California National Guard

[AurorA56$$]

Are you Prior service or on active duty and looking to ETS?
Have you ever thought about continuing your military service and maybe gaining another retirement?
The National Guard offers time to start, continue and finish you degree or certificate programs. We also offer great low cost health and dental programs.
If you didn’t like or appreciate your old MOS, we could also send you to another MOS-T school.
If any of this interests you, please feel free to message me back or answer me with a reply and I will message you back.
Thank you for your service.

[Supersapper]

Don't forget to tell them about the interminable deployments, but short and long term, multiple ATs and interruptions to work and school.

I spent 18 years in CalGuard. You'll be basically active duty without being active duty or getting the benefits.

If you're active duty, try to gut it out and stay there until 20. You get the benefits of full time employment, Tricare, etc. If you go Guard or Reserve, you lose alot of it but you still are going to have a LOT of active duty time. As a reservist, you will not see a retirement check (IF you're still allowed one under the new rules) until age 60, minus any years on T10 after 2007(?)

Example: A 35 year old Soldier has 15 years AFS and wants to go Guard. If he waits another 5 years, he gets an active duty retirement check of 50% at age 40. If he goes Guard and gets an average of 100 points per year, it will take him another 15+ years to get that same active duty retirement dollar amount. He'll now be 50, when he gets the 20 year letter, instead of 40. Make sure you tell him about the difference between Reserve/Guard and Active retirement dollar amounts. They're NOT necessarily the same. And, of course, there are all the "Guard-isms".

Low cost medical is good with Reserve Select, but United Concordia Dental is NOT a good company. Better than nothing, but most civilian plans are better.

Please do them a huge favor and make sure you tell them everything about the reserves. I've had numerous Soldiers tell me that this is NOT what they were sold at the recruiters and would have made a different decision had they been told everything.

[AurorA56$$]

[Snoopy47]

In the case of prior service my rant doesn't really apply. You guys should know what you are doing, and I feel the NG and USAR is best for those who are older and don't need to go to school, or are prior service and looking to finish out their time.

So I don't want to cause friction too much on this thread, but the only thing I see going for the NG and USAR is the very cost effective health plan. I'm not saying it's great. I'm saying it's cheap. For me as a mid 40's male it's $50 a month, and dental is another $10.

As for education, yes, while there is an annual tuition assistance program, it isn't any better than what generic corporations offer anyway for jobs as simple as flipping burgers. And this program is not like the GI Bill, you only get it while you are in the NG/USAR.

The unit I just left has the next three years of 29 days training missions in the middle of March. So anyone going to school just effectively lost the ability to go to college in the Spring for the next three years. So the USAR effectively added an additional year to complete a degree for anyone going to school while in my unit.


A regular employer would assist you about the same cost wise, and wouldn't stop you from going to night school one entire semester every single year for potentially the duration of your eight year obligation.

The GI Bill on the other hand needs 3 years of ACTIVE duty time. So if you are in the NG or the USAR and never deploy or put on title 10 orders you are never vesting any GI Bill time. I've been in NINE YEARS, and with one deployment, and two years on title 10 orders working Missions I AM NOT FULLY VESTED myself. I'm only at 90% (which is pretty good). But folks are out there with as much time with ZERO vesting.

****

Now, units DO exist that have "cake" training schedules, but you are not going to stumble upon them going to a recruiter. The recruiter is only going to see what is given to him, and you can bet he's getting spoon fed all the crap positions that are hard to retain for.

What defines crappy? Because even a cook job could be a cake assignment depending what you are attached too.

I have a theory:

If the ASVAB requirement for a given MOS is low (easy to get the position for idiots), but there is a modest cash bonus or higher then that's a warning flag.

It's perfectly fine to see $20K bonus for EOD techs, for payment upon completion of EOD school, but when that same $20K is being handed out to warehouse clerks for re-enlistment and they DON'T have to go to school (re-enlisting) and are staying in the same job, that's a MAJOR hint what they want to leave sucks.

*********

So what do you do???????? I am not saying ignore the recruiter. He/she is where you absolutely have to start. As far as the USAR/NG goes DO NOT SIGN ANY CONTRACTS until you have spoken with the receiving unit's 1st SGT or Company Commander.

You CANNOT do this with Active Duty, but you CAN with the NG and USAR.

*********
My biggest complaint I have about one of my soldiers we took in was she was sold on the bonus for the warehouse clerk job, but recently finished dental assistant school.

I had to give her a distance waiver because she was outside the 50 miles from my unit.

HOWEVER!!!!!!!!!!!! There was a USAR DENTAL UNIT with a PRIMARY VACANCY in the rank of E3/E4 only 30 minutes from her.

But she already signed on, so she was screwed.

*******
While I was a Company Commander I always asked new soldiers:
1) How far is your drive?
2) Do you own a card?
3) Are you going to school?

