United States
In the United States military, active duty refers to military members who are currently serving full-time in their military capacity. Members of a reserve component are not generally considered active duty. However, in support of the Global War on Terror and other contingency operations, a large number of Reservists in all branches have been called to active duty in an operational capacity. Many will argue that today's Reserve forces are no longer the "strategic" Reserve of the Cold War. Those Reservists deployed in support of contingency operations, either as a unit or by individual augmentation, are also considered active duty. These terms may also be applied to military forces of other nations, although the details concerning obligations to serve may differ.
Read more about this topic: Active Duty
Famous quotes related to united states:
“The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder—in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“Fortunately, the time has long passed when people liked to regard the United States as some kind of melting pot, taking men and women from every part of the world and converting them into standardized, homogenized Americans. We are, I think, much more mature and wise today. Just as we welcome a world of diversity, so we glory in an America of diversity—an America all the richer for the many different and distinctive strands of which it is woven.”
—Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978)
“Greece is a sort of American vassal; the Netherlands is the country of American bases that grow like tulip bulbs; Cuba is the main sugar plantation of the American monopolies; Turkey is prepared to kow-tow before any United States pro-consul and Canada is the boring second fiddle in the American symphony.”
—Andrei Andreyevich Gromyko (1909–1989)
“What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others.”
—Carlos Fuentes (b. 1928)
“The Federated Republic of Europe—the United States of Europe—that is what must be. National autonomy no longer suffices. Economic evolution demands the abolition of national frontiers. If Europe is to remain split into national groups, then Imperialism will recommence its work. Only a Federated Republic of Europe can give peace to the world.”
—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)