The rules, they are a changin'

Pentagon Abandons Active-Duty Time Limit
Pentagon Abandoning Its Limit on Total Active-Duty Time Required of Guard and Reserve


http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/IraqCoverage/wireStory?id=2788666&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312

So. There it is. Good news, deployments will now be about 12 months instead of 18. Bad news, you won't get just one in 6 years.

After this war is over, we (as a nation) really need to look at how we handle this "citizen soldier" thing. Previously, we viewed these individuals as people who drilled 1 weekend a month and two weeks in the summer, but never get deployed. Now, we view these individuals as soldiers who happen to take some time off from the military to do other things, like work, available at a moment's notice to deploy repeatedly in short timeframes when the understrength, overworked regular forces can't be everywhere at once.

I don't believe either is a balanced view. While the demands of a "citizen soldier" can be reasonably expected to include a deployment or two (or even three) in a twenty year career, we need to resource our military with the active duty troops necessary to handle the "active duty" that we are calling on our military for, such as war.

The concepts of the reserves and the National Guard were to supply a ready, trained force in case of major conflict where we needed to identify and be able to call trained individuals into service QUICKLY. They were also seen as the nation's strategic defense in case of attack on our nation's soil. However, we are into this war over 5 years now. The quickly part has come and gone.

While I believe we can still win this war, things are progressing, and positive things will come of this, I believe one of the positive things that needs to come out of this is the discussion of where our citizen soldiers fit in our military planning. I would argue that, in the last 5 years, we have overcorrected and need to adjust back to some balanced state, where citizen soldiers get to have time to develop the citizen part of that citizen soldier label.

Aloha.