How will the new retirement system affect the guard/reserve component?

I think this is going to be a future problem. People can pick up and leave whenever they get sick and tired of the military. It will be a rarity to find a twenty year woman or man; if they get fed up with the military one day, they could be out and about in one year. That knowledge base will be lost to the Army.

This is going to damage heavily, an already beleaguered force.

The majority of leaders in the Guard and Reserve have at least one Active duty enlistment under their belts. They came over, in large part, because the points count toward a retirement rather than simply separating. They form the nucleus of their component.

We are losing people with 15+ years in and less than 20-while there is still the carrot of a retirement that they can start collecting in a couple of decades.

According to this Congressional Research Service white paper, there will not be drastic changes to the way the reserve component retirement system works, but the total payout could be a lot lower. The main change is a reduction of benefit calculation from 2.5% to 2% per year of service, which sounds to me like a 20% reduction in retirement. So active duty will retire at 40% instead of 50%, and reservists would see a similar 20% reduction of whatever they would get now upon retirement. This only applies however to those who enter service after Jan 1, 2018, if I'm reading it correctly (please comment if you can clarify otherwise).

"...the [current] reserve retirement system also accrues at the rate of 2.5% per “equivalent year” of qualifying service (explained below) at retirement eligibility for those who enter service prior to January 1, 2018, and 2.0% for those who enter on or after January 1, 2018."

See bottom of page 7: https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL34751.pdf

Also, it's not clear whether the reserve component branches will match 401k style savings.