Point taken & understood, but what you wrote is still wrong.The Holmchicken wrote:Whoa, it was just some ball busting. Sorry for their loss. If my qoute offended you, I'm sorry. But it doesn't change what I wrote.K.Ingraham wrote:Yeah, the 5 INFANTRYMEN from near my hometown here, 28th INFANTRY Div, PA NG, who just died in their Bradley from an IED died in that special, kinder & gentler war they set aside for weekend warriors only.The Holmchicken wrote:You were NG Infantry right? That's the same as Active pac clerk. Just as demanding.
We've only lost one war. That was the one set aside for the professionals, where the NG was specifically not invited.
Comparing combat arms soldiers who are meeting and engaging our enemies since before this nation existed with ofice clerks is ignorant.
The RC troops from the USAR, NG & USMCR are doing the same job as the paratroops & regulars in the same wars. They are doing it with 10% the training time & 110% of the admin burden & with 60-80% of the equipment, & with equipment often generations behind the RA troops.
That they often don't perform to airborne, much less ranger standard isn't surprising, but then, many, if not most NG units perform to the same standards as their RA counterparts in spite of the hinderances. Hinderances often provided by the Army the RC/NG is a part of (I've been on both sides of this fence).
We can go back & forth with antidotes, such as during the Desert Storm mobilisation where the Mississippi NG tankers outshot every III Corps armored or cav unit, but the Corps commander still refused to allow them further access to training areas or resources, much less let them deploy as part of the Corps to which they were capstoned.
I saw an Ill NG infantry company do pretty damn well as opfor to a Ranger Bn in the 1997 SOF JRTC rotation - maybe even outfought them - I sure didn't want to acknowledge that, but when the rotation was complete, those weekenders from Ill were pretty proud of how they performed & with good reason.
Yep, we could go back & forth with the antidotes & both be telling the truth, but overall, the vast majority of the slag directed at the RC is simply that: slag.
What we do isn't rocket science & can be, and is done just as well by reservists when the time comes. That they usually can't perform to RA standards as units on Day 1 is simply the nature of the beast. But properly resourced with minimal time allowed, and without getting the rug pulled from them as happened in 1990/91 and often today, the NG soldier will fight as well as anyone.
Within our own community, compare the combat record of D-151 with that of any of the other LRRP/Ranger companies of the Vietnam War. It'll speak for itself. But then, in their 4 months train up, no one tried to create a self fulfilling prophacy of failure.
250+ years of American military history has proven beyond all doubt that our RC soldiers fight and win.
The Marine reserve battalion that just returned home to Cleveland by way of Fallujah etc and the GA NG 48th Bde (still in Iraq) are two examples to shut the book on that "can't do what we do" bias.
As our neighboring volunteer firefighters kept telling us career FFs:
"The Ark was built by an amateur; the Titanic by professionals".
but that was at SILL, hopefully benning will be better.
