This is the part with which the Regular Army here (or parts of it at least) struggle with on a cultural level. Studies have shown that a British Regular soldier is likely to associate professionalism with time served. In other words you could do a job to a perfect standard, but if you are only available for less than 7 days a week, you will never be considered professional. Whilst it was imagined to be a Regular/Reserve issue, experience with the New Employment Model suggests that the same in/out group division is applied to Regulars who take a step back to, say, 200 days per year instead of 365.
There are hints that Australian Regulars suffer from the same phenomenon, and one of their medical studies observed that the mental map needs to change from a vertical value hierarchy:
1. Regular
---------
2. Reserve
---------
3. Civilian
...where your 'worth' is defined by a pecking order, to a horizontal one:
Regular | Reserve | Civilian
...where each category is seen as just another way of serving.
Some nations have grown up and are far more likely to promote the second model (e.g. Sweden, Finland etc). In my experience, a factor that weighs heavily in this thinking is the relative size of the three components. Where the Reserve is, for reasons of cost or utility, far larger than the Regular component, they don't seem to get hung up on this issue. I think this is because everyone - from the most gung-ho General to the thickest private soldier - can see that there really is no alternative. Israel is a good example of this. It seems as though the more the Regular thinks that they don't need the Reserve because they are of a near-viable size in their own right, the more they go in for deindividuation and demonisation...kinda like a lot of the posts on this thread.