the technical skills of their mission.
Basically you have "Unit Manning" w/o having to implement the unit manning system. Back when the active guys were doing Individual Replacement, the Guard/Reserve was potentially far more effective because they did not have the 50% turnovers the active guys had every year.
But now that OIF/OEF came around, we've turned that system on its head. The active guys are doing "Unit Manning", kind of. The reserves are down to individual replacement with all of the personnel fills they have to do to deploy a unit. It is only natural that the reserve units these days do not have as good a morale as they used to.
Another note on those guard brigade HQs: On active side, HQ duties is not where rubber meets the road. We have the same in the guard, except it's many times magnified. The Echelon Above Brigade HQ guys sit around, drink coffee, shooting bull for their drill/ATs, so of course they wouldn't do well during a deployment.
Thank you. That is an intriguing, and imaginative, definition. But i will leave it at that....this is a helpful thread for one not well versed (mercifully so) in the nuances of this debate., and i don't want to distract from it.
The point about going to regular deployments (once every five years), Andrew, was so that the Guard personnel, their states and their employers could make plans about their rotations. If you sign up and know you're going to be used full-time for one year in your six-year hitch.
Going in armed with that info, would that be a deal breaker? Our internal surveys found something like 85 percent of Guard personnel made considerably more money when deployed than they did back home working the regular job, including the Guard pay.
I might mention how popular AGR and COTTAD and other programs have been.
Here's my problem: If Uncle Sam pays your check and puts a lot of time and effort into training you, you and your command have an obligation to make sure that you 1) meet height and weight standards; 2) can meet the minimal APFT score; 3) should not be on profile for an underlying medical/dental/psychological condition; 4) have basic proficiency in your stated career MOS; and, 5) if you're presented to DoD for funding as "deployable," you should be deployable, not available only for light duty in CONUS.
One of the good things about the last few years is that it cleaned out a lot of dead wood in the ArNG. It exposed a great many senior officers and NCOs as below the most basic standards established for their peers.
My concern about the Guard is that the majority of personnel have the makings of being outstanding Soldiers, but they're set up to fail by piss poor officer and senior NCO leadership, and little competent oversight by the state Guard commands until national mobilizations.
If we're going to count on the Guard as a true "strategic reserve," we need to make better numbers than "less than half capable of deploying or remaining proficient at their MOSs."
That's just not good enough. Beyond the materiel questions (that we can fix), we owe the American taxpayer a better return on our investment.
make better numbers than "less than half capable of deploying or remaining proficient at their MOSs.make sure they are not frittered away on non-strategic deployments.Bring them all home. Make the non-deployable overseas without a formal declaration of war.
mike
Height/weight and APFT are not part of the deployable criteria right now. If the big Army does not care about the PT standard for its most important mission, fighting a war, should you be?
I really don't know much about the Army NG and Army Reserve, so don't know about those surveys. The 85% figure does not mirror my anecdotal experience in the AF Reserve. A few made more money (generally the technicians and those Jimmy notes as perpetual volunteers) but most did not. Many employers provide matching pay, but not all.
Such stability is undoubtedly a good thing and knowing when you have a "window of vulnerability" for deployment is a good thing for sustained operations and commitments. But what happens when a Desert Storm comes along and you need more than 1/6th of your forces?
Again the issue is: Can a quality NG/reserve force be recruited and retained under such a bargain? I honestly don't know, but the problem is compounded because NG and reserve units are really subjected to the local conditions and demographics of where they're stationed. They have a limited recruiting pool unlike active duty. That alone is a huge limiting factor. If the Guard/reserve were willing to pay travel costs for drills, etc., then units could recruit a wider pool of the citizenry - either state-wide or even nation-wide for the reserve. The because these units are "local" made up mostly of people residing locally, they're also subject to the vagarities of the local economy. If the local economy sucks, then suddenly you'll get more volunteers for deployments - if the economy is great, then less will volunteer. IRR has talked about the flight of reserve/guard units away from urban areas. Well, that has consequences and I think the 85% figure you cite is a result. Unlike the Army, the Air Force guard/reserve is tied to airfields/airports, so I think the AF units tend to be in more urbanized areas with larger recruiting pools and higher incomes.
I agree, what I don't know is why this is the case. There is a leadership failure somewhere - either the senior leadership are not holding the units accountable or the fault lies further up the chain.
Something else to consider - supposed that bad 50% were gotten rid of - are there others who can be recruited from the local community to fill those now-empty slots? I suspect this may be very difficult for units stationed in BFE rural America where general medical and dental care is already lower in quality and quantity than suburbia and urban areas. Perhaps the transition of the Army guard/reserve to rural areas was penny-wise-pound-foolish.
The binding requirements since 2005 are pretty clear:
The reason the commander must ensure this is because we've been told that failure of the APFT often is indicative of an underlying medical problem, and we should seek guidance on his or her likely profile. If the problem is NOT related to a medical issue, we are instructed to ensure that the Soldier goes through a physical retraining program, with diagnostic APFTs until he or she is capable of meeting minimal requirements pre-deployment.
So, yes, there's some CYA here.
Congress has the power to amend Title X right now if it wants to change the requirement, thanks to the Constitution ("to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia").
Under the existing War Powers (50 USC 1541) authority of Congress, it could determine right now to restrict deployments of National Guard or Reserve forces (as Congress did to ensure that Nixon didn't extend troops to Laos or Thailand during Vietnam). Congress already has set limits on the types, troop numbers and missions for US troops in Colombia.
Congress has not done so, and indeed recently INCREASED the power of the CINC to mobilize National Guard troops to handle disasters such as Hurricane Katrina.
Call your Congressman.
(c) Presidential executive power as Commander-in-Chief; limitation
The constitutional powers of the President as Commander-in-Chief to introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, are exercised only pursuant to
(1) a declaration of war,
(2) specific statutory authorization, or
(3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.
OEF is captured by (2) &(3), and OIF by (2).
(c) Concurrent resolution for removal by President of United States Armed Forces
Notwithstanding subsection (b) of this section, at any time that United States Armed Forces are engaged in hostilities outside the territory of the United States, its possessions and territories without a declaration of war or specific statutory authorization, such forces shall be removed by the President if the Congress so directs by concurrent resolution.
That's according to § 1544 (Congressional action).
This could be done. If Congress has not done so, why not?
The reality is that statutory guidance could drive the train here, Andrew. Let's say that a CINC was bound by Title X to use, at most, only a sixth of the ArNG for routine call ups (substituting for a RA BCT) unless Congress declared a war or other sort of national emergency (we have similar restrictions in place now by statute for troops deployed to Colombia).
And in real terms, if one looks at who actually deployed to OIF and OEF from the Air and Army National Guard(s) between 2002 and 2007, we're talking about using LESS than 10 percent of the Guard every year.
The problem is that basically we made it into a polyglot mobilization and used ArNG to prop up troop levels in OIF from 05-06 while we retrained much of the AD military in COIN.
I see reforms to that ad hoc system as a win-win for the Guard and DoD. By going to a 15 percent rotation, DoD can cut AD numbers to account for the regular rotation of ArNG units (in other words, we slice the AD component of ground forces by 15 percent, which means for you, IRR, 15 percent fewer people to recruit or retain); the BCTs from the ArNG, on the other hand, get to mobilize and serve as active duty units completing a regular training cycle, perhaps even deploying to handle contingencies. No more generational (actually, multi-generational) clearing of dead wood.
Personally, I still believe we would be better off converting the ArNG into a CS/CSS force, dispensing with the notion that they will become AD BCTs upon routine mobilizations, and treating them more like the AR (with Congressional stipulation that we keep yearly deployments in every MOS below the 17 percent threshhold, which could be doable).
So you're wondering why we have not honored this now, despite our warnings that we couldn't long continue current practices and not exhaust key components of the force structure?
We're cheap. Despite everyone's fixation on SecDef Rumsfeld, he did NOT want to grow the ground component of the Marines or Army (indeed, the previous QDR discussed cutting the actual size of the RA, AR and ArNG by 300,000 over the decade). And Congress, despite all its bluster, wouldn't make good on McCain and Warner's call to "grow" the ground forces to meet the needs of OIF and OEF.
In real terms, the legislation basically forced on the administration will grow real numbers of combat forces by about 8 percent by 2012. Whoopee.
But that's the deal we've reached with the AVF. We, as a nation, have decided that it's the best use of the American tax dollar and our military to exhaust the current structure, especially the AD in the USMC and USA (again, I have a lot less compassion for the ArNG than I do for the RA or AR).
Personally, I think if we're going to do OIFs and OEFs, we must do them with the full force of the federal military and civilian bureaucracy, otherwise why do them at all?
