from Viet Nam and as CofSA almost immediately set out to move the bulk of the CS/CSS to the Guard and Reserve for two reason. First, to insure that no future President could go to war without calling up the RC and secondly, to put those kinds of unit -- even then having problems recruiting -- in the RC where they could better recruit and could allow unit members to work in their trade in civilian life as well as in training, thus enhancing their skills if they needed to be called up. To that end, some thought was put into what units went where in an attempt to locate units where there were likely locally required skills that would enhance the effectiveness of the unit.

Unfortunately, in the 80s, politics took over and two things happened. first, the ArNG got agreement to take over all CA units in the RC (bad decision on the part of DA) and the USAR picked up the majority of the CSS (read: all that the ArNG did not want) while both components shared CS elements. There was also some movement of unit locations based on politics and not on what native to the area skill pools might contain. Both of these actions were detrimental (IMO) to the concept, to the Army and to the RC.

Come Desert Shield/Desert Storm, Vouno tried to go to war without calling up the RC CS/CSS pool -- he couldn't do it. He and Benny Peay tried every trick in the book and couldn't make it work so the CS/CSS package had to be called up, thus units tabbed Capstone to VII and XVIII Corps had to be activated. Third Army's down trace was mostly RC, they had to be called up. Congress also insisted on ArNG Brigades being called up and sent (they paid for 'em and they and the Guard wanted to put 'em to work). So three Bdes were activated over loud protests from DA. The DA plan was to stall and not deploy them in order to justify a couple of full up, all AC deployable Corps so they decided the RC refresher training would entail a trip to the NTC. One Bde, the 48th from GA, went through that and completed it just about the time of the ceasefire in Kuwait. It never got certified for deployment by DA (a statutory requirement) on the basis "the war's over..." Fun and games the DA way...

Come this one, Tom's got it right plus the need for for more troops due to a rotation policy drove the deployment of ArNG Bdes -- all of whom have done pretty good. 278th from TN did exceptionally well.

There are a number of lessons in this for many, from Congress to DA to the RC to Defense contractors. Let's see how smart everyone is...