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Army Reserves Pick Up Combat Duties

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Zip06

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I understand that the Army Reserve get about 39 days a year of training. I may be wrong but it isn't much. On the other hand the 101st got about 300 days a year before going into Iraq.

With that in mind, it has been announced that two brigades of Army reserves are being committed to combat in a unit rotation beginning in February. Even if they get some minimal traing prior to deployment does anyone actually think that they are suitable replacements/substitutes for the 101st, 82nd, 4thID, 1st Armor Div and Jarheads?

Would you want a Platoon Sgt who last got shot at in 1974 as a PFC?

I don't think this is good.
 
Bear in mind that they'll be doing pre-deployment training - a number of units have already rotated through Fort Polk, LA, and I'm sure others are rotating through other training establishments. Also, when they get over there, there will be a transition phase, where each new unit will be settled into their area of operations, probably with a transition team from the unit they're relieving to show them the ropes, warn them of potential dangers, etc.

There is always a difference in "current knowledge" between reserve units and "professional" units, but with the right preparation, this can be minimized. Don't forget that WWII was won by part-time soldiers, not full-time career professionals! :D
 
"Don't forget that WWII was won by part-time soldiers, not full-time career professionals!"---Preacherman

Preacherman,

I think that WWII was won by full-time soldiers, which were not career professionals, and returned to civilian life shortly after the war. I'm sure my father and uncles would be surprised to find, the years they spent in the military during the WWII, that they were only part-time soldiers. :)

And like then, I would think that our regular Army is full of full-time soldiers, most of which are not career professonals.


Respectfully,

jkelly
 
When a man was drafted in WWII he was in "for the duration". There was no "tour of duty".
None of this X number of days and bye-bye stuff.

That sounds an awfully lot like full-time to me.
 
First off, there are no combat arms units in the Army Reserve. All Army RC Combat Arms units are in the Army National Guard.

All soldiers in the Regular Army, the USAR and the ARNG receive the same training. With the advent of the Total Army School System even NCOES, and MOS schools are the same throughout the Army. Active component soldiers can take the same abbreviated RC courses and get the same credit.

There are many things that RC units can't train on. This is a given, time and training facilities preclude that. However each unit commander maintains a METL (Mission Essential Task List). This is a list of all tasks a unit can be required to do in combat based on guidance from it's wartime headquarters. The RC commander trains to meet the tasks on this METL with all the resources and time he has during IDT and AT. He also prepares a Post Mobilization Training Plan and sends it to his mobilization station. He actually plans to train on those things he needs to before he's ever mobilized.

Since many units are performing missions that aren't related to what they are actually trained to do (i.e. Field Artillery and Arrmor units doing Infantry and MP missions) the Army has created a training plan for these units to conduct at MOB station. All of the call up orders are giving 3-6 months at MOB station before a unit deploys. That's why soldiers that are scheduled to be in theater in the late Spring and early Summer are being alerted now.

Preacherman is right. It was part time soldiers who won WWII. The professional regular army was very small until 1940. In 1940 the National Guard divisions were mobilized and inducted into active federal service. This immediately greatly expanded the Army. These part time soldiers trained full time for a year. When the draft started inducting more and more men, the mobilized Guardsmen were transferred into newly formed units to give them a cadre of trained soldiers to lead them.

It's interesting to note that we no longer have the capability to rapidly expand the Army like we did in 1940. Force cuts in the RC in the 90s saw to that. We also no longer have much of the training base we built in WWII. The closing of many installations have cause major backups at those that are left to support the training of all these newly mobilized reservists. Defense planners gambled that we'd never again need to mobilize a lot of reservists at once and they disbanded units and sold off the training facilities in the interest of economy. Now we're paying contractors $400-$800 a day to go to Iraq and Afghanistan and do what we don't have enough soldiers to do.

Jeff
 
Well thats how it works as most are the reserve in battle, they hold the line till the regular army gets its stuff together. Bataan was the reserves not the regular army. The idea of having a standing army ready to go is a post nam idea. Teddy at Kettle Hill was a NG type of deal, Most of the guys that landed at Inchon where the reserves.
 