The AVF has not shown itself robust enough for longterm events such as OIF and OEF (although I would argue that the Guard actually might be a better force today than it was five years ago). If Congress and the President want to prosecute these wars, then Congress and the President should adequately fund, staff and plan for these wars.
Meanwhile the state of CA is losing money funding law enforcement slots that they can't replace with a new body with overtime.
I laugh every time I receive a call or postcard from the NG offering $100K to sign on.
If you do that, who will be designated as the MSR convoy security shock troops (Rough Riders in Vietnam = Grunts), and COP, Small Base large base security force (Palace guards in Vietnam Parlance...from fire base to huge mega complexes...soup to nuts = Grunts), a duty now handed down to the NG, as well as Squid and Zoomie cats and dogs? Someone has to do that shit, and it should not be the "Crunchies."
I know you qualified your statement as pertaining to routine deployments (Balkans ?????). I think we can safely put a fork in that kind of Euro-Centric shit. I am thinking more in the line of latter day fuck stories like Iran and Waziristan; after all, according to McCain, we shall be the Pashas in Mesopotamia for a hundred years (are those dog years?).
ArNG had been involved in every major American overseas expedition, from the insurrection in the Philippines through WWI and WWII and then into Korea.
That was the point of the Abrams reforms at the dawning of the AVF: That if the US committed troops into combat, they wouldn't be either the selfless volunteers or the conscripted fodder, but everyone who was willing to serve Uncle Sam.
I've always wondered how the guys in Vietnam felt about so many of their fellow Americans finding refuge from the draft in early marriages, college, the Reserve and the various National Guard units.
I also think that both administrations might have considered it to be sending bad signals about the status of the war if they committed the "strategic reserve".
One advantage RA has is that if a unit sustains a large amount of casualties, the casualties are spread across the US. If a Guard or Reserve unit takes a big hit, then the numbers are centered in a much smaller area. Pennsylvania and Ohio, for example, have seen this in OIF. This tends to focus the tragedy and bring the attention of the local political hacks, IMO. Six soldiers killed is bad, but six soldiers killed from Hayseed County is throwing chum into the media shark tank.
On the air side, 80 percent mobilized! Largely ill-trained and poorly equipped, they were absorbed by AD units.
In WWI, the Guard constituted two out of every five doughboys in France (wow!).
It fell to about one in five during WWII (although the entire Army, including ArNG, grew to about 8.2 million by 1945).
Those were mass mobilizations. After Tet, LBJ activated all of 12,234 National Guard troops, of whom 7,040 ended up in SE Asia.
At the time, there were about 500,000 troops in Vietnam, putting the contribution from the ArNG at about 1.4 percent of the force there. For a short time. In one year.
Sucked to be those 7,040, but at the same time it sucked to be one of the 500,000 too, right?
"I have a question for Fasteddiez, Al and Publius. Did it bother you that you were in Vietnam while ArNG and AR, for the most part, stayed put?"
I was a fucking foreigner (from Montreal P.Q. Canada)...joined in Plattsburg NY. The USMC recruiter there was Golden, because he made his quota and then some on Montrealers (all we needed was a Mil specified Visa from the Us Consulate...the rules changed in 1965 to a degree) A lot of the local up state New Yorkers who were attracted to military life were too dumb to pass the ASVAB (even though they could retake the exam in another township immediately upon failing)....Yes, even back then US education for the Proles was a joke......I went to Catholic school...(Free).
MSR: You have no idea of the scorn I was subjected to when in country in Vietnam. My so called buddies, as a lark, wanting to yank my chain, would introduce me to all external personnel as someone who did not have to be here, (a Lifer of sorts), because I could have merely gone home upon receiving RVN orders. I would reply (the truth) that I did not want to be back home if all the people I had trained with were stuck in the NAM. I still received no respite. You have no idea, I think, of the extent of the bad feelings between the rank and file, and the "Lifers;" it was bad news. Mike, Publius and Al (Jonst?) could expand on that.
So, in closing, I did not care or know about the detailed info on the extent of NG participation in that conflict. Post conflict, when anybody tried to get all American on me in regards to RVN, I would give them the old Canadian stand by "Don't let your alligator mouth overload your canary ass."
Now, in closing, this scorn I received was from other Marine Grunts, people who were described by Moshe Dayan (during his visit in 1966...he visited the Krulak boy's company in the ZEE), as golden. These were different people, less country hicks, more urban, and ergo, less susceptible to be propagandized effectively. Once a Grunt saw what the ARVN were doing/not doing to unfuck their own country, all the propaganda went down the shitter. That freedom and liberty shit just did not survive a thirteen month tour (spent largely in the toolies).
Real nice guy.
I had no problems with reservists as there were tens of thousands of Marine reservists serving in Nam. I believe the same is true for the Army Reserves but I that is only what I have heard and I have no documentation for that.
As for the Guard: It especially bothered me that some privileged few like Bush and his pappy's VP (what's his name) were able to use the NG to avoid the draft. They jumped to the head of the line in front of thousands in front of them due to political influence.
Did I make bad jokes about the NG back 40 years ago? Hell yes. But the threat is different now. Bush failed on his dead-or-alive promise to get Osama et al. We need to have a strong National Guard presence here at home, especially in or near large population centers. We also need a beefed up Coast Guard (another service that I am sad to say that I mocked back in the sixties.
mike
I might have posted this before The North Wall
my best friend from boot camp/ITR/H-2-6...Here
His home of record might have been North Plainfield NJ, but he was from Halifax NS (his dad worked in the States...that is why it is hard to gauge foreign participation....dual citizenship, home of record etc.) All mention of VC in the details should be replaced with NVA/PAVN 324-B division. The Company CO, who flew in to unfuck the Sparrow Hawk, Cap'n Lee Here.
Finally, our company's favorite Irishman ..and Here
He was a Machine Gun team leader that day, he should not have raised his head when he did....A Navy Cross recipient from a previous engagement.
For every one of them danged furners coming to the US of A, you can count on 4 or 5 of the well bred headin' in the other direction...that's life in the big city, I guess. I guess it is small consolation that Schmidt (Barrel Head) died in a famous engagement of sorts...or not.
We estimate that the AD forces are comprised of about 2.5 percent non-citizens (in the Army, it's about 4 percent).
Somewhat is the best answer I can give. I wasn't bothered about the individuals serving in the reserve components, but the policy decision that denied us the value of the units in holding down the optempo a bit seemed foolish, especially with the level of hostility towards the draft.
FWIW, the finest GS arty bn in the III Corps area was from the New Hampshire Guard. Dedicated soldiers who's accuracy and time on target was outstanding. Fought valiantly. And, calling upon what PFM mentioned, they suffered the loss of five men from the same small town in one incident where a truck struck a mine.
To be honest, MSR, I cannot recall harboring the anger against those who didn't serve that swells from so many of your posts.
Al
Let me expand upon my views during Viet Nam. At the time I enlisted in the Corps (1960), a healthy male had choices: Take your chances with the draft, enter the active component or enter the reserve component. Those who exercised the latter two options were able to have some control over the timing, length of service, component, branch, etc. Those who simply waited out their fate via the draft, did not. Since those who took their chances with the draft (be called or not) were accepting some level of risk, I had no argument with them. As to those who joined the reserves, they were still subject to "The Big One", so there was a level of risk there as well. After all, we did have reserve call ups over the Berlin Wall and Cuban missile crisis. And, during RVN, some reserve units were mobilized and some were deployed. Whether or not a reservist is shot at, his primary civilain career is distrupted and often stunted by a mobilization.
Yes, there were active draft dodgers and those who played the system, ala Cheney and Clinton. I have no great love for them. But I have no argument with my best friend, who simply went on with his life and never received a draft notice. He did nothing to avoid the draft, and probably would have served well had he been called. He was just never called. I am sure that the five or six years of uncertainty this involved were his price to pay. By the time RVN heated up, he was 24 and no longer prime draft material.
But, during RVN, there was not a huge population of war supporters who knowingly chose to never put on a uniform, such as the Romney boys. Pretty much, if you were physically fit, and claimed you supported the military, you served at least one hitch.
Further, I have never harbored the animosity you tend to display against REMFs and those who haven't served as much time in the high exposure billets you claim as yours. Back then, we had folks like pay clerks. My monthly pay in RVN was disbursed by one of these clerks who never went out on patrol. I had no problem with that, as they were subject to the regular rocket and mortar attacks that hit our base, and their job was to pay us properly and on time, something that I truly appreciated. And, they did serve their time on perimeter defense, and the perimeter defenders did see action.
