Tension between National Guard and Active Duty Army?

I have been in the Reserves and active and there is always talk about the reserves and guard.

We don't drink beer in our tanks anymore and most of us have 2 or more combat tours. Many,like me, have been in the USAR or ARNG and were never active duty aside from schools,annual training, mobilizations and deployments. Many complete over 20 years of service. Some are KIA in OEF and OIF. There should no longer be any bias about our abilities.

I served on active duty for 22 years. I was in Desert Shield/Storm. We could not have have maintained the airflow or logistical support without the guard or reserve. When our reserve and guard units arrived to help us so that our manning allowed for 24/7 365 plane launch, load and recovery, we found we did things differently. Not wrong, just differently and we all had to learn from each other to do it in the most efficient, effective way. We all learned to "play nicely" and put the mission first as it always should be. It is or should be the same for the other services.


CMSgt Marcus Falleaf Maj Robert Thornton Sgt (Join to see) LTC David Brown CWO4 Terrence Clark MSgt (Join to see) SMSgt Lawrence McCarter SFC Bernard Walko MAJ Dale E. Wilson, Ph.D. Cpl Vic Burk MSgt Dale Johnson SSG Michael Noll LTC Trent Klug PO1 H Gene Lawrence LTC Marc King SMSgt David A Asbury LTC Stephen Conway CPT Jack Durish SSG Paul Endes 1SG Joseph Dartey

CPT (Join to see) As a leader you provide the example and hold all to the same standard. When people talk about NG or Reserve vs Active, SQUASH it. You don't allow any reinforcement of the idea.
Treat everyone the same: 1) Use the Army standard, ONE standard of professional courtesies and measures of performance. As a reservist I love to come on active duty to partner (and sometimes compete, in training schools) with my peers. Most people don't care when you have missions down range or at least I didn't.

If you want to see the real tension, look at the recruiters from USAREC and NG. There is not a lot of love lost between the two groups. One team,one fight only goes so far in the recruiting world. I would love to see them rolled into one recruiter organization that truly represents #armyteam.

Every component has their super soldiers and their dirtbags, the National Giard has been putting food on my table for the last 13 years and I see legitimate things to bitch about on a daily basis. One thing we have over the active duty though, tell an active Soldier he/she has to work a weekend (when not deployed) and that Soldier will bitch for a year. Notional Guard (get it? Notional,) That's kind of what we do.

Yes there is absolutely tension, and we are both guilty. My view is this. Active Duty guys generally look down on the guard as lesser Soldiers, primarily because we don't understand the guard (or reserves for that matter), why we have them, and where they fit it.

In my branch (and the other maneuver supporters like Engineer and CBRN)... over 80% of our force structure is the Guard (and Reserves), so I understand, and I appreciate what they bring to the table. Having deployed more than once with them, I have learned a lot about what they deal with when the Mobilize and deploy. I also know Mob Station is an evil place and word too.

My rub, with the Guard has always been this... plain and simple. They/you pick and choose when they are US Army vs. ARNG. When it serves their needs, they are all Army. When it does not serve their needs, they are quick to tell us active duty jokers, they are not in the Army, they are in the Guard...

You can't have it both ways, and expect to be treated equally.

Being a proud veteran of 3 years on AD and 17 years in the Guard, There have been and always will be misconceptions of our abilities and our duties.

For those of you who feel we chose to be "weekend warriors" I respectfully ask you to remove that scene from "Rambo" where that idiotic stereotype of a Guard unit plays out like a scene from "Stripes", that's not us at all. We may not train as often as you but our skills are up to snuff. Remember even though you do it full time, we have full time jobs AND choose to be Guard members. That's an additional burden of time away from our home and families.