Don't forget that a lot of Reservists and Guardsman are prior active duty.

Heck, one friend of mine just returned from Iraq in order to leave the Army on 05 DEC 03. He enlisted in the NG to get his college tuition paid for, and not long after signing the contract was told the unit had recieved orders to deploy come spring. Poor bastard spent 6 months in Iraq, will be home for 6 months and then go back for 12 - 18 months.

Frank
 
I'm curious as to what the re-enlistment rate will be after this is all over with. I know several guys who are deployed in Iraq that definitely will not re-enlist in the Army Reserves or NG.

Seems that the check isn't worth it anymore.


Good Shooting
Red
 
My own National Guard enlistment contract is up this summer. There's rumor that our unit will get deployed within the next couple of years; possibly to the Balkans, possibly to Iraq.

So I don't know. My plan had been to get out, as I was planning on moving to Utah this summer. BUT, having found that I'm not that far from graduation, it's in my best financial/academic interest to just complete my undergraduate degree here and move west to get my Masters.

I have a lot of thinking to do before I decide. Not directly related to all of the deployments and whatnot; there's an internship in Washington D.C. that's availalbe, that'd be both educational AND a really good thing to have on my academic resume, that I'd liek to take, but can't obviously if I'm still in the Guard.

On the other hand, I don't want my unit to get sent someplace without me.

So yeah, lots of thinking to do.
 
I think most reservists with the exception of the National Guards are prior full time enlistees. I worry more about recruits doing it for college money who's hearts are in it for the good of the country.
 
Full time soldier-need not be career man

"Preacherman is right. It was part time soldiers who won WWII. -Jeff White"



Jeff White,

I respectfully disagree with you. If you are on active duty for several straight years, as was the case for most (or many) soldiers during WWII, you are not a part time soldier. And, to be a full time soldier for several years does not mean that you must be on a career path.

My thought is that: You may have been NG, you may have been AR, you may have left the field and factories to join up, or you may have been drafted, but once you were in for the "duration" you were a "full time soldier", regardless of that NG, AR, or draftee label. I think that during the war you needn't have been a pre-war RA to be a war time "full time" soldier.


Respectfully,

jkelly
 
jdkelly,
I think our disagreement is one of semantics. Of course you are a full time soldier while you are on active duty. The point I'm making is that those full time soldiers would not have been full time or in most cases even part time soldiers if it wasn't for the war. At the end of the war most returned to their civilian lives and therefore were not professional soldiers in the true sense of the word.

In the time that the world needed them most, these heros put aside their personal lives and ambitions, became soldiers and when the war was over returned to civilian life.

We went from a small standing army to a large army, back to a small standing army. We never had a true professional army after 1940 until 1973 when the draft ended.

Jeff
 
You're quick!

Jeff White,

You're quick!

I know we went from several 10s of thousands of men pre-war to several millions of men during the war (perhaps a 100 fold increase?).

I was trying to seperate the term "Full Time Soldier" from "Career Soldier" (What you call "Proffessional"), and seperate NG and AR (were there AR units then?) who went active from "Part Time Soldier".



"We never had a true professional army after 1940 until 1973 when the draft ended."


I wouldn't touch that line with a 10' bangalore (sp) torpedo. :)


Take Care and Shoot Safe,

John
 
NG/Res vs Active Component

I am retired from the reserve but spent 8 yrs active. The reserve component forces tend to be very good at their individual jobs and good at coordination up to Battalion level. things tend to fall off at combined arms coordination and coordinating at higher echelons. I do not think that there will be a significant fall off in performance in Iraq because they will be asked to do small unit operations. The biggest falloff in performance will be because they are new in country not that they are RC.
Mike
 
zip06,

Like our esteemed former president :barf: said, "It depends on how you define is." ;) We fielded an army that was was the best in the world while we still had the draft. Our army was better then all the professional amries in the world at that time even though the ranks were filled with draftees. But by the strict definition, it wasn't a professional army.