I would imagine that all in all, I was exposed to more hostile fire in RVN than you have in all your adventures, and I was not a ground troopie. I was just fortunate to not have suffered any serious injuries. On the average, while flying, my aircraft received effective hostile fire one to three times a week. Our base took rocket and mortar fire once or twice a week. On two or three occasions, I was on duty on night perimeter defense when we came under ground attack. That involved being the equivalent of being a platoon commander for a defending sector. Got shot at and shot back. Also was involved in active operations on a couple of occasions when I had to spend the night at a fire base as a liaison officer for air operations the next morning. You might have read about defending such bases against "human wave" attacks. A stimulating experience, and my machine gun training from the Corps sure supplemented my aviator training from the Army.
The preceding paragraph is not to compare my "warrior" experiences with yours for the sake of who has bragging rights. What I described above was my job. It was a job I volunteered for, as my transfer from the Corps to attend Army flight training was just about the time that my military obligation was completed. RVN was heating up, and for whatever reason, I was willing and able to go. I did my job, and I expected others in uniform to do theirs, be it combat infantry or mess hall.
The reserves did the job they were called upon to perform: train and wait for orders. For most, those orders never came, but they did train to the level the government funded them. Because of poor funding and equipping, many of these units were not ready. But the NH ARNG unit I wrote of above were the best of the best, and I think fondly and thankfully about them to this very day. As I do the numerous individual NG and Reserve folks who volunteered for active duty and service in RVN. And, believe me, the Army's process for an RC soldier to get onto active duty during RVN discouraged all but the truly dedicated. I met USAR &NG officers who enlisted as PVTs after long hard struggles to be activated. They were active duty RA enlisted and IRR USAR commissioned officers concurrently. Some continued to do their military officer education by correspondence course while serving as enlisted troopies.
So, my experience and attitude to those who didn't serve as "robustly" as I is far from yours. There were few folks back then that drew my ire in a manner you express towards tens of thousands. But, I will say again, I could not imagine a pro-war candidate for president back then saying what Mitt Romney has said about his five sons serving their country by "working on my campaign". He would have been laughed out of the country. Sadly, hypocracy like that is today's standard.
So, I guess you will just have to accept that you cannot draw me into agreeing with your anger and condemnation of those who serve out their contracts as they were written.
Al
“You have no idea, I think, of the extent of the bad feelings between the rank and file, and the "Lifers;" it was bad news. Mike, Publius and Al (Jonst?) could expand on that”.
Perhaps, best summed up, at the time, by the saying: “lifers are like flies….they eat shit and bother people”. Not endorsing the sentiment, simply recalling it. I have no resentment to any one who stayed out of the conflict. But then my experience was unique, all things relative. I was given a choice, go back to reform school (for truancy….I had been expelled from school for refusing to cut my hair)….or go in the Corps. Sort of a judicial cosmic joke. I took the Corps…and they took me, and when I got back from Nam….I was sent to a Marine Brig anyway. Sort of another cosmic joke. I had been organizing against the war, on base, down in Lejeune, in 1969 . Got lucky….got out with a swift kick in the ass (I just as swiftly returned the blow), a door slammed behind me, but a general under honorable discharge.
I thought, and still think the war was an illegal war. A colonial war….fought, for the most part, by the poor, and lower middle class, against poor people. I thought, and still think, a great deal of it had to do with control of the drug market. I thought, and still think, we had absolutely no business being there.
So no, I had no resentment for anyone who stayed out of it. Just as I had, and have, no resentment with anyone who went there as well. Who believed in the cause and acted on their beliefs.
My brother, on the other hand, was a Warrant Officer. Chopper pilot. Strong believer in the war. Bitterly resented “slackers and draft dodgers”….by which he meant “pukes who went in the Guard to get out of going”.
He and I did not speak for 20 years. Sort of a personalized way of experiencing the gap between “lifers”…all officers were seen as lifers, no matter how long they actually stayed in, and the so called “rank and file”. We wound up speaking eventually…..things like “pass the salt”…..or “could you move your car…you’re blocking me in”. He died a while back.
No, I don’t resent anyone anymore, except the people that got us into the war. Oh, and I still resent the thump squad goons who were turned loose on the marines in the brig during the so called brig riots of 69 down in Lejeune. I resent those mother fuckers. But then again they probably resent me. I like to think we gave as good as w got…..and, we got good.
It all seems so long ago.
I received a direct commission from Chief Warrant Officer to 2LT in Viet Nam. Commonly called a "battlefield commission", as it was done by the US Army Viet Nam Commander, not Dept of the Army. Upon my return to the States, I was sent to the AOBC to learn how to be a lieutenant. There were two other "battlefield commissioned" aviators in the class. The rest of the class was ROTC, and there were a fair number who were not in any way interested in doing more than serving their 2 year obligations and moving on. Further, some were anti-war. Yet, there was no expressed animosity, and every member of the class worked hard to do well. The three of us with RVN tours under our belts were given respect for our experience, and in some subjects, our classmates sought our assistance. One area was maintenance forms, records and management, a subject that the three of us not only had extensive schooling for as aviators, but a few years of practical experience. In short, we all worked well together. But then, these guys were officers of their own volition, albeit draft motivated in many cases.
By 1970, we were beginning to see a fair number of warrant officer aviators (and commissioned officers) who elected flight school to avoid the draft and subsequent ground assignments. They were in for the duration of their contracts and no one minute more. As long as they pulled their weight, they were welcome, as we needed the numbers to keep return tours in RVN down to every 18 months or so. Some thought the "lifers" were fools. Some "lifers" might have been fools, but that was not because they were "lifers". It was for the same reason that some of the "Summer Help" were fools as well.
But as I have said on previous occasions, you cannot compare my cohort in uniform with today's. We had been born with a draft in place, lived with a draft in place, and thus made decisions about military service with that in mind. Many draftees elected to submit to the draft rather than another route to limit their total active service to two years.
Lastly, the "Lifer" versus "summer help" business was a cultural thing. It was learned from those around you. As far as I have always been concerned, if someone lived up to his contract, meeting the expected standards, they were welcome in my Army/Marine Corps, regardless of whether they were in for a day or a lifetime.
Al
Thanks for sharing. Your words are profound and reflect the attitudes of many I've encountered from your generation. This stands in stark contrast to the animosity, bordering on contempt, that AVF "lifers" like MSR share with those who aren't especially eager to spend years of their life in Iraq.
Folks can say what they want about those that joined the Guard/Reserve during Vietnam, but the fact remains that the ALL left home, attended BCT/AIT and learned to interact, "cooperate and graduate" with their fellow Americans - many of whom they had nothing in common with other than shared Army service. There is something positively American about this.
These "shirkers" as MSR calls them, have at least a rudimentary knowledge of the military and a set of Class A's hanging somewhere in the back of a closet. I'll take this arrangement any day with what we have today. A lot of the middle-aged "elites" I've met in life: brilliant law professors; big-firm attorneys; and financial managers got on a bus, went to BCT/AIT as PV1s and learned the rudiments of military service and what it means to share in the common defense.
This arrangemnent provided an important cultural "feedback loop" for civil society and the military. Many of those reservists unfairly branded as "draft dodgers", entered the reserve after college and ACTIVELY PARTICIPATED as enlisted men while enrolled in law school, doctoral programs and the like. Now, very few in those environments have any experience with the military - particularly as enlisted personnel.
This arrangement tied America to its total Army. My uncle joined the Reserve under the "6 months active" program in 1956, shortly after graduating from college and while working as a CPA in Manhattan. His "6 months" of active duty was a source of great pride for him. As a NYC CPA and Private in the Finance Corps, he became something of a legend at Ft. Ben Harrison. Uncle Joe died unexpectedly at age 44, and until her death, my Grandmother considered the letter sent to her in 1956 by the Chief of Finance, as one of her proudest posessions. The letter said something to the effect of "thank you for sharing your talented son with the United States Army." There were real benefits to this arrangement. I wish they were remembered by more than a few of us.
By not, you know, sharing in what really mattered: Killing, being killed, and the fall out of that process in what we call "war."
If I might channel GEN Abrams for a moment: It's is deeply unethical for there to exist two Armies. One fights and dies, and the other remains at home, reaping the benefits of education and pay while assuming none of the risk.
During peacetime, there's absolutely nothing wrong with a bargain that means you serve, take your chances, get the benefits promised you for the labors you provided, and move on.
There is something deeply offensive to me, however, to have a shadow "military" wherein people can find safeharbor from conscription or combat and say that they did their "fair share."
No, they didn't. They did profoundly less.
I'm deeply bothered by the notion that somehow the way we used the various state militias and the National Guard through most of our nation's existence -- and returned to that practice from Bosnia to the present -- is fundamentally flawed, and the better path is to have a non-deploying, "strategic reserve" that's banked and never spent.
That is impractical for the taxpayer, immoral to the men and women dying on behalf of their nation in the field, and ultimately destructive to the state forces themselves because they become meaningless jobs programs.
