March 8, 2006: For several generations, the U.S. military has had an easy going attitude towards reservists who did not show up for their monthly or annual training. Since the reservists were paid for this, the military didn't want to pay for work not done. But the brass did not want to go through all the legal and administrative hassle of disciplining the absent troops. So, over the years, there developed the custom of simply transferring these reluctant reservists to the inactive reserve. This took them off the payroll, but still allowed the government to call them up in case of a national emergency. However, when the Department of Defense tapped into the inactive reserve over the last two years, it was found that you still could not get most of those reservists to show up. So now the policy is changing. In the future, if reservists don't show up, their commanders can just have them discharged (fired, in civilianspeak). While the reserve units hate to lose people, what with all the expense and effort it takes to recruit and train them, it's now obvious that the simplest solution to reservists who don't want to serve, is to just let them go. This means that approximately 15,000 reservists (out of some 1.1 million) who are not showing up, will be shown the door.
