Are we comparing apples to apples, or apples to oranges here?

First let me just say that nobody can ever really be "prepared" for what they might find or what might possibly occur on any given battlefield. You simply can't be; war is chaotic by it's very nature. Every battlefield is different, and you just have to "learn as you go". There is no guarantee that any of the lessons of the past will even apply in a new situation. Maybe they do. Maybe they don't.

When I first joined the military I had zero experience too. When I first joined the military I was trained with the draftees. There were far more draftees than volunteers at that time. We all trained together. Even though I went on to two other schools before going to Vietman, most of the other guys (the other volunteers) did not. They (volunteers and the draftees alike) were all trained together and they all shipped off to Vietman together. How can you claim that one group had more experience than the other? They all had exactly the same experience, or you could also correctly say that none had any experience. Either way, they were exactly the same, experience wise.

Yes. I chose a military career and yet on my first day in combat I had absolutely no combat experience either. All I had was a few months of training that was exactly the same training you also would have received as a short-term draftee. As a "volunteer" just beginning my military career I was just as inexperienced as the newly arrived "draftee" standing next to me. In fact all the draftees that had arrived before me were much more experienced than I was. They were also much more experienced than the older sergeants and officers (who had been in the service much longer than the draftees had been) that had just arrived in Vietman, too. Since we had not had a real war since Korea virtually none of these older "experienced career professionals" had ever seen combat before either. The "experienced draftees" we encountered when we first arrived in Vietnam taught us all how to stay alive, and how to fight.

People come and go from the military all the time. The number of guys that stay in the service (and thus accumulate more knowledge and experience) is relatively small, but we don't actually need a large number to stay in. We only have a limited number of slots for Generals or for Sergeant Majors, after all. One experienced Platoon Sergeant is in charge of 30 (or more) subordinate soldiers, so, obviously, we need subordinate (less experienced) soldiers 30 times more than we need experienced Platoon Sergeants, don't we? And we do not, in fact, have anywhere near as many experienced platoon sergeants as we have inexperienced subordinate soldiers. That's just common sense. We only need a few of the one, but a lot of the other.

At any given moment the composition of our military is always the same: a small number of experienced people commanding a very large number of inexperienced people. It does not matter if the inexperienced people are draftees or volunteers - they all get exactly the same training, so they are all at the same proficiency level to begin with.

A short-term draftee that has already been in combat is far more experienced (at combat) than a career soldier who has been in the service for 20 years but has never been in combat at all. Right? It's all relative. Compare apples to apples, and oranges to oranges.

That's not really true either. For one thing the regulars don't get much more actual training than the Reserves and Guard soldiers normally do. The daily life of a full-time soldier is made up of many activities. They have to make their beds every morning, clean their latrines, perform guard duty and attend classes on such vital subjects as Sexual Harassment. They do equipment inventories, they write and submit reports, they prepare classes, and they practice marching in formation. They work on their vehicles and they clean their weapons, even if they're already squeeky clean. Their days are chock full of such activities; activities that really have nothing to do with getting better at fighting or combat, or with maintaining proficiency in their Military Occupational Specialty (MOS). It's just "busy work" meant to keep them occupied and out of trouble, for the most part. And a lot of them get sick to death of doing the same things over and over again. They begin to hate it and not take it seriously after a while. They really only do it because they have to. They have no choice. But the Guardsman or Reservist, on the other hand, does have a choice, and he chooses to do these things himself, and he chooses to devote every single minute of his drill time (and yearly active duty training) to sharpening his MOS and combat related skills. They actually do this eagerly. Once you weed out all the active-duty "busy-work" I think that overall the amount of actual MOS or combat related training is about the same for everybody, be they active duty, Guard or Reserve.

When I was technically just another part-time "weekend warrior" Guardsman returned to active duty and stationed in Iraq with the regular Army, would you say that my "combat effectiveness" was any less than that of a regular active-duty Marine that was in the military for a full career, and had been in the service for 20 years, but had never even seen combat before?

Who would you rather come up against in a firefight in Falluja? Me - a "weekend warrior" with nearly 25 years of experience, and nearly a quarter of it in combat zones? Or the full-time Marine regular with 20 years in the service and no combat experience at all? By your arguement you claim that the Marine would naturally be the much more formidable adversary. And you'd be dead wrong, too.

Everything else being equal (and it is) draftees are every bit as good as volunteer soldiers, and experienced Guard and Reserve soldiers are every bit as good as full-time career soldiers. Many times the draftee or the Guard/Reserve soldiers may actually be the better soldier.

At the very least it would be extremely dangerous for you to "assume" anything to the contrary, if you were on the opposing side in a firefight.

As to the "accidents" thing -- hey, that's just the way it is. We are a high-tech force. We are a very fast-moving force. We are a combined arms force. Accidents happen. It's a very dangerous job. Soldiers are not protected by OSHA rules and regulations. They handle dangerous weapons and vehicles all day long, every day, in very dangerous and unpredictable environments. Shit happens. It's to be expected. People need to be careful. And they are, but shit still happens. It's unavoidable, and it comes with the job.