If being a "citizen soldier" means always being a citizen and never doing what soldiers, by our nature, train ourselves to do, then I don't want them, don't need them, and would be better off not knowing one of them.
Well, then you won't have much of a total Army then. You want an expeditionary "warrior caste" and have contempt for the citizen-soldiery our founding fathers intended.
Your proposals might even be destructive to our nation.
Your tortured interpretation of Guard history is laughable! There was OVERWHELMING popular support/desire in Guard - from all ranks - to deploy for things like the Spanish American War, Mexico in 1916 and WWI. Big difference than today, where without threats, and intimidation, you cannot get enough volunteers to sustain the OPTEMPO.
Many good books to read on this topic. Histories of NY's 7th Regiment and the Fighting '69th (aka. 185th US Infantry) may be good places to start.
Where do you draw the line? We had hundreds of thousands of active duty folks in Europe during Vietnam. What hateful words do you have for the "3 year RAs" who enlisted as an end run around the draft to choose their MOS and hopefully go to Europe? How about those that volunteered for 4 years in the Navy or USAF to avoid RVN and Ground combat?
You can thread this needle all you want MSR, but your blind hatred for those who don't want to endlessly deploy to Iraq is ridiculous.
Even the most jaundiced "interpretation" of Guard history would suggest that there was some sort of strategic necessity in the Spanish-American War, the various expeditions against Mexico (you missed the more lengthy and robust use of the state militias in Polk's crusade) and WWI.
What, exactly, were the "interests" of the US people that required the use of the anyone, much less the Guard, in those foreign ventures?
I'm afraid at this point you've displayed a certain, unfortunate, misunderstanding about the very natures of America's many conflicts. The fact that "citizen soldiers" were agog to join in the pacification campaign in the Philippines, the many wars against Mexico and the slaughter in the trenches in WWI says quite little about the ultimate strategic value of their sacrifice.
My point, however, was quite different. It was that for much of America's history, it didn't matter what the strategic value or the wishes of the National Guardsmen or state militiamen about the conflict -- what mattered was that they were used alongside the "regular" career enlisted and their officers because that was not only the pragmatic thing to do, but in a democracy the morally correct path.
The respite in this longtime US policy -- beginning in Vietnam and extending to Bosnia, but really to OIF -- was actually undemocratic, and deeply so.
It doesn't particularly matter what I, personally, think about the moral rectitude of the man who joined the USN to avoid service in Vietnam (didn't work for John Kerry, did it?). What I have an opinion about is what the POLICY of the US should be.
In that sense, I side with Abrams. It is deeply offensive to me to suggest that there should be two separate Armies, one that does the fighting and the other that doesn't.
It's good to have the ArNG in ANY major conflict to which the US is a party, even OIF and OEF.
For all your bluster about the role of the "citizen soldier" in our military and our society, you don't seem to care all that much about the corrosive effects on the nation and the military when we invent shadow forces of hundreds of thousands of men and women in uniform who don't do any fighting for six decades.
What you might notice is that I, unlike you, actually do more than pay lip service to the notion of the "citizen soldier" because I believe he has to do both parts of his name: He gets to go from citizen, to Soldier, and back again.
To a certain extent, I demand that he actually be proficient as a Soldier when he goes to war. Other men and women depend on him to be so. When we're at war, I don't want him to be a citizen, forever cashing the checks for a weekend per month and two weeks in the summer without taking the risk all other Soldiers take.
That's the very heart of what it means to be a "citizen soldier." If that means "endless" deployments to OIF or OEF (you seem to always forget about OEF), then so be it. That's what our democratically-elected leadership has chosen for us; they have put a tax on our labor and we shall pay it where we have trained to do so, on the battlefield.
Unlike those men in here from another generation, I haven't earned the right to pass judgment on those of a different era who absented themselves from the battlefield.
I think I've earned the right to discuss those who never condescended to serve their nation in uniform in combat and yet who ordered me to do their dirty work for them. I also believe I've earned the right to opine about those in uniform, regardless of service or active duty status, who have sought to avoid deployment to OEF or OIF.
Personally, I don't give a flying f*** what you think of my opinions. But I think GEN Abrams and I are on the same wavelength.
Good place to be.
I like it. At least for as long as al-Qaida remains a threat however remote it may seem.
mike
Many here served under General Abrams, including myself. Some might say that you would not even make a good pimple on Abrams @ss.
mike
Where do I begin? I really tire of your attempts to dissemble and obfuscate accepted "truths" that almost everyone here (with exception of yourself and the occasional Blackfive trolls) is in agreement on.
I think you know the answer to that one. Don't insult our intelligence. The "regular Army" circa 1898 or, 1916 or 1917 were miniscule forces and did not have the infrastructure to support the mission at hand. The Guard in 1898 and 1916 provided a wellspring of eager (if unevenly trained) personnel. There was overwhelming DESIRE by personnel of all ranks within the Guard to "go" and there was a great willingness on the part of governors to "get into the action." Neither of these are true in today's conflagrations. 1. The volunteer pool is about dry; 2) I don't see any governors or state legislatures ASKEING DoD to mobilize their ARNG assets. In fact. I see the opposite.
WWI and WWII, the Guard was used a foundational building block to "grow the Army." This provided an institutioanl framework to build a force around on short notice. I would remind you that today is 2008 and our misadventure in Iraq is already longer than US invlovement in either WWI or WWII. If this were, say, February of 2005, I might buy your arguments of "necessity." Five years after the first Bradleys crossed the LD into Iraq? No way in hell.
I think you know better than to try to passoff bullshit revisionist history to "show us the way. You're on thin ice here and approaching the lonely rhetorical point-of-no-return populated by the likes of LTG Blum, Jack Stultz, COL Steve Boylan and LTC Bryan Hilferty. For God's sake man, come back from the edge!
A complete non-answer. Your unwillingness to go down the "slippery slope" I laid out for you is because your aspersions directed towards generations of Guard/Reserve volunteers is indefensible. Logically, you share the same animus towards those that enlisted in the Navy, USAF or even the "3 year RAs" who enlisted to avoid 11B and if possible, RVN.
John Kerry? Are you kidding? He VOLUNTEERED for Riverine duty in RVN - he was not "volun-told". Some say because of political ambitions.
Earth to LTC Know-it-all: GEN Abrams is dead! I don't think he ever envisoned a 5 year hot war where we cut taxes and failed to mobilize the public to the cause. To infer that you are on "his" wavelength, is as silly as the GOP candidates claiming to be Reagan's heir at the last debate.
You love talking about our "system" in a historical context. I'll bite. Part of that system is its FEDERALIST nature. Like the checks-and-balances between the Legislature, Judiciary and Executive, there alos is an inherent tension between the 50 states and the central government. The nation's governors have essentially "voted against" going down this road. No one is asked their ARNG to be deployed or volunteering to pick up the pace. This is telling. If you want to lecture me on the strength of our system, the words and deeds of the overwhlming majority of our governors proves my point.
Your position is extreme. It is untenable. You should not be allowed to retire. After all, this is "total war." Whatever...
For all the faults with the present scheme (it kept FBI's intelligence unit outside the "homeland security" jumble, for example), it is intended to have a non-military (hint, hint, policing) role when it comes to guarding our borders, vetting legal immigrants, shoring up security at important sectors vital to our nation (airways, railroads, industry, finances, et al) and coordinating intel with outside agencies, including DoD.
It makes ZERO sense to have DoD create a "strategic reserve" of trained Soldiers and air personnel who then won't be used strategically with the rest of DoD. This is the problem with using National Guard troops from Iowa to guard the Tex-Mex border: Don't we have a Border Patrol that can fund its own initiatives without involving the military increasingly in what are traditionally (and rightly) part of the civil realm?
It makes no sense to have DoD-funded personnel guarding domestic civilian infrastructure, tackling WMD, arresting suspected terrorists on our soil or otherwise doing what police states do with their armies and not what democracies do with theirs.
Moreover, it's a very bad return on DoD's investment. If you don't want to use the Guard for overseas work, then you will need to expand the AD forces by some 450,000 or so personnel, who much of the time will just be sitting.
Also, if the states want to use their own paramilitary "defense forces" for these activities, they can do so now. Some, like Maryland, actually do use their militias outside the Guard structure for that role, and they do an outstanding job at it.
If you want to have the ArNG take over these homeland security roles, then perhaps DHS should start funding their training and deployments and not DoD. Currently, we don't need 425,000 people to do this work, so we'll probably have to lay off several hundred thousand Guardsmen and tell them that they're now working for the same geniuses who run FEMA, Border Patrol, Immigration and the rest of the mess.
We've already given them USCG from DOT, and it's no surprise that the one military asset (tragically underfunded) DHS has is the most professional, accountable and effective unit.
