Originally Posted by
flybynuts
Most of the situations that I have heard about is guys finishing up IOE and a month later activating themselves for a year doing "support/desk" stuff and not really deploying to the sandbox. A lot view it as a tactic to offset the 1st year pay and CA is left without the new body to use and abuse for 12 mos.
I'm not saying that no one has ever used this situation for reasons other that desire to serve their county, but it's reasonable to do a stateside job and take mil leave for it.
This actually happened for example: Squadron is participating in AEF over a 5 month period. Most of the guys are going to the sandbox for 45 day rotations over that time. Command thinks this would be a great time to give us an ORI/UCI, while most of our guys are gone fighting the war. So, we asked some of our part-timers, who weren't going to deploy, to go on orders so that they could cover for ORI/UCI prep while the other guys in the unit were concentrating on getting ready to go to war.
Did these guys "go to war"? No. Did they contribute to the overall effort? No doubt.