Guard survey hints at exodus

USA Today ^ | January 23, 2004 | Dave Moniz,

[George W. Bush]

It seems that Reserves and even the National Guard are being turned into active-duty and can expect to be deployed anywhere, any time. I think our National Guard should primarily stay at home and be smaller in numbers. And the Reserves should be actual reserve troops, activated only in national emergency.

More active-duty troops.

If they're going to all be deployable overseas at any time, they should get paid the same. And re-enlistment bonuses should all be taxed at the same rate, either taxed for all or tax-free for all.

Personally, I would favor tax exemption on all military pay.

[LizardQueen]

A close friend of mine is a Nat Guard helicopter pilot. He's planning on retiring soon if the stop-loss is lifted.
He has his 20 (21 years, actually -he'll be 41 this year) and while he loves flying and the Guard he's been deployed twice already and now there is talk about sending his unit to Iraq. He's got a wife and 2 little kids, plus a full time non-military job and the continued deployments are trashing that part of his life.
He said that if he was regular Army he a) wouldn't have had kids until he was out as it's not fair to them to have Dad gone all the time and b) wouldn't have a full-time job either. But he's got both but he's being shipped out as if he was regular.

I think a lot of guys feel similiar to him. If continued deployments are going to be made in one country after another a lot of long-term Nat Guard guys who originally signed up expecting to be called up only in situations of national emergency or direct threat to the US mainland are going to bail out.

I'm sorry to see him go, but I understand how he feels.

And I think Rumsfeld needs to take a hard look at what the missions are and how many people we have in which areas (reg Army, Nat Guard, etc).
And if they are going to continually deploy the Guard as if they were reg then maybe they should shrink the Guard and boost the size of the regular forces so that people are deployed in line with what was understood when they signed up.

LQ

[Darksheare]

Oh yeah, nuked at random.
*chuckle*
After seeing some of his quoted stuff.. he deserved it.
And then some.

[g'nad]

dude... sorry I missed this...

[Loc123]

He is the CINC. Even Peter Jennings--an avowed leftist--acknowledged the story to be false.

Even if it weren't false, that was 30 years ago and Bush became born again. You should not condemn changed people for their past.

[George W. Bush]

Too bad about your friend's situation.

We need to be more honest about how we designate these units. The National Guard, in particular, needs to be available in the event of domestic emergency. Massive floods, quakes, etc. Personally, I think the National Guard should be domestic-only until after we call up the reserves. And just before we reinstitute the draft.

I think we're lucky so far in keeping up recruiting and re-enlistment numbers. But I don't have any great confidence that this will continue. But the patriotism of our younger generation does surprise me at times.

And our military are soldiers, not policemen.

Nation-building and planting democracies doesn't work unless you utterly destroy them first, then settle in for a decades-long occupation (Germany, Japan, Korea). The rest of these kinds of police/occupation duties have been a miserable failure and we should stop trying unless we're willing to totally commit ourselves to it for 20-60 years.

[Criminal Number 18F]

ITEM: Pay is currently processed by soldiers in the 73 CMF. fyi, the 71 and 75 CMF are realigning to 42 series. Although I guess to you they will still be "idling".

First, sorry for the late reply. Been busy. Idling... loafing, ghosting, stealing oxygen, wasting space, employing protoplasm that could be achieving more if you broke it up into one-celled amoebas and created a dysentery epidemic. I'm aware that the clerks are realigning, but not of the details (there was a big thing on it in Army Times last year). Having extensive military and civilian experience, I have never seen an organisation so overrun with "overhead" as the Army. Tens of thousands of soldiers who can't even get the troops' pay straight are not a good use of defence dollars.

I have seen large and diverse companies whose entire finance department is two accountants, two clerks, and who outsource fiendishly complex payrolls with thousands of workers, no two paid the same, to ADP or another contractor with zero problems.

The military is backward in its personnel management doctrine (General Motors circa 1935), backward in information processing (you need a terminal emulator to run several necessary administrative computer programs, for crying out loud! IBM circa 1975) and horribly backward in its understanding of the value of human capital (Tara Plantation, circa 1862). Yet I've seen no useful suggestions from any of the officers in these branches -- they inherited it just like it is, and all they can think to do is keep it that way. Conclusion: officers in those branches are not particularly able individuals.

Nice blanket insult. [I had said: An awful lot of the people in the Army, including most of the Combat Service Support branches, are idling there, as some kind of an alternative to collecting welfare ] So you want an Army without medics, engineers, transportation, ATC, supply servies, finance, etc? Yeah, that would be a refreshing change ...

Maybe I was over the top with "most," but it certainly fits my experience. Lots of people knowing lots about how their uniforms should look, but incurious and inflexible about the way in which they underperform their jobs. Let's take engineers off the table, they are combat support, not CSS, and they have actually proven in this war (as in all others) that if they have to they will fight. Unlike, say, the 507th Maintenance Battalion, which turned lack of training into the new version of media 'heroism,' which is victimisation.

Have you ever tried to get anything done in a personnel services "customer service point" in the Army? You discover where the people who couldn't make the cut for TSA screener or Wal-Mart janitor landed. They're sullen, idle, The sad thing is that the first-term enlisted soldiers are not hopeless material, but the officers are the dregs of each year's intake, and the NCOs are simply awful. At the end of that first-term soldier's enlistment, that kid will look at the NCOs and only if he or she has no more potential than them, will the soldier re-enlist. The least able stick with the Army, the only employer that is truly non-discriminating -- at least, for ability; and the more able uninstall themselves. It becomes a self-perpetuating system where failure drives out excellence and begets more and more failure.

Supply and finance need a serious weeding out, and they need to be resubordinated to the combat army. Ditto transportation (although I have to say the young troops and junior officers in Iraq and Afghanistan have been remarkably flexible and imaginatve in dealing with high levels of use, and brutal road conditions, that were never imagined by dull prewar planners). Also, there were always mechanics willing to volunteer to go out into hardship conditions (i.e. to remote firebases or SF camps) to try to fix vehicles with no spares. Those guys were good (I say "guys" because the female mechanics who couldn't lift their toolboxes didn't deploy forward like that. I am sure they found something useful to do in the garrisons, but the guys in the field sure complained about them).

Then there's R&D. Pretty sad when your $100k off-road vehicle with no off-the-shelf parts and no spares in inventory is outperformed by a $20,000 Toyota diesel pick-up truck. How about the QM corps' brilliant stroke, making the humanitarian ration the same colour as one of our CBUs' bomblets? Never in the course of human events have so many been so screwed up by so few.

By the way, I don't know if my pay is screwed up or not, but those non-geniuses in CMF 73 generated 450 LESes for me, and for some of my guys, each, in the last year - - more than one per day. We can't make heads nor tails of it; neither can they ("What's this one for?" "I dunno sah, that bees revoking some other one, could be any one." "Well what about that one?" "Saaaahge, I doan be unnerstannnin your pays, you all guys gets too many extra pays an' s'it. And I got no mo time because it my break.") I am giving them the benefit of the doubt and assuming that between their army of clerks who couldn't even get executed in the USA (gotta have an IQ in the normal range, right?) and their museum-artefact computers, they paid me more or less right.

d.o.l.

Criminal Number 18F