How long it would take for the Guard to regress to parity with FEMA would be an interesting conjecture. I'm not sure the proud history of the "citizen Soldier" would find its fitting end as an adjunct to FEMA, but so be it.
If someone tells you he thinks it's a capital idea, he probably is a raving lunatic.
Or Mike.
Actually, it was the inability of the various state militias to arrive properly trained, led or outfitted that led to the 1903 legislation I outlined above. If you fail to understand the historical roots of that statute and the course it set for us with what we even term the "National Guard," perhaps we should simply discount everything you type after that.
I would refer you above to the relevant link and you can actually read how the War of 1898 and the various state militias' role in the prosecution of the conflict led to the National Guard system. It would be a proper primer for a young officer to perhaps read.
Currently, 95 percent of the personnel mobilized today are NOT in the National Guard. One probably could make a cogent argument (no, I won't ask you to try it) that properly "growing" the military would have removed the necessity of even using the state militias for duty overseas.
I would still argue that regardless of whether we would've needed to use them, we have a moral obligation to use them because they are citizens, and Soldiers, and when the US goes to war we should involve everyone willing to sign on for it.
You claim that National Guard troops are unwilling participants in OIF and OEF. I would suggest that they continue to muster and deploy, although LESS THAN HALF actually have done so because they haven't been asked for the pleasure.
Yes, again, more than half of the National Guard has NOT gone to either OIF or OEF.
As a democracy, it's morally incumbent on us when we go to war to spread the risk of it as widely as possible. As a people, we've chosen the AVF (as much for pragmatic reasons as moral). If so, then we can't have two militaries, one engaged in combat and the other safe at home.
That was the genius of GEN Abrams, who saw that LBJ's policy was morally corrosive, that it was unfair to conscript men to fight and die for their country while leaving safeharbors for others, many from wealthy or connected backgrounds, to absent themselves from danger.
If you sign the contract, and your elected leaders determine that we, as a nation, should go to war, then everyone who trained and took pay -- even part-time -- should be in that war.
I don't mind that they are there less (because they are citizens and then Soldiers), but they should be there. They were there at Concord, Vera Cruz, Gettysburg (both sides!), Luzon, Meuse-Argonne, Normandy and Pusan.
They deserve to be with me in Baghdad, Kabul, Ramadi and Fallujah.
We would be less of a nation if they weren't sharing the risks.
mike
In other words, you have nothing to say. Address my substantive points re: federalism and the fact that our Governors of both parties - have given a vote of no confidence in the status quo. Otherwise, you're just dissembling with your stock-in-trade ad hominem attacks regarding the intellectual ability of those that dare question you.
Get over yourself.
In my last duty station in Iraq, more than half of my troops were Guard infantrymen, mostly young SGTs and SSGs. As I've said before, they were the best Soldiers I've ever had the pleasure of serving with -- ONCE THEY WERE FREED OF THEIR COMMANDS, who consistently misused them, failed to exploit their intelligence and operated battalions based on civilian ties and not military competence.
In our DoD studies, something we've fixated upon is the attitude of former RA Soldiers (and other prior service veterans) in the Guard. After WWII and Korea, the Guard wasn't just a "strategic reserve," but an intellectual one because it safeguarded the collective combat wisdom of a generation of active duty veterans of prior conflicts.
In 2003, this was not so, and we were puzzled by the lack of interest in former RA personnel remaining in the Guard. Why were they so quick to leave? Why were incentives failing to keep them in the ArNG after they had left the RA? With our "Try a Year" programs for former Marines, why were the Devil Dogs so down on the Guard after their experiences?
Well, the questions answer themselves, don't they? While a great many former AD personnel find value in the Guard, a rising number throughout the 1980s to the present didn't. When we started teasing out the data, we found that the former RA and USMC, et al, disliked the fact that promotions seemed based more on personal, civilian ties than actual competence. They didn't care for the lax attitudes about drilling and the drop in talent at the senior NCO and officer levels, many of whom hadn't spent a day on active duty beyond routine training because of the LBJ policy of keeping them from mobilizing.
Let me be perfectly clear: The "citizen Soldier" of the National Guard is just as proficient, just as brave, just as tough and just as good as any active duty Soldier anywhere in the world, IF HE IS GIVEN THE CHANCE TO BE.
It's not a failure of the Guardsman. It's a failure of the command and the state's oversight that leads to a lack of competence and capabilities.
I would serve with every single member of my former team in Anbar. I consider those Guardsmen truly brothers in arms and I will continue to communicate with them for the rest of my life. Two of them went home in body bags.
They were outstanding Soldiers and, more important, outstanding men and it was my great honor to have the chance to serve with them.
But their home commands were worthless.
Oh brother ... another "newspeak" capitalization.
I'm not talking about policing but about disaster response - situations like Katrina and other crises that pop up from time to time. The Guard would be homeland security's "strategic reserve." There are situations where a military organization is desirable.
And no, you wouldn't have to increase the size of the AD military because you still have the reserve. Much of the "warfighting" Guard could actually be folded over into the Reserve which would be the strategic reserve and back-fill for the AD forces. Again, why do we need two reserve structures for our AD forces? Why does a governor need strykers and F-16's?
Andrew:
Why not just make the National Guard completely homeland security focused and move everything else to the Reserve
Mike:
I like it. At least for as long as al-Qaida remains a threat however remote it may seem. W
What would a lawyer say, JonSt1? Res ipse loquitur, most probably.
Sigh. And I gave you a timeline above for properly understanding how we, as a democracy, have arbitrated this tension, beginning in 1903 with a federal statute that set it all into motion.
This is called "historical context." You might notice above that I mentioned what Congress did last year against the will of every governor in the nation (and Puerto Rico), forcing upon them a federal mobilization in the event of disasters, et al, that has absolutely nothing to do with strategic goals and everything to do with the meltdown from Katrina.
The reality, again, is that there are things the governors can do under Title X (the endpoint of the 1903 statute), and things they can't. Last time I checked, we didn't ask our governors to run our foreign policy or give them a vote on going to war.
If you think that we should, then by all means get busy rewriting Title X and part of the Constitution. I can think of 50 people, at least, who will support your jihad.
Agree with you about the commands sucking. Time and time again I have seen E1-E4 come out of Basic/AIT ready to take on the world, only to be sentenced to serve under SGT Snuffy, who came in the Guard right after Vietnam and hasn't done a damned thing since. Why train for combat when you can spend all drill counting tents and netting in preparation for that next AG inspection? I feel even sorrier for the poor 2LTs that are sent into the units.
I agree completely with you, Andrew, and further would add that structurally an ArNG that is based on CS/CSS would be a net benefit for the governors because these assets are more important in the event of a natural disaster, riot or other event than a BCT of Strykers or an artillery battalion.
But that's just me.
At this moment, allow me to speak as IRR would: I still am not completely comfortable with this scenario, however, because we will lose the strategic reserve of the combat MOS personnel. Moreover, since casualties will be primarily carried by these very Soldiers, it's politically smart to make the Guard less likely to suffer losses but morally problematic.
Again, it goes to the two militaries conundrum.
More obfuscation. I never suggested that the governers have a "trump card" on the central government. Rather, I am pointing out that unlike 1898 or 1916-17, the governors of the 50 states do not support the current overuse/overdeployment of their ARNG assets? Got it?
Of course they can't overrule DoD, but they can apply pressure in other ways. This is happeing.
Your frantic desperation in defending an untenable status quo and attempts to justify 5 years of mismanagement of the Army are evident.
I have a buddy here who
I have a buddy here who is studying a really interesting phenomenon (he's an Army historian): With half of the Guard not deploying to OIF or OEF, what happens when the other half comes home?
This is fascinating to me because everyone in the AD ground forces basically has been to OIF or OEF at least once, unless you're new to the military.
In an armory, what does the SPC who got a Purple Heart in Ramadi do when he must shuffle back into a formation wherein his SL is a SGT who did two years guarding the Des Moines airport under TAD and never signed his COTTAD to go to OIF with the rest of the battalion?
This particularly affects ArNG junior officers and non-NCO enlisted, who didn't have the comfy ties to their units to get the TAD assignments to guard the terminal 40 hours a week with a sweet per diem and instead did six months of train up at Shelby and then went through the grinder of OIF in 2005-06, like CPT (now MR) Carter.
What happens when that SGT tries to tell the SPC about SOP in a TIC? Or yells at a kid with a "V" on one of his medals about a battle drill?
This really is interesting to me, and it's something that's playing out in small towns across the country. What a sociological dig! What an oral history project! What an unintended "smoker" when that combat-tested CPL puts his SGT on his ass while the SSG from Baghdad and his LT look the other way!