We had a professional army between the world wars, and we've had one since 1973, because we don't have conscrtipts. Everyone who is there volunteered.

That's not to say that the armies we have fielded with draftees were bad. They were the envy of the world.

I'm defining professional as all volunteer.

Jeff
 
OUCH! Kinda hard on the Reserve forces. Im not a reservest, Im a full-timer, and I really appreciate the Gaurd and Reserve (dont tell them that).
Actually they are the militarys mules. They took the brunt of GW1, and have been working non-stop since the 1st plane hit.

If you cant depend on your Reserve force to complete their mission ( which obviously they can and do) why have a reserve? Oh and by the way, prior to the 'ghan , most active duty PSGs hadnt seen combat since they were PFCs, in '91.
 
OK. I thought that was where you were going. That definition doesn't, of course, apply to the commissioned ranks or enlisted soldiers. It could be well argued that professionalism assumes an educational component, adherence to a set of standards, and a higher calling. Duty, honor and country do have a place in the armed forces of the United States and often, if not always, all components have risen to the occasion.
 
The vast majority of my reserve battalion is made up of prio-active types.

Most were not Seabees when they were active, though, so skill levels vary widely.

IMHO, this is what the reserves are there for. I didn't join to sit around the reserve center and drink coffee. I have no illusions that being deployed to the gulf wouldn't suck (it sure did the first time), but I'm still somewhat disappointed that my battalion didn't get the call yet.
 
We as a nation have been spending that "peace dividend" for more than a decade now.

We went from 780,000 active duty soldiers in 1991 to 485,000 today with an increase in worldwide commitments. The other services were also cut drastically.

Our armed forces are stretched awfully thin.

Now our leaders want to bring back the draft and include medical personnel in it. Makes one wonder what their long-range plans are, doesn't it?
 
Son of a Gun said:

"I think most reservists with the exception of the National Guards are prior full time enlistees. I worry more about recruits doing it for college money who's hearts are in it for the good of the country.".

The Reserve Components of the Army include the National Guard and the Army Reserve. The Army Reserve was pretty much gutted under Clinton. If you say the above, just who do you think you are talking about? My Army Guard unit is about 25 % prior service. As for the thread starters comments about PSG's who last saw fire in 1974, obviously he has no idea the average age of a PSG in the Guard.Our oldest PSG is 41.

As for WW2, the guys who were in the Guard at the outbreak of hostilities were initially activated for a year, which was then extended to "indefinite". I don't recall anyone from that era making any sorts of distinctions in quality of soldiering based on being NG at the outbreak of the war.
 
TCSD1236 - I started the thread. My comment about having a PSG who hadn't seen combat since 1974 was one of concern. Concern that NCO's and Officers in command positions either had no or very limited combat experience. Your comment that the average PSG is 41 years of age is even more disheartening. I would imagine that the RC PSG is about 7-10 years older than his AD contemporary who probably has Gulf War 1 behind him, knows the battlefield, has expereince with building and leading teams and knows the in's and outs of tactics, commo, support in a rapidly changing environment.

I would like to see the RC take zero casualties. I would like to see them hit the sand with as much training and competent leadership as the AD. Infact I think the Army and Marines should make part of the career path of NCO's and Officers to include stints in the RC.
 
Zip06,

The active Army does offer NCO's and Officers assignments with the Reserves. These are known as AC/RC, or Active Component / Reserve Component assignments, and are generally highly sought after. The active duty soldier will spend 2-3 years assigned to a Reserve unit in a liasion and evaluation capacity. Most of the time, these slots are hard to get because everyone wants them. It's a chance to get away from the 'real Army' for a few years, with minimal time spent away from home and little or no deployment time. Also, the hours are more like a civilian '9-5' job and the soldier recieves additional pay to cover the increased expenses incurred while living away from a military installation.

Frank
 
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