Guard and reserve recruiting goals

Ugh, SGT Hill, this is a FUGLY one!

Along time ago in a State HQ far, far away when I was a company commander, we had to meet monthly and report our recruiting and retention efforts directly to the Adjutant General. Quite a few Purple hearts were given out at those meetings.

1) The NG was always in completion with AD for recruiting soldiers and guess who had the bigger purse for recruiting and re-up bonuses? We would get drilled on why our numbers were not competitive to what AD was getting. Despite having a full time recruiting force, with a recruiter assigned to each Bn level unit, we were expected to run recruiting events at the expense of training to fill in the gaps. At that time RI did not have free state tuition for NG members while our neighbors in MA & CT did.

2) And then there was the other side of the coin - Retention why did we have a pretty much 1:1 ratio of troops gained to troops lost?
a) quality control - if they could breathe and make it through basic, no one really cared what came after, it was all about numbers, a good number would never make it to AIT because of all the split options available to the NG, that I don't believe, AD had
b) Bennies - no free tuition, I'll go where I can get it
c) Lousy training and leadership (I'm not talking the Bn on down, I'm talking the head shed & up) Too many mandatory events and distractors - like recruiting, a commander was lucky if they got 5-6 drill weekends a year that were 80% theirs after maintenance, PT tests, inspections, recruiting, Change of Commands, Change of Responsibility (CSMs) December Holiday family meal, mandatory annual briefings, ranges, makeup ranges, and so on and so forth...

Budget, what budget? Until our unit went to Iraq in 2005 we still had and used camo Chevy Blazers, VRC-46 & 47 radios, computers that AD rejected, Hell, we were lucky we got M16-A2s a few years before.

Don't get me started on how AGRs were utilized where the highly immobile state HQ had all the AGR slots and line units had 3 or 4 per company

This is going to create a HUGE mess. I'm seeing and feeling the effects right now. I'm trying to transfer from MA NG to AL NG and I'm facing the possibility of having to be reduced to E-4 because those are the slots that are open. I've been told a couple of times by readiness NCOs in AL, "Our only open E-5 slot was just given to a guy coming off of AD."

The Guard isn't like Big Army where there's constantly a revolving door of people coming and going. If a unit has slots for 60 people, 40 of them are for E-4 and below, 10 are for E-5, 5 are for E-6, and the last 5 are E-7 and E-8. Once those slots are full, anyone else trying to get into that unit/MOS are SOL.