Uh, last I checked, he volunteered for that. No one twisted his arm. IRR personnel who receive orders are entitled to apply for a delay/exemption and if denied, they get two appeals (HRC and Army G1). A well pled case can tie them in knots for 12 months and this usually works for those who have no desire to be mobilized. An IRR "tasker" generally means the Army needs a "body" in a 90-120 day window. For most who appeal, they just move on down the line till they hit someone docile or who wants to go.
I have no problem with your latest scenario in the last paragraph of your 5:45. Others may. Let us hope that your combat-tested Cpl does have a SSgt from Baghdad or a good Lt at his back.
Or - - - perhaps he will be promoted before something like that ever happens and ends up instructing battle drills to the ones who did not get there. It will all depend on the leadership of his commanding officer. I hope he does not end up in your outfit.
mike
I still question this "overuse" nonsense. When more than half of the Guard hasn't deployed to either OIF or OEF, I'm not exactly convinced that they're being misused in foreign adventures.
They might be "misused," but for much 2001-2005 it was for post-9/11 security duties that the governors absolutely loved because then they didn't have to increase THEIR budgets for their port authorities (air, sea, inland waterway, freight and passenger rail, et al), hire more state police to eye nuclear plants or otherwise spend their own money to guard their own critical infrastructure.
It was paid from federal budgets, often through DoD funding streams. It paid Guard personnel more money than they typically make, and for most of them they remained spending it in their home states.
States love getting federal money to fund the Guard for projects that often turn out to be complete boondoggles ginned up by the states' lobbies in DC (remember the WMD counter-terrorism squads of the 1990s? Or the West Virginia training center?).
What SOME governors don't like is these "citizen soldiers" going to become Soldiers overseas, where they get little bang for the federal buck. Instead, they have to find replacements for everyone on Cellblock 4 of Dipsh*t Prison because they're policing the ASR in Dimaniya and keep promoting guys who aren't there but remain on the union rolls.
USERRA's a bitch, ain't it?
More important, should anyone really give a hoot about what governors want for the Guard while two ground wars are going on? A little. Sure.
Quit being an ass.
mike
I might use my DD214 to roll it, too.
I know this sounds odd to people, but when I get out I really don't want to remain all that close to the military. I want to do other things.
If I might borrow something from IRR, I want to be the "citizen" and not the "soldier." I figure they have one more deployment (probably not to OIF or OEF, but to Africom) left for me, and them I'm out.
If you're ever in Djibouti, don't make yourself a stranger.
Nothing wrong with that. Grow a beard if you must. And keep your regimental flag in a foot locker instead of raising it on a flagpole over the old homestead. But stay off of the pharmaceuticals of choice of Bill and Georgie. That is not being a citizen. We my have to turn you into NCADD for counselling.
mike
As a side note:
The only reason I know my father spent three tours in the RSSZ was I found a box while cleaning the garage as a teenager and his last instructions to me were for me to read his NavyCom with "V" citation at his funeral. My father volunteered for two of the three tours as a PBR coxswain. Given the size of the Army and the Navy during the conflict, you had a better chance of avoiding Viet Nam in the Army infantry by being stationed in Germany, than joining the black water Navy.
I think one needs to first understand oneself. I went to Vietnam on the my first enlistment. Young and dumb. I turned 20 in Vietnam, when it was an advisory effort and we had few troops. Frankly, never gave much thought to who was and wasn't there. Went back two years later, after having decided I'd likely do a career. Still a kid, but by now a "lifer." It was at some point during that second tour that I worked it out (I'm slow) and decided that this was a futile endeavor. But to be honest, I always figured I didn't have too much to bitch about. I asked for it. Back again in '71, blessedly for a short period of time. By then I knew it was time to put a fork in it.
Did I resent AR and ARNG folks? Not really, with a caveat. By the time I'd worked it out and decided it was a hopeless cause, I kind of figured that if somebody could dodge it, more power to him. And for me personally, well, shit, no draft-dodger was harming me. I signed up for it with eyes wide open. But here is the caveat. And here is why I do have contempt for the draft-dodgers who found a haven in the Guard. We didn't have an AVF. We had a draft, where men were forced to go to Vietnam. And lots of guys who were either too unlucky or not well enough connected got swept up in the draft and breathed their last in that stinking place. Or got grievously wounded or fucked up in myriad ways.
And then there was MacNamara's 100K, the guys who otherwise would never have been allowed anywhere near military service. Oh, man. Those poor boys went out there and died for their country, often not even knowing why they were there. It was then that I discovered just how venal and corrupt my government could be. I learned a lot of valuable lessons from Vietnam. And I developed a life-long hatred of pro-war people who "have other priorities" that preclude them from sharing the burdens their fellow citizens bear.
Now it is 2008, and we have an AVF. MSR, I don't see where you have any legitimate complaint about folks not joining you in military service. There is no draft. You are a volunteer. All of you are. Just as Vietnam was a self-inflicted wound for me, you surely know Iraq and all of the rest is the same for you. You don't like it? Quit. I and many of my contemporaries (some posting here) had that same option and chose not to do so. As an RA enlisted man and then officer, I never spent much time complaining about the millions of Americans who chose not to join me; I suggest you think about that. The terms of your service are pretty clear. You've signed up for an active military that's undermanned for the wars your leaders have embraced and that must accordingly resort to using sometimes ill-trained and inadequate (in your eyes) part-time help to get the job done. I'd say you should either bite the bullet or get out.
IMO, a lot of what you say about the ARNG and AR is on target. But it doesn't matter. You and George Bush have at least one thing in common: this is your war and you've got to dance with who brung you. All you warriors together. Hooah.
There aren't that many in the guard who have not deployed. It's been fairly well communicated to all of the officers that, if they haven't deployed, they don't have a good chance of promotion to field grade later on.
Of course, with everyone getting out, the promotion path is probably still wide open to all of the slugs that remain anyway.
As for the enlisted, one tour plus all of the medals give them all of the promotion points they need to rise to the top. These days, for promotions, it's pretty much the veterans who're competing against each other on the promotion lists.
The ones who don't want to deploy are usually waiting to retire or getting out.
In terms of officer/NCO quality in the guard, of course it is uneven. Especially when the good ol'boys get a second chance at promotion from the state boards.
However, I think that it is good we can afford 2 reserve Armies. This way we have 2 different personnel systems with different optimization. On the one hand we have the impersonal Army bureaucracy where interpersonal skill is not as important (where you can afford to burn bridges); the other a very people-oriented, "nurturing" environment. W/ 2 systems, we will never have a monolithic Borg officer corps, but one w/ the diversity of styles to innovate.
MSR, some of the bad leadership you saw in Iraq was probably due to the fact that the Guard was not well-tested prior to OIF. During OIF-1/2, the various states sent their best people. After the first rotation, you have to change out the leaderships for the next rotation. After you keep rotating people, eventually you have to scrape the barrel for the leaders you saw in 05-07.
[Especially since we're stuck w/ the peacetime promotion rules rather than being able to battlefield promote people.]
The active Army never deemed it necessary to send the Guard BCTs to NTC/JRTC rotations, so of course the leadership was not up to snuff. Back in the days of post-VN/early 80s, the active duty had some "check-the-block", pencil-whipping mentality to training tasks as well. It wasn't until you had command emphasis and accountability on the NTC/JRTC rotations that the active Army started shaping up.
You know, Publius, one of these days you're going to realize that I agree with you far more often than I don't.
I subscribe to the "USMC" school of thought: You Signed Motherf*cking Contract.
I don't buy for a second the claim anyone -- in the Guard, RA or AR -- that they didn't realize that they might, some day, be deployed someplace overseas in the event of a war. Anyone who has signed up or re-enlisted AFTER 9/11 who somehow believed he or she wouldn't be exposed to combat or dreary days in the desert must have an ASVAB score close enough to qualify for Pentagon duty.
Ha ha ha.
My beef is about those who think somehow the National Guard should get a "pass" when it comes to wars. I think it's deeply immoral for someone to swear an oath and yet refuse to accept the same risk as volunteers in the RA and AR. If you want to make good on your claim to being a "citizen soldier," you better be willing some time to be a "soldier."
When IRR talks about the Guard -- MORE THAN HALF OF WHOM HAVE NOT BEEN DEPLOYED TO OIF OR OEF -- like their some sort of "victims" I get a little testy.
They signed contracts, too. They took the same oaths of enlistment and commission that we did. It's is offensive to believe that somehow they should be spared for political points or other reasons exposure to danger.
That's not how the Founders of our nation would have conceived of their use. Maybe those Founders wouldn't have liked this foreign adventure, but throughout the history of our democracy the Guard has been a major part of every single shooting war except one -- Vietnam.
It's why GEN Abrams was right to begin the "reforms" (actually, return to traditional values) that put the Guard and Reserves increasingly back into the national security mix.
