Army National Guard Essay

Research Topic Today the Army National Guard is more than the strategic. It is now an operational force that fulfills missions that the active Army cannot support. These title ten missions on top of state duties make unit strength one of the key factors for the ability to accomplish these assignments. Keeping Soldiers that are trained and part of the unit keeps the team dynamic and bypasses the additional work of training new Soldiers. You cannot keep every Soldier from leaving the service but there is always a chance to retain them. Soldiers leave the National Guard for many reasons and all of the reasons are legitimate. They leave due to civilian job conflicts, issues being gone from their families, and many more reasons. Consequently,

These factors are often trivial reasons to leave as a result of lousy experiences, inconveniences, and situations that occur in their civilian life. The reasons to leave the service are often short term and the Soldier does not realize how much leaving the service can affect his/her life.

The unit leadership can affect many of these situations as long as there is a favorable command climate and it is taken care of early in the re-enlistment window. Often the need to belong and the Soldier's feeling that the leadership cares about them has a massive effect on their desire to stay. The unit leadership cannot fix every problem but a real attempt and following up with the Soldier can change their minds.

Soldiers that have had an awful experience in the National Guard can still decide to stay. The leadership just has to look at the overall picture of keeping the Soldier in the service versus in their unit. A simple move to a new battery or a complete change of military occupational specialty can have negative effects on the battery but positive for the overall force. A change of scenery can be just what a Soldier needs to give him or her a new outlook on the National Guard and their future in the

This is the basic amount of time in uniform but may vary considerably. This is published every year in a training memo that Soldiers use to notify their civilian employers of their drill dates. The length of the drill is traditionally two days but can be up to five days long. This requires moving drills from one month to lengthen another month's drill. Soldiers often start to have problems with work when drills happen during the normal work week. This means that Soldiers need to take this time off from their civilian job. Not all jobs give their employees military leave, so these Soldiers must use vacation or take unpaid time off. For large numbers of Soldiers, this creates a burden with the loss of wages. This also affects families when vacation days vanish which requires adjustment of any planned trips they may want to take. The addition of deployments and state active duty for emergencies creates more time that Soldiers are away from family and their civilian jobs. The National Guard can't control when deployments or emergencies happen, but Soldiers feel the more time they spend away from their jobs hinders their progression in their civilian careers (Ashwell, 2020,