"One weekend a month and 2 weeks a year" is the biggest lie since the Warren Commission report. Once you are in a senior leadership position, we have weekly admin nights, sometimes additional OPD/NCODP meetings and so on. On top of that try being a Signal Officer - you are cordially and mandatorily volunteered for every advance party, pre-AT conference and technology briefing there is. The year we deployed to Iraq, 2005, even before we deployed, I logged 3 weeks in Japan for AT, 3 weeks in Germany for pre deployment training exercise meetings, all 12 drills crammed into deployment readiness before we hit Ft Dix and an additional 4 weeks in Germany for the pre deployment exercise itself. Now try explaining that to your family and employer who is by law supposed to retain your job for you. And I hate to surprise you but a lot of the extras we do at home station on a regular year are in the, "For the Flag" pay status. I tracked the extra hours I put in for the Guard at my base salary and estimated that I gave Uncle Sam about $4000.00 a year as an O-4, a little under a month of free time in addition to my paid time.

The NG system isn't perfect, its units are under staffed and under budgeted, but, speaking for my old unit, the 43d MP Bde, whenever we showed up for the game, training or otherwise, we showed up as players, not the posers that some of you AD folks may have encountered in other units. You can't make blanket statements about NG or USAR units in general because we are all unique. Yes I've worked with some ate up units in the Guard, but I hate to break this news to you, as a Guardsman, I've worked with more ate up AD units then NG units.

I had another thought about this topic....What is the average time-in-service for a typical soldier as compared to the reserve/NG? Many of us have a lot of active years in addition to our active reserve time. What percentage of the soldiers who are on active duty have less than 4 years? The majority? My point is that in many cases the reserve side has more active time than the active duty component. For example, when I arrived in Iraq and was briefed by my counterpart from the 101st, the soldier had just under 10 years on active duty and here I was coming in as a National Guard replacement with over 12 years of active service (at that time). On top of that, my counterpart was well versed in his MOS, but I was just as experienced. In terms of the rest of the staff (enlisted side), I as a reserve component member, had more active duty than any of the staff except for the Operations Chief. When it comes to active duty experience, I believe that that vast majority of the soldiers I worked with did 3-4 or more years on active duty before joining the NG. I don't have the stats to back it up, but from my experience the average age is probably higher also. The opportunity for promotion is much less in the NG so we end up with an older SPC or SGT. I was originally an E7 on active duty and had to take an admin reduction to E5 to get into the NG. Now consider how many other soldiers had to give up rank and what you have is a much more qualified lower enlisted body of soldiers as compared to the active duty side. There I was as a SGT and I had already completed ANCOC. How many active duty E5s are that qualified? There are many components to this discussion. The active duty side needs to change their attitude and remember that we are soldiers through and through just like they are and in some cases we actually have more experience than they do. Together we can do the job. In modern times, the active side has never been able to do the job by themselves. The reserves have been called up and filled gaps from WWII to present. Do you not think that this should be a none issue after all these years?

My time is over. Having spent some 13 years active and another 13 in the National Guard, I am honored to have served with both sides of the house. In my younger years as a communicator in Vietnam and ending up working with DCA-Europe at the end of my active time, the years in between were served with many hard charging professionals. When I joined the National Guard, I was retrained as an Intelligence Analyst. One of the things I immediately saw was that most of us were college educated. We may not have been as "hard charging", but that attitude was replaced by "professional pride". Don't know how other units trained, but I spend untold number of hours training at the computer training site, or whatever it was called, at Ft. Campbell. The S-3 and S2 staff would report at 0800 and we would play war games one Saturday and Sunday. In the summer we often trained with active duty troops. For two years in a row we went to Germany and played our role in blocking the Fulda Gap. We did some training down at Camp Shelby, MS with other NG troops, but we also went to Fort Knox and Fort Campbell and worked with active duty troops. Before my time was up, I did a tour at Camp Taji near Baghdad in 2006-07 (I had a gap in my time..having retired in 1993 but came back in to do my part in War on Terror. I did my job as Operations Sgt at the young age of 58 and I still passed my PT test, and did all the grunt training the young soldier did. Our guys replaced a unit of the 101st. Like MSG Stankovich, I think it is a non-issue.<div><br></div><div><div>Remember - If Obama gets his way and the number of active troops in all military branches is lowered to less than a half-million, the reserves/guard will become an even more important part of the military family.</div></div>