'Reserves' just doesn't mean the same thing that you're used to. In the United States, the Air Force embraced - really internalized - the concept of the Total Force, which includes ALL units wearing an Air Force uniform. Like I said before, the concept of the weekend warrior, the old-age or disqualified 'out-to-pasture' paradigm that almost every other country uses when it speaks of their 'reserve forces', the kind that get called up when the country is on a last-ditch crisis footing...no.
The reason that first-line equipment and highly-trained personnel are used in Air National Guard and Reserve units is simply that it allows for an alternative to the OLD way of doing things: full-timers are active-duty, and if you don't want to do that for whatever reason, you can be in the 'joke' Air Force that's only used for 'second-tier' missions, and isn't really supposed to, you know, PRODUCE. So, you get a LOT more bang for your buck, and you can hang onto that fighter jock that wants to fly airliners, or that intel guy that sells real estate. Your force is WAY bigger and LOTS better than if you thought about and used your reserve forces like they were just aerial militia, all but useless in anything like an actual war.
As to the friendly fire thang, I know a bit about that, too. I consider myself extremely lucky - LUCKY, folks, not particularly talented - to have never caused anything like that with my work. Was I careful? Bet your ass, I was, because I lived in terror that it WOULD happen to me someday. I know a guy that called in a bad target, and got a whole pile of innocent people killed. It hurt him BADLY, and he almost didn't come back from it. Well, it could have been ME, because this is the truth that I had to try to live with as I did my job: sometimes, you are just playing the odds, and conditions and circumstances are such that you're hoping that The Breaks are going to fall your way. Because a decision has to be made, and that 75% probability that you're going to be right will have to be good enough to go ahead and release hell onto SOMEbody, because NOT shooting will get somebody - probably OUR guys - killed, too. So you make your call, eat a Tums, chew off your fingernails to the second knuckle, and hope like almighty that you haven't committed the evening news' lead atrocity story. (I'm not asking for anybody's admiration here, but THAT is PRESSURE, folks, and while I do not consider myself to have any insight into combat stress, having never heard a shot fired in anger, I have felt ENORMOUS responsibility while I weigh my decision and wait to hear what happened, and relief when it comes out right - again.)
I wrote this recently:
Quote:
During the war, we were all going SO fast, there was a chance that we were going to get bad data corrupting the air tasking orders. Also, the ground forces were going SO fast, a lot of our grid refs were BEHIND the FLOT, and baby, if there's ANY time that you're going to get blue-on-blue, there ya go.
I was terrified my plots were going to be The One that hit friendlies, not to mention innocents. (And let me tell you this: it is largely a matter of plain old LUCK when Bad Things do NOT happen. I am a good analyst, but this is the truth: the fact that I never had one of my strikes go into a bad target is simply because I'm more lucky than good. It could've EASILY been me, and not the guy on the night shift, poor bastard.)
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When you're pressed for time (and you always are) and you're exhausted (and you usually are), it's WAY too easy to screw up, and that's why we demand such professionalism from our people. I was purty dam' hard on doing the little stuff right, and my people were expected to meet or exceed all the standards in All Things Air Force, whether it was lethal or not. Because I wanted their minds trained to think about DETAILS, because that is where the mistakes lie in wait for the careless, and they can kill you, or cause you to kill somebody else. But sometimes, all control is removed from your hands, and you have to do your best, and prepare yourself for the fact that not everybody is as lucky as Sgt
Bluesman was.
With the version of the combined air and land forces doctrine that the US military trains for and stresses, it may seem to a Brit unit commander that USAF pilots aren't taking proper care. But the speed and personal initiative and decentralized decision-making that the doctrine stresses and that also makes battlefield success seem effortless and irresistable, the friendly-fire losses that seem so high are actually replacing battle casualties that would be WAY higher, should a more 'careful' approach be adopted. And I would tell that furious commander that he got to BE furious about his losses to Yankee cowboy fighter jocks because he wasn't dead from enemy ambushes, artillery strikes, days-long breaching ops through obstacle belts, etc.
Long post. Sorry.