Lending my concurrence to Ken's comments.
When I left the Regular Army to attend law school I joined the Oregon Guard and was assigned to a light infantry brigade. I have to admit I went through a couple years of shock as I adjusted to the different mission, different priorities, and different strengths and weaknesses between Regular and Guard units. Many soldiers don't survive that transition, a few of us, however actually come to understand and appreciate the differences and then work to use our skills and experience gained in the regular force to help make things better, without falling into the trap of thinking the AC way is the only way.
I found that (prior to AC trainers descending in mass and demanding that Guard units train to AC standards of collective training) Guard units were full of soldiers who had superior skills in certain areas. Forward observers who could drop a round on your helmet; howitzer and FDC crews who had worked together for years and, while a motley mob moving from position to position, were lights out at working their gun or generating data. Pilots with the innate skills of one who both loves what he does, and has done it for a long time. Then came the Readiness Training Brigades of AC soldiers who could only see the lack of collective training (which is a post-mob task, but try explaining that to some AC Major-Colonel with all the answers). It was sad to watch individual and section skills fade as scant training time was shifted to efforts focused on higher-level collective tasks. We broke up the solid foundation of these units in order to build a shaky structure of collective skills on top. It looked better to the AC trainers, but to me it looked like the Western town in the movie Blazing Saddles: All false fronts with little behind it that was real. Even today we see the conventional force seeking to build such a force with the ANA. Instead of helping them better at being an Afghan Army (which probably would have been largely militia-based and recruited, trained and employed at the local level), we have set about attemting to build a much less effective version of an American Regular Army.
Having been on the receive end of GPF FID/SFA I came to appreciate very much the difference in approach between what I had been selected, trained and employed to do as an SF officer and what I was getting from my former conventional peers. SF tends to accept people as they are, seek to understand their culture and situation, and then incorporate into the same while helping them to be as good as possible within that construct. GPF soldiers tend to judge others by the standard of how similar US units perform a task, with little consideration for why the unit they are working with might be different, and then assesses the unit to be inferior. They then isolate themselves in little enclaves and proceed to attempt to push the unit to the same tasks, but dumbed down to a level within in the means of such an inferior organization. Eight years of being on the receive end of GPF FID is one of the main reasons why I am not optimistic at all about the big push in recent years for SFA...
But for all its faults, the Guard is a great American institution. Great Americans, great soldiers, and many of my closest lifelong friends. They own the domestic mission of supplementing our civil service in times of domestic emergency; and they also own the mission of supplementing our Regular military and draftee armies in times of foreign emergency. Sad that the Regular force sees the Guard as a threat to the Regular force, rather than as a vital component of our national security in both peace and war.
I hope we can shake off the bad habits of the past 15 years of mobilizing and deploying Guard and Reserve units for peacetime deployments. Counter intuitively, I think it will be through making the Regular Army smaller that we break this habit. Keeping a war fighting army on the shelf tends to make it a COA we use too often. We make better decisions when Presidents have to ask Congress to mobilize or build an army before they can employ it. It is time to finally bring the Cold War army home and return to a more normal, appropriate, American approach to national security. Large standing armies have little place in that model.
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