I'm not a kid anymore. I'm 41 and have done five combat tours in just less than 20 years of service. I'm not asking any Guardsman to replicate what I did.
What I do ask of him is that he believe that he should at least do one tour. Even if he doesn't go, he should be available and not seek to shirk his moral duty to put himself at risk of death like the rest of his fellow Soldiers.
When IRR goes on sometimes, I wonder what bizarro universe he's inhabiting. It's immoral to ask men to die while others stay as a "strategic reserve" at home.
No, they take the same oath, they take the same risk.
I agree, Jimmy. It's a fine balancing act. I agree with IRR that we've royally screwed up critical MOSs in the RA, and we're on the verge of doing it to some parts of the ArNG.
The good thing is that 2005-06 cleared out a lot of dead wood in the Guard (do I have time to mention "AGR"?), but we've still trapped like flies in resin many of the O-5s and above who really shouldn't be there (and, on the NCO side, too many senior NCOs who really are not mentors to their younger NCOs, many of whom now have combat experience unlike their elders).
While this also is true in the RA, you really can't compare officer leadership above the rank of O-4 in the RA to what we continue to see in the various (it depends on the unit, of course) units of the ArNG. It's just abysmal.
The core competencies we take for granted for a battalion commander or a senior NCO in the RA just aren't present for too many peers in the ArNG. Some, certainly, but it's not the norm.
This is a great shame and I am NOT discounting RA's part in that. We should have nurtured more both personally and with our policies. But people forget that when they're not mobilized Guard units belong to the states and NOT DoD. That's something we want to change with a regular rotation policy, as much to ensure that those commanders get the chance every five years or so to go to JTC/NTC, learn from our best, attend some division schools and work for long periods together so they develop unit cohesion and not the clusterf*cks that came out of ad hoc groupings for deployment during the last round.
A Hawaii ArNG BCT is preparing now for its second overseas deployment. This, I fully believe, will reveal that unit to be just as cohesive and competent as many of our RA BCTs because they've understood the reality of combat and have prepared themselves with our best from First Army to excel this time around (HI units typically are outstanding anyway, and they're paired with the guys from Arizona).
What most bothers me is that some in here seem to assume that I have ill will toward the ArNG. I don't. I want them to serve alongside me. It makes the force -- and our country -- better.
How can anyone impugn wonderful Camp Dawson?
If you're there during the annual Buckwheat Festival it's gawd's country.
Drive there from the airport in Morgantown or Pittsburgh at night, past the coke ovens, and it's like something from Dante's Inferno.
So while making the guard a formal part of the fighting forces, what do you get to take their place inside the US, formaly and/or functionaly?
I will give you, and thru you, the Norwegian people, a bit of unsolicited advice: whatever the Bush Administration suggests, or tells, you do......do the opposite and the odds for success will always be highly in your favor. Not a 'slam dunk' mind you...but as near as you will come to one.
A unit in the RC is doing very well if it can achieve company/troop/battery level proficiency. Between the lack of local training areas, the relentless administrative requirements and the simple factor that everyone in the unit has to readjust back to a military mindset with each drill, it is a difficult training environment.
In the early 1970s the Army instituted Roundout and Capstone. The RC units then a mission focus more specific than 'be prepared to mobilize'. The Readiness Groups were created as well as Readiness Regions, an AC unit commanded by a MG. Maneuver Training Commands were created to prepare and conduct annual CPXs for battalion and higher and external ARTEPs very three years for at least companies.
Enter all of the officer veterans from the Viet Nam era. We didn't do well attracting enlisted. There was a mixture of Viet Nam vets as well as the cold war types, whether Germany or Korea. We were getting our mandatory promotions to CPT and had vastly more experience than the RC units that hadn't been mobilized. The RC units had no problem filling their slots because of the draft and were stagnant.
The MTC had a lot of colonels in it, but they wisely stood back and let the junior officers have their way writing and giving the exercises. We were wildly successful. In fact, we were experimenting as we went along and had good luck. All good things have to come to an end and the Army couldn't continue to support the regional headquarters. The MTCs reverted back to control of their local GOCOMs and became a prized place to park colonels. It also became more bureaucratic. After a number of years my own creative juices were spent and I left the unit.
What was our take on the exercised units? A few units had tremendous staffs with weak companies and we also found the reverse. Some units were simply terrible and should have been disbanded. This was true both in the ARNG and the USAR, the big difference being that the ARNG had a much better PR apparatus and they believed their own PR.
A common observation was the troops being poor at basic soldiering. They might be good at their unit mission tasks but failed common unit tasks. It seemed that nobody had taken the time to read Defense of Duffer's Drift.
'had other priorities'
Nice part: "In November, General George Casey identified 37,000 soldiers—7.2 percent of the force—who have not been to a war zone since 2001 and have no legitimate (that is, medical) reason not to go. He told them to pack their bags. ".
Given that they are active-duty troops, and this was approximately as far into the war in Iraq as V-E Day was into WWII (for the USA), one wonders WTF? Also given that there is allegedly a chain of command and a whole hierarchy of officers running the show, one wonders why this was tolerated?
Of course, the final mystery is why certain people can't understand the simple concept that turning the NG from a 'once a generation' strategic reserve into a 'one year every five (at best)' operational reserve will break that NG?
So, instead of one year every five, they're gone for three years over a six-year span during OIF and OEF -- as the HI and AZ and TX and WA BCTs will be experiencing by the end of 2008. Yeah, that makes sense. That's fair for those lucky SOBs.
What seems to go unrecognized here by all the manpower savants is that this was a decision reached by both OSD and the National Guard command. The governors wanted some regularity, dedicated funding for equipment and training and "surge" help for families while the Soldiers were deployed.
They also wanted to know that if they lose some battalions from their state that mutual aid from neighbors will be available.
OSD wanted a force that was routinely brought into the fold for the best divisional schooling, exposure to the rest of the RA and AR, and without the shock of losing more than half of a deployment cohort to dental recall, medical issues and, on top of that, a third of the remaining who were incapable of performing their tasks with the most rudimentary proficiency.
It's also ultimately cheaper and will require fewer personnel.
Yeah. All that's just crazy talk.
So much better to have the cobwebbed ArNG that had three generations of men and women deploy no farther away than the nearest RA base for two weeks in the summer while the AD put their lives on the line.
Again, I'm not sure the collected manpower savants fully understand the shape the ArNG arrived for us from 2004 - 2006.
Nor do they seem to get that MORE THAN HALF OF THE GUARD HASN'T DEPLOYED TO OEF OR OIF.
Hard to say we're abusing them when most haven't even gone over.
Some of these will be part of the "Homesteader" community. By being dues paying members in good standing of this club, they become eligible for the infamoso "ROAD Program," that is the Retired on Active Duty Program. This Program's members engage in a competition called "Taking one's pack off," thereby letting it crash to the deck, and causing a WTC like pancake effect which sends all floors to the bargain basement.
Also, could some of these 7.2 percenters be heavily represented by Senior Officers and truly senior enlisted maggots, who just happen to have Humanitarian circumstances that would require their continued presence in CONUS? Inquiring minds wish to know!
"plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose!" Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr.
"In an armory, what does the SPC who got a Purple Heart in Ramadi do when he must shuffle back into a formation wherein his SL is a SGT who did two years guarding the Des Moines airport under TAD and never signed his COTTAD to go to OIF with the rest of the battalion? "
What did the Spec-4 with a couple of months in-country in Vietnam do when a shake and bake NCO became his squad leader, fresh from Ft. Benning?
H*ll - if you want a far more powerful example:
What did the draftee Spec-4 with a year in-country do, if he went into the NG afterwards, and dealt with both a SGT who was in the NG in order to stay out of Vietnam, and a SFC who had put in 20 years in the NG with no combat time?
What did the CPL with a year in Korea do, when he rotated back home, and dealt with a SGT who had put in four or five years of garrison service?
And similarly for WWII, WWI, the Spanish-American War, the Indian Wars. Serving in the Army east of the Mississippi was a bit different than serving on other side, for the 1870's and 1880's.
Even the Civil War - I read an account written by an officer who was in the first class of women to go through West Point. She commented that some black cadets privately said that they were glad that the women were there, because it directed some attention away from them.
She became interested in the history of hazing at West Point, and read up on it. She claimed that it really took off when after the Civil war, when a number of brevet officers went to West Point to get RA commissions. The cadets already there instituted (or ramped up) hazing so as to maintain dominance over the older, combat- and leadership-tested plebes.
Yes, MSR, from a "fairness" standpoint, ensuring that the ENTIRE ARNG is mobilized and deployed on a regular basis (let's use the one year out of every five model) does sound enticing. It places military pain on them equal to the pay and benefits they receive. Note the adjective "military".
