What I said before stands: I am waiting to see the stampede for the hills that occurs among doctors, nurses and other highly paid technical positions out of the guard and reserve the minute the stop-loss is lifted.
And so they are going to draft 18yr olds to fill the gap you are predicting?
NO, they will go back to the method they used to use: offer to pay the bills on medical school for anybody as long as they agree to be a doctor in the service for a standard hitch. Then, once they are trained and have served, they can be re-activated at any time.
FWIW, on the subject of why peopel serve: there is a different answer for every person. It's probably fair to say that the 19 year old Marines go in to get a decent living and also to fight. They interviewed the West Point grads and every one of them said they expected to be in combat within six months (and they are probably right).
I don't know any National Guard personally, but I do know reservists. let's face it, most of them stayed in the reserve to get the 20 years in to earn that tiny monthly stipend which (IMHO) they definitely deserve. They know and accept that they could serve in time of war, but none believed they would ever be forced into the role of "standby active" to be deplyed whenever the president wants to overthrow a country. The reserve's traditional role was to back up the actives when a sudden need arose and the actives needed time to mobilize.
Further, the new use of the reserve caught most of them by surprise. It started with Desert Storm. During Viet nam, the reserve made up a microscopic prcentage of total combat force. In Desert Storm, reserve units were some tof the first activated. My wife's Navy medical unit was actually activated before the Marine unit it is attached to back during Desert Shield when 500,000 US forces were sent to Saudi Arabia. Although many blame Rumsfeld for the new "smaller" active scenario, it actually started during Reagan. He did NOT like the fact that slaries ate up most of his defense budget, and he HATED the fact that reservists were paid more than active counterparts and actually almost never served. He instituted new standards where many reservists were driven out (primarily the older ones at higher rank with no special skills) and he set the stage for what we now see: reserves being deployed and used exactly like an active duty force.
The point is, the present use of Reserve and Guard is simply wrong. These are people who served active and then started a life as a civilian. Recall imposes crushing financial hardships on many of them, not to mention what it does to their families. Actives know what they are in for, reserves are there primarily to back them up as needed. The "new vision" IMO violates this long standing trust by elevating the reserve to a status of active duty force which is simply supposed to go away in between wars so the government doesn't have to pay them.
In two words: that sucks.
