Talk:Arkansas State Guard

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Recommend Merger with Arkansas National Guard and World War II

Merger

I recommend the merger of this article with Arkansas National Guard and World War II the larger article includes a section on The Arkansas State Guard but does a better job of putting it context. The current article includes information about the militia that is better covered by the series, Arkansas National Guard. If the Legislature and Governor were to authorize the formation of active units in the Arkansas State Guard today, those units would be a part of the Arkansas Military Department and thus would fall under the command and control of the Adjutant General of Arkansas. Aleutian06 (talk) 19:03, 16 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I recommend against a merger. Every other state defense force has its own page; removing this one would be an unusual step by removing one page out of a series. As an entirely separate organization from the Arkansas National Guard, merging it does not make sense as the article has enough notability to stand on its own. Even if the State Guard was reactivated today, it would still be a completely separate organization from the Arkansas National Guard, despite it still coming under the authority of the Adjutant General of Arkansas. This is no different than how the United States Army and Navy are separate branches despite both being under control of the President of the United States. Furthermore, shoehorning it into the World War II section would leave out a good number of things found in this article, including:

The role of the militias of Arkansas before the National Guard of the United States existed;
The role of the Arkansas State Guard in the Reconstruction Era, when it battled against the Ku Klux Klan;
The Home Guard units activated during World War I;
The legal standing of the State Guard and possible future reactivation.

As such, I cannot recommend trying to merge this article with another as much of the information would, at minimum, be spread across multiple articles, making it almost impossible to piece together the history of the State Guard as a unit independent of the National Guard. Again I will reiterate that deleting one state defense force article out of 44 would be highly unusual. As a final thought, many of the National Guard articles are fairly long already and separating the tangentially related information into its own articles should be supported so that the reader is not overwhelmed with information from any one article. Et0048 (talk) 21:53, 16 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with Et0048. Merging the article would be a step backwards. The article should stay as is. Runk1395 (talk) 22:05, 16 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]