What you have not taken into account is the collateral damage such a model would deliver in the long run. We have covered the ground of "our best and brightest departing in droves" subject. In short, captains do not see an inviting future in a full time military career under the current circumstances, even though they are offered job security, benefits, and the like.
Now consider the employment outlook for a bright young ARNG captain who will be taken out of the civilian workforce four times in the coming 20 years. Put yourself in the shoes of a responsible employer. CPT MSR is due for his regular activation in a year. Will you promote him to a more responsible position knowing that you will have to fill that position shortly with a temporary replacement? Then, CPT MSR will return to his civilian job, and will need time to get back into the swing of things. Let's say one year. At the end of that year, perhaps you, the employer, might see that CPT MSR is fit for promotion. Well, all you can count on is a max of three years, and then disruption comes again. Is CPT MSR the best candidate for this promotion if an almost equally talented non-ARNG candidate occupies the desk next to him?
Let's be realistic. For six months prior to mobilization, and for at least six months post-mob, CPT MSR is not going to be 100% on the civilian job. That's 40% of every five years, when you put the pre-mob, mob and post-mob time together. How many key employees do you want like this?
Now, CPT MSR becomes MAJ MSR in the ARNG, with a resulting rise to an equally responsible civilian position.
Additionally, recurring military service would reduce retirement investment in contributory plans by 20%. And, the impact of this loss in the early years is compounded by the investment loss. Will CPT MSR be able to continue to contribute to his retirement plan while he is mobilized, and will any matching employer contributions be made? While his year on active duty will increase his military pension by 2.5%, it is not a vested plan, and he MUST REMAIN FOR 20 to collect. His civilain retirement is vested.
There are mounds of studies that show that women suffer in the job market due to the actual and perceived liability of taking time out to have children. And childbearing is not as regular and recurring as the "one out of five" deployment schema.
Is the ARNG going to retain the "best and the brightest" if membership is going to mean that their primary wage earning capabilities are going to be seriously hampered, along with his civilian retirement?
The reason that the mindset for Reserve Component activations has been to save them for "the big one" is because "the big one" has been thought to be in response to a specific significant threat for a finite period. After "the big one" is over, things go back to normal. And normal (to the general population), for over a century, has been to leave the reserves as reserves until another "big one".
Now, for the past SIXTY YEARS, as one of our fellow posters like to say, 30 years included conscription. Reserve service was seen as an alternative to conscription. You gained some control over your life while being subject to call up for "the big one". And "the big one" didn't necessarily mean a shooting war. I had friends and neighbors called up in 1961 for the "Berlin Crisis", when some 75,000 reservists were activated for a year. The units were needed immediately, the people understood, and so on. The mobilized reservists returned to their civilian employment at the end of the mobilization, and everyone lived a normal life, assured that no further "disruptions" would occur unless there was another "big one". That is a far cry from an indefinite future with mobilization assured every four years.
I am not saying that one approach is right and the other is wrong. What I am saying is that until 2003, the reserves existed to respond to a need to expand the active force to meet a clear and finite mission. A sort of "in for the duration and then back home", with a "duration" that has some sort of end in sight, even if it was pie in the sky. That is the social contract that has stood for a century or more. And while the "legal contract" may now differ, it has a century of cultural difference to overcome.
We are talking about a very complex and difficult situation, with ramifications far beyond having the ARNG members sacrifice to a level acceptable to certain serving active component personnel.
END OF PART I
Al
First, let me offer some credentials. Undergrad and masters was Organizational Behavior. Doctoral work was Labor Market Theory (research completed, dissertation never written to completion). Research emphasis, Dual Labor Market Theory. In brief, looking at the so called "Secondary Labor Market" (SLM) from a sociological standpoint.
The SLM can characterized by jobs in which annual earnings are predictable only by the prevailing minimum wage and hours worked. Age, years of experience, seniority, education, gender, race and other typical predictors of earnings are not factors. Thus, you will find white, male PhDs in the secondary labor market right alongside minority, female high school dropouts. Not in the same numbers, but numbers enough to make them a population that can be examined.
Further, once workers spend a year or two in SLM employment, they tend to remain there. It's the "Roach Motel" of employment. The typical reason for a person who's credentials are more typical of the Primary Labor Market entering the SLM is significant health, employment or family disruption. An engineer's job is terminated due to massive layoffs, and he ends up flipping burgers to survive, as engineers looking for work are a dime a dozen in his labor market. The longer he flips burgers, the lower his odds of returning to an engineering job. And, there seemed to be a higher probability of this permanent dislocation in the population who had over 8 years experience before the career disruption.
So, consider the situation of reservists who are guaranteed to have an 18 month or disruption every fives years. Will they be seamlessly reintegrated into the labor force each and every time? If not, the effects will be cumulative, as each and every mobilization will contribute permanent entires into the SLM.
There seems to be some linkage between military service and unemployment. Equally interesting in this article is the possibility that post service education does not result in better employment prospects.
So, as we look at regular and routine mobilization of the reserves, we also look at regular and routine disruption of civilian employment. Not just people in "professional" occupations, but skilled workers. And, because of the "hometown" nature of reserve units, disproportionate numbers of jobs in some areas will be disrupted. As people see reservists' civilian advancement hampered by reserve service, the draw to reserve service will be for those who desperately need a drill check.
And, what does the "once every five years" model give us? Basically, a standing active force with about 100,000 more soldiers than the "active Army" alone is authorized. Might save some money, but I am willing to venture that the need to raise recruiting and retention incentives will offset this.
Perhaps there is a fine line between asking for "sacrifice" and encouraging stupidity. I think the "one every five" leans toward the latter.
Note that in both Part I and II, I have not even addressed any physical nor mental impairment that mobilizations may cause for the returning reservist's civilian employment picture. Nor have I addressed the costs of 20% of the Guard being permanently unavailable for homeland missions. Or the disproportionate load on certain states that have a higher Guard per capita authorization.
Longitudinal studies of the effects of multiple mobilizations on the labor force are several years off. Intuitively, I don't think they will show a pretty picture.
So, from this old man's viewpoint, there is significant long term risk in making the reserve something other than trained units available for homeland missions and also prepared to serve in immediate response to suddenly emerging "big ones".
Now, that does not mean that I accept low standards in the Guard. I use the word "prepared" in the strictest sense.
Are there any questions?
Al
Now, doing one's military job well in OIF benefits the career soldier in his chosen career path. Good OERs, good assignments, a couple of medals and you make the next promotion list, maybe even below the zone. You return to CONUS with a competitive edge over your cohort.
The same goes for a reservist, to a certain degree, AS IT PERTAINS TO HIS RESERVE CAREER. What it doesn't do is enhance his career at Bubbaville Bank of Commerce, IBM, Microsoft or Smith Construction. And his civilian career represents 80% of his time working towards his golden days in the sun on a Greek island.
If a promotion opportunity comes up while he is mobilized, he is not there to pursue it. The law only provides advancement that would have been automatic had he not left for military service. The list of probable civilian career hampering situations is endless. And if reserve service is guaranteed to seriously hamper one's primary wage earning career, why would a talented person serve? Join the active military and reap the long term "benefits" of good and faithful service.
The commander of a NG Arty Bn activated and sent to RVN as a Corps level GS unit was asked by the Corps commander to consider serving only six months in command and then allowing a RA LTC to have the opportunity for the second six months the Bn was in combat. The NG LTC and his BN were doing a superior job. The logic was that there were only so many command opportunities, and this would be a career benefit for the RA guy. The General said it was his responsibility to provide as many career enhancing opportunities as possible for good soldiers under his command as a reward for their being sent to RVN. The RA LTC he had in mind was a bright, dedicated officer who would be a good commander for the NG Bn, and the BN was the only command opportunity available in the time frame. The NG LTC would be offered a "great" job at Corps in return.
The NG LTC said, "Well, general, that's an interesting idea. Now, I am also concerned about the careers of my soldiers. You know, SGT Jones' career at the bank, CPT Smith's career at the auto dealership and so forth. Tell me what you will do for them, and we can discuss your RA LTC. After all, sir, they are here because the RA needed them." Needless to say, there was no further discussion about LTC McCrone offering up his job to enhance the career of an RA officer.
If we need a standing Army of 600,000 for the foreseeable future, then stand up an Army of 600,000 regulars, not 500,000 regulars and an endless rotation of 100,000 reserve augmentees on a "one out of five" basis. The long term consequences of manning the Army via eternal reserve mobilizations concern me. Are we looking for "fair" or "smart"? One of MSR's ancestors once offered a very "fair" solution. When two women argued that each was the mother of a baby, and that the mother should have the baby, he suggested that the baby be cut in half, and each could then possess their own half. "Fair" is often neither "right" nor "smart".
Al