Yep. Part of the whole restrategizing the "soft military" capacity that the Chef has raised involves the Guard and Reserves. It's not just numbers of specialists doing what, it's where they're located in the professional streams of the military. Also relates to homeland security -- monies for, missions, who does them, etc. The internal Pentagon strategy, budgeting & planning exercises right now are as much about force restructuring as whether to cancel the F/22 fighters or mothball aircraft carriers. And top on the list of the force restructuring is the Guard/Reserves -- size, roles, how they fit in with overseas deployments, professional career paths, civilian career paths, family issues because they tend to be older etc. And the crisis du jour -- retention and recruitment. As the memo from the head of the Reserves in December indicated, force restructuring isn't just resizing the force or deciding on the number of boots available to hit the ground when the proverbial fan is hit. Barnett talks in his newer stuff about people coming into the military for shorter periods later in their overall career paths - from civilian experiences and back to civilian life. These career path issues are a critical dimension of the force restructuring calculus. Another question involves how much capacity we want to have on a permanent standby basis at home, ready and involved in home stuff, while that capacity isn't off doing stuff abroad. You'll never get these folks to spend their non-rotation time in lily pads in Uzbekistan! And what do they do besides train -- and how do they keep their professional skill set up to snuff -- when they're waiting to be deployed abroad? Again a rationale for separating the Leviathan from the SysAdmin. The Leviathan never works at home whereas some of the restrictions of military performing homeland functions could be relaxed for the SysAdmin. The Guard and Reserves is really, really complicated in terms of domestic politics. The Guard has been the third rail of the military like SocSec for the civilian arena. The old guys in their home states are a very powerful bloc. And each governor (both parties) are directly interested in the size and posture of the Guard in their home territory. Makes sensible decisions at the federal level difficult - so you see a tug-of-war between Congress and the Pentagon somewhat like the whole base-closings problem. The other big problem with the Guard, and the Reserves to some degree though not as bad, is incompetence, nepotism/cozy deals, and quasi-corruption. The Bush National Guard tale has a whole subtext of this that didn't get aired properly. The real problem wasn't that Bush got unusual preferential treatment. The problem is that the sort of preferential treatment he got is not unusual to this day. In Bush's case, he was actually competent. Which is not the case with a great many politically-connected. It's a tribute to general American can-do initiative that the casualty levels in Iraq in the Guard haven't been higher -- it's more in spite of rather than because of anything about the way the Guard is run. The guys who have been on the case forever on this are the Hackwoth, Soldiers for Truth folks. They've been collecting Guard and Reserve horror stories long before Afghanistan and Iraq that make you wince.