Four extra months is a very long time in a counterinsurgency type of war like this.
I would rather have and pay for 2 extra active divisions of full time troops than have 6 division of Guard or Reserve.
It takes too long to up train the units to get them up to speed compared to active duty units. I wonder whether the cost of the Guard/Reserve units is worth in in a situation like this.
Most of the post-mob training for the NG is the same training AC units get before they deploy. An extra component for the NG is all the new equipment they have never seen before. Another time waster is that the Army has, until recently, refused to certify NG unit’s readiness and training levels so that each unit has to start out at step one post-mob, even if the unit has been training at and passing external evaluations at a higher level for years.
Personnel cost are in the military, as in the civilian world, is a, if not the, major component of cost of maintaining a unit. The problem is that congress and DOD refused to equip NG units at the same level as AC units. Yes they saved a lot of money, then not now.
As to performance in the field, show me a report where NG unit’s performance was markedly inferior to AC units. Even Michael Yon had good thing to say about the guard in Iraq.
N.B.: we count Brigades now, not Divisions.
The guard should only have been being used while they raised new divisions to replace them. If they had wanted to offer them bonuses to go active duty, that would have been ok to. I just sometimes get the feeling that the Army get’s too focused on new and better ways to kill the enemy and not enough on finding and training enough trigger fingers for those wonder weapons.