

I was in the military from 2010 to 2022. If all you’ve known is living on post then you weren’t trying to be a member of the community and that’s at least part of the problem here. When you live “on post” you’re isolated and that’s at least partially about control (and damage control).
I’ve served both active duty and as a reservist and I gotta tell ya, the shortest I ever lived in one place was about 6 months during C-school. You don’t make a whole lot of connections in 6 months, but you absolutely can in 4 years and my first duty station was literally a 4 year stint. It is what you make of it, but it’s also down to what kind of person you are, where you’re from, hundreds of other things besides.
The people I have known (deployed and from my home town) who were Guard rather than military seem to have had similar experiences to me. Not all of them are even stationed in their home towns. Plenty of the ones I’ve known have been deployed.
I was also stationed in CA. I hate the state, but the community where I lived and worked wasn’t the worst. I had neighbors and friends, people who gave a damn. That’s perhaps rare in the military, but for the purposes of the conversation about the differences between the Guard and the Military branches, I can’t say that I would consider the National Guard to be a Civil Service, even if on paper it might technically qualify. The National Guard has more in common with military than it does with just about any other civil service and bonds to the community don’t do much to protect you from living in a hut in Djibouti or a tent in the sandbox.
I wouldn’t be so quiet to discredit sacrifices those people have made just to make a random claim online.
At this point, my dude I feel like you’re just looking for a reason to be offended. If that’s the way you’re going to take what I said, I’m definitely done with this conversation.