I agree but if you are waiting to go overseas and they keep telling you "NO", why on earth are they bringing back troops whose enlistments have been up for awile or officers who have already resigned after 8 years or so. I know they can do this and I'm not flaming anyone but i'm curious as to why this is happening IF there are those waiting to go. Does it have to do with specialties???????
The military moves in strange ways -- ways that only they understand.
In truth, yeah it partly has to do with specialties -- some are in really short supply and more likely to get recalled & deployed. (I think military police and helicopter mechanics are in the shortest supply, but there could be other tight specialties as well -- intelligence, medical, even truck drivers, etc. And Special Forces fall into their own, unique category.)
In other cases, there are people (like me) very willing to serve, but some of the administrative people are really slow at putting through our paperwork and getting us the schools we have to have in order to deploy.
So basically, there's a whole stew of complex reasons why things work like they do, and not all the reasons are good ones, I'm afraid.