Active Duty or Reservist or National Guard. All are heroes and defend our Country!
“I will put the young men and women of the U.S. Army Reserve up against any branch of the United States military,” Caffie said, “in terms of their leadership, their professionalism and their continued service.”
Ditto the Air Force Reserves. I am so proud of the USAFR JAGs and paralegals who VOLUNTEER to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan I could just bust. There hasn’t been a single involuntary deployment of a reservist since 11 Sep, because volunteers have stepped up - and our Air Force folks are performing ILO duties just like the other services. The days of the weekend warrior are long gone.
Colonel, USAFR
They’re all Joes downrange. In Uncle Ronnie’s Army it was easy to tell just by looking who was USAR and NG. Not any more.
While it is very hard to maintain the Reserve and National Guard edge in peacetime, both because of the reduction in financial and political support, a program should be under way right now to do the next best thing:
To keep the Reserves in shape by maintaining the connectivity with the active duty military. Granted this is a formative idea, but I can imagine some components to it.
An intraweb for knowledge-based training. Everyone in the Reserve and National Guard could become part of a virtual active duty unit. Day or night they could log on to get a multimedia-heavy “active duty experience.”
Perhaps an enormous MMORPG, a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, like World of Warcraft, but completely oriented to active duty.
And here is the truly strange part: each individual, be they enlisted, NCO, or officer, would be playing their real world role, but virtually.
Then insert training into the “game”. For example, a National Guardsman Corporal in Utah is in the game. At some point his job is to clean his rifle. But instead of cleaning a virtual rifle, the scene changes to a video of someone cleaning a rifle in the best way possible. Not just a demo, but a real time video of cleaning every millimeter of that rifle. In the very best way it can be done.
Now this is different from a typical instructional video, that would just one patch through the barrel and say, “That’s how it’s done.” In this case, patches are run through until that barrel is *clean*. Certainly, it is less entertaining than a short video, but it fully shows how the job is done *right*.
And imagine how long the video would be showing how to do a major repair on a 5 ton truck engine? But after watching a two hour video of someone repairing a truck engine, you would *know* how to repair that truck engine.
This would be a huge project for TRADOC, but would be a huge help in keeping the Reserves in tip-top shape.
But continuous training and “virtual active duty”, MMORPG-style, might be the wave of the future in training Reserves and National Guardsmen.