There's a reason for that. New young soldiers are not showing up to drill once they find out what they got themselves into.

[Snoopy47]

you are probably adult enough to get a training schedule for the year so you can get enough time to plan and notify your employer.

True..........however.........

In my two years of command I have signed SEVEN annual training schedules because of changes throughout the year (usually about every 4-6 months).

A published annual training schedule doesn't mean anything.

[Supersapper]

That’s is why the Guard is going back to the 2 days a month and 2 weeks, because of retention. Deployments don’t happen as often as they use to.
If you were enlisted before, you are probably adult enough to get a training schedule for the year so you can get enough time to plan and notify your employer. There are plenty of people who are in right and going to college or other schools. Their employers and instructors understand their sacrifices and work with them if something comes up.
As for the insurance; at least ppl will have insurance instead of Soldiers having employers that are giving them minimum hours to not offer health and dental. The state now makes tax payers pay penalties for not having health insurance.

Ummm. No. That is NOT the case. NGB and the Pentagon are pushing not to do that, but rather they want 56 UTAs per year and 2 x annual training periods. Deployments are RAMPANT, and I include in that all of the extra week and 2 week this and that training. 40ID went back to back deployments last year to AFG and in the 3 previous years I had to do 3 x ATs per year to cover down on "missions". Your information is dated. If Iran and Syria turn South, it'll be up again.

Also...Snoopy47 above is correct. I've seen annual training schedules change OVERNIGHT within a week to 14 days of the actual training. This happens with regularity. If you're a full time recruiter, I don't think you're tracking the pain that part timers go through. You can't be faulted for that because there is a KNOWN rift between full time force pax and part timers. We part timers are seen as second class sometimes and the decisions made by full timers virtually NEVER take into account the 2nd, 3rd and sometimes 4th order effects.

Why would they do that? Because every time a Guard unit goes to MOB station or a PPP, they are berated for the lack of training quality and quantity and it's not up to "Big Army" standard; therefore they have to waste time doing it again. The NG/USAR always counter that there isn't the time in the schedule during a training year to get it done. There were some hearings about it and the resultant proposal was that they increase the number of days and reduce the extraneous training (like that online crap). I spent significant time as an OC/T...I've watched the painful realities of reserve training in person.

For the record, you may not know this, but employers are savvy to all of this. They are NOT HIRING NG/USAR Soldiers in a lot of cases and many of them know about the 5 year cap on protections from USERRA. They do not have to outright deny employment because that's illegal. They just simply never call you back. If you do not tell them you are in the reserves, you can be fired for lying on your application and USERRA can NOT protect against that.

I'm just saying make sure you give them both the rose AND the thorns.

[Supersapper]

Not always. The laws I sort of address below, but USERRA and ESGR can NOT protect that way and do not have enforcement powers. They do not even advocate, they simply inform.

Those laws do not protect as well as you think and they have consequences for education and employment.

PLEASE...desperately to avoid issues with people regretting their decision, get educated on the dark side of reserve work. You'll be better prepared to inform the recruit of what he's getting himself into.

[Supersapper]

The state now makes tax payers pay penalties for not having health insurance.

Not that I'm aware of. Trump removed that penalty for the taxes.

[rero360]

[Snoopy47]

Not that I'm aware of. Trump removed that penalty for the taxes.

its a state law apparently

[Mustard]

Oh boy, some salty Guardsmen in here, great place to ask questions....

I'm looking into CANG. When in the recruitment process does the recruiter talk to me about what jobs I can do (assume great ASVAB scores)?

We've talked a lot about the basics and the process of applying, but little about specific jobs.

Good idea to ask to talk to the receiving unit.

[operavoice]

I joined Cal ARNG in 1988.
12B. Hit 10 years and said goodbye.

During my tenure, I was activated for one earthquake, two floods, and volunteered for two forest fires.
That was why I joined the National Guard.

Then Desert Storm hit.
My unit was allegedly two weeks away from being activated.
Overseas war fighting was not why I joined, and I got the Hell out.

My unit got deployed to the sand boxes not once, but twice after my ETS.

Many of the guys I was in with are still fighting with the VA to get their broken bodies fixed properly. Knees. Backs. Hearing. That needs to get addressed for all veterans.

National Guard should be just that. National.
Until that gets fixed, recruiters are going to have an uphill retention battle.

[Snoopy47]

When in the recruitment process does the recruiter talk to me about what jobs I can do

Only in the military are you hired by someone that doesn't know what you are going to be doing.

Then you are trained by someone that you will not be working for.

Finally, the person that you will work for didn't ask for you in the first place.

[Milsurp1]

[AurorA56$$]

If your in the National Guard and all you can do is sit and cry about it, and blame everyone else, then get out or retire.