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From: emery@aries.mitre.org (David Emery)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: National Guard: Not ready or sandbagged?
Message-ID: <1991Feb8.014753.18994@cbnews.att.com>
Date: 8 Feb 91 01:47:53 GMT
References: <1991Feb7.015334.3310@cbnews.att.com>
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From: emery@aries.mitre.org (David Emery)
We had a briefing in my Guard unit last night with a lot of lessons
learned from the recent mobilizations.  I really can't go into
details, but a couple of general observations are worth noting:
	1.  USAR/ARNG (generically, RC units) combat support and
combat service support units are performing superbly, pretty much
across the board
	2.  Some RC units look just as good as RA units.  One example
is the Field Artillery Brigade from Oklahoma mobilized at Fort Sill.
But this unit has a significant advantage, since it gets to train at
the home of Field Artillery, and gets a LOT of assistance during its
training.  
	3.  There is a general problem with "not training to
standard", where a RC unit is reported as being better than it is,
because its evaluators used a lower standard.  In general, I think
that most units would be unhappy with such an evaluation, but we all
know there are politics involved with such things.
	4.  There are some serious problems with senior NCO and
officer skills and qualifications, but the junior level people are
pretty good, once they get the right leadership and direction.

Overall, I think there will be a lot of changes in RC unit evaluations
as result of these lessons, and I think the idea of Roundout brigades
for RA units (particulary the RDF units like the 24 Mech Division) is
pretty much dead.  You really can't expect a unit that trains 40 days
per year to match one that trains 250 days per year, but the
performance of some RC units is an embarrasment to many of us who _DO_
take this stuff seriously and train to meet Army standards.  The
approach in the entire Army is to select those (mission-critical)
tasks you really have to perform to meet your mission, and this is
even more important in RC units, due to the limited resources.  You
pick the most important tasks and train to them.  Some units do this
better than others.

				dave emery
				CPT, FA, NHARNG