Are the Elite Guard the only military force on Cybertron?

Or are they just the best of the best?

the impression you get from bootcamp is that there is a huge army and the elite guard is just that, the elite guard. they are the best of the best going around helping out the regular troops who are doing anything from repairing space bridages to recapturing bots who escape the stockade.

I see what your saying but thats not exactly how it came across to me, the impression I got was that the 'HUGE ARMY' your talking about is the Autobots as a whole but that the Elite Guard are the combat soldiers as you say the non-elite guard are support personel.

Kinda goes like this Decepticon seperatist faction emerges causes a civil war that the Autobots win the surviving Decepticons banished to the far reaches of space. With the war at an end there is no reason for every Autobot to be a soldier in peace time but they have learnt from the past so a relatively small number of Autobots are recruited into the Elite Guard so that they have a standing military organization while allowing the majority of Autobots to go back to the same sort of existences as they lead prior to the great war.

dont forget bulkhead is from a energon farm. the huge army of the civil war might be gone but the army remains active in peace keeping efforts. though it sorta bring into question the rest of the cybertronian society. we only know about the armed forces and that there is farms. hopefully in season 3 we might get more info about it.

See I've been wondering about the rest of Cybertronian society as well. I mean are there just every day average joe type bots?

Bulkehad said he came from a "farm like" thing.

That's right. An Energon farm, he said.

I figure there has to be just "regular" 'bots in Cybertronian soceity. In most every culture (and Cybertron hasto have a culture, which is essentially a universal mindset among a group of individuals, be those individuals a human race or the Autobots) there's a social hierarcy-- this group outranks that one and the like.

In Cybertronian culture, the Elite Guard must be pretty high up on the food chain. Consider "Autoboot Camp"-- when Bulkhead and Bumblebee first meet, Bulkhead asks Bee to snap a picture of him with some of the academy buildings in the background, adding, "They'll never beleive this back home!" Bumblebee just can't help resist asking, "This is your first time off the energon farm, isn't it?" to which Bulkhead eagerly replies, "How'd you guess?"

This implies a pretty good deal. Bee's almost disgusted way of asking the energon farm question, not to mention going on to call Bulkhead a mudflap (the Cybertronian equivalent of hillbilly, it seems) two or three times during the remainder of the episode, implies that 'bots who farm energon (Bulkhead and his family included apparently) are lower on the social food chain.

(Wow, I sounded smart there for a minute-- call it speculation fueled by 70s music and cherry PopTarts at 6 AM. )

Yeah but you have to consider that perhaps the disdain for 'Energon Farming Mudflaps' could have been much like the tendency of city folk looking down on country folk (and vice versa) and thus its less of a social heirarchy thing and more just the prejudice between different sub cultures.

The way I interpreted it was that "Autoboot" camp is just a springboard into a miitary career.
After it, the bots go into more specialized training.
An example being The Autobot Academy, which is probably where the Elite Gaurd are trained.