True, he won't get the 1.7 multiplier, but he could get a normal 1% FERS pension with his buyback time by doing the CBP job. His 4.5 years in a 6c position would def earn him the vesting he needs, to draw a 1% FERS retirement. What difference does it make if the job is 6c or not? Sure, he'd be doing it at a discount compared to someone who can put in the required 20 years as 6c for the 1.7% multiplier, but he was never going to reach that anyways so that's a sunk cost to him.
Ditto on the recommendation of going for AD retirement. For disclosure, I actually have the same amount of AD time as the OP, and I'm def going for full AD retirement in the Reserves as an AGR. The reason I didn't throw in that suggestion is when I saw he's already been a min runner in the Guard for 3 years, which means he's only 3 years to 20 good reserve years. IOW he's no spring chicken. Plus the fact he's asking a lot of questions about homesteading tells me this guy is done with the deployment grind and why he's asking about de facto desk jobs in the GS side. Finding AGR jobs in the Guard right now is a non-starter with the airlines stop-hiring. It's too late already in this environment. Musical chairs are prob full already. His own unit's technician jobs are full up (title 5 I'm presuming, the Guard's different full time statuses are foreign to me as an AFRC baby).
Also, the ARC (Guard and Res) has been used and abused as an expeditionary force for the past two decades, and is nothing more than AD Lite now. Depending on local leadership, going full time (ARTs have some deployment heismann leverage title 10/32 AGRs don't) in the ARC right now in a combat-coded unit means you're back to being gone from the family to the gratuitous frequency Active Duty loses people over every year in the first place. QOL Non-starter for this guy probably. I'm in a specific niche that insulates me from much of the deployment thrash, but my AGR is an institutional Reserve outlier, and one I low-crawled for 8 years to secure after years in the border. So I'm not gonna proffer it as the norm nor easily attained to be of any help to this guy.
Are non-LEO GS flying jobs that much easier to attain? My cursory experience with acquaintances and enough 1st hand experience with USAJOBS in the Lost Decade lead me to believe that is not the case. Shy of raking farm truck tires pointlessly with the border patrol people in Laredo, the UAS job is probably the quickest way to getting homesteading. Well that or licking stamps at the post office
