Tentative Guidelines for building partner armies post conflict

[Schmedlap]

*Fifth, the creation of a reserve force should be carefully considered. Such a force might employ those people who would benefit from having an occupation to avoid them causing trouble, but are unsuitable for the regular army.

Also, a reserve force may be wholly adequate, depending upon the security situation. Consider the American experience with Minutemen and not having a standing Army.

*Sixth, after individual and unit training, major exercises need to be scheduled to maintain skills and keep soldiers busy.

Soldiers know when they are being given busy work and it is a morale killer. If there is a concern about idle Soldiers, then I think the leadership should begin by asking, "what is it we're afraid the men are going to do if they are too idle?" Then choose an appropriate course of action from there. I suspect there will be many alternatives less costly or complicated than major training exercises. Exercises are also not necessarily something that keeps the Soldiers occupied as one would expect (and I'm only speaking from the experience of seeing some jaw-dropping idiocy occur during US Army training exercises).

*Care should be taken to restrain pressure for higher quantities of new army personnel over higher quality personnel.

If you are just standing up an Army, I would think you could tend toward quantity in the short term, just to ensure enough young, able-bodied men have employment. Once the situation stabilizes, then you can focus more on quality.