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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

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.