Yeah, my guess is there are a whole lot of support and noncombat billets that they need to fill to keep the gravy train flowing to Kiev and produce all of the quadslides and storyboards for the NSC and CJCS meetings back in Washington.
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USN AD to SELRES Transition
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Most of the personnel we've utilized so far to support Ukraine have largely been out of hide, since the war is now going on close to 18 months it makes sense to make it more enduring. It is really a great mission for the reserves, and a great chance to do something useful for the war effort.
I strongly disagree about the pay being good for the work unless you go on orders. I loathe how much the game changes once you're forced into APPLY orders and traveling nationally at your own expense. Very few are eligible for IDT-R, and those that are tell stories of getting fought at every step from initial approval to rejecting said expenses. All add in all the unpaid extra time you spend on SELRES admin and knee jerk NRC BS as you get more senior, and the value proposition starts to look very unappealing.
The money is pretty decent (for what it is) in hardware. I imagine the same is not true otherwise. Not living directly under the NOSC/NRC umbrella also helps one avoid a lot of the BS. I can't fathom how we keep any of our NOSC heroes around longer than a year or two.
I wrote an absolute stemwinder of a rant, and then decided I was selling some good folks short and deleted it.
The TL; DR is that even in nonflying billets, supporting the AC in cool billets is the crack Big Reserves uses to get you hooked. And it can be good shit. But eventually, their bullshit starts to wear through. In non-flying NRC land, it sometimes really does feel like Big Reserves takes the freely-given goodwill and free time of a bunch of great patriotic Americans and just shits all over it like they're entitled to it. There are good folks to be found here and there, but ultimately, you have to weigh an extra $15K in your pension against torpedoing your private sector career to get said $15K. Because the vast majority are topping out at O-6.
That goodwill is burned. Three years ago I was coming off of a second set of ADOS orders where I was compensated well, made a tangible impact to the command, and selected for O-5. I had no definite date to leave the Reserve and was aspiring to become a SELRES CO.
My experience since then has left me with zero desire to be a CO and I am counting down the 41 weeks and change left until I can submit for retirement in NSIPS.
The timeline may not be the same, but the reason why I retired is that I’m basically 43 weeks ahead of you. I loved the work I did for the AC, but the impact it would have had on my civ career, family, and sanity to keep going made me go “nah.” And it was obvious I was nothing more than a number to the NRC, and would never be even as an O-6.
Yes, Big Navy, as a bachelor, I still have a family. Mom and Dad aren’t getting any younger, and in the worst case, they come before you. And I’m not risking being stuck in Djibouti in the worst case.
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@nittany03 , @snake020 I wish I could say I disagree with any of that. The sheer - and more than a few times, open and to-our-face - contempt a lot of AC folks have for the Res never stopped astonishing me. Showing up to take a Friday late-afternoon FCF at a Fleet squadron and enduring a 20-minute rant from Ops about "the fucking Reservists" just being one. I was thisclose to telling him I felt my hay fever flaring up and to pull me off the sked, but.
I never had it that bad. In fact, the VS RAG let us use their planes on weekends almost like they were ours. We gave them plenty of Xs both in the plane and sim, but it was a good deal. When CVWR 30 went aboard Enterprise VS-41 even let us get underway with RAG birds.
Most valued and almost zero Reserve BS was on the staff of NAVEUR. I got a desk, computer and a phone. Was treated like the AD kids. No checking in no muster. Long lunches, early out to catch a plane home. When I left after.my drills they thanked me and asked when I'd be back. Just reinforced how uderly unnecessary all the Reserve crap is.
At least for me and many of my colleagues in all three of my units the pay was definitely worth it most of the time with the exception of the some of the airline guys missing out on last minute trips with triple super overtime, or whatever the hell it was. The first two units were both local and the last was a 3 hour drive away.
There were a couple of caveats that definitely worked to my advantage, in the first and third units I was in the reservists were critical to the mission and the job could not be done without us. The first was a watch where ~60% of the shifts were reservists and the last the entire task was done by reservists but for one contractor and two USAF E's. The second one was a NATO unit and they were always happy for the extra help. I was also local or semi-local for all 3 units, living in one and within reasonable driving distance to two very big 'fleet concentration' areas and 'homesteading' in my last unit helped. Finally I am a federal civil servant that had 120 hours of just reserve leave a year and bosses that were happy to support me doing reserve stuff.
So I do understand that my situation does not apply to a lot of reservists but for the work I did and the pay I got it was very well worth my time and will be again when I finally get my retirement pay.
I've seen a couple folks that weren't really enthused about reservists, but it has been a mostly positive experience so far. Seems to kind of go in cycles. At the end of the day, I think it is hard to argue with the % of X's we throw down, even if you perceive us to be part of the retention problem.
That's always been a good fact to have in your back pocket. "You know all you guys are able to go to Grad school because of the SAUs, right?"