Quote:
Originally Posted by cavtroop
Happy to answer!
1) 17 weeks or so. My 19D training (Cav Scout, not tanker) was 17 weeks start to finish, I know the tankers at the time had a very similar timeframe (they were in the barrack right down the street from us at Ft. Knox). Coming out OSUT (One Station Unit Training), you were still green and raw, but you were at your unit then and fully deployable.
2) Don't know the answer to this. Some of the NG Armored units - mostly in the south and west - were called 'round out units'. I believe they'd form one brigade of an Active Duty Army Unit, I don't know the specifics though. My Cav unit was the division Cavalry Squadron for a National Guard Infantry Division, we weren't 'affiliated' in any way with a regular army unit.
3) One weekend a month, two weeks a year until the end of your commitment. Sometimes a guy would take an extra two weeks during the year to attend leadership training for promotion or some other military school, but that was rare. Usually any leadership training/schooling was taken in lieu of your normal 2 week annual commitment.
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Tankers would have the 17 week OSUT course. When I went through OSUT, roughly half the platoon was NG, One intresting fact was that the Training Company had 16 M-60A1s for the RAs and a single M-48A5 for the NG to train on (mostly to show the differences between the two). Training was roughly the same, although the NG (in 1977 at least) also had two days of riot-control training.
The augmentation or round-outs tended to have younger personnel assigned and were able to get training funds from DOD to help increase their readiness. The 155th Armd Bde (MS-NG) was the only I ever worked with for any length of time and they would do 3-4 days a month and 3 weeks a year, including a stint at the Fort Irwin NTC, one of the very few Guard units to rotate through during the 1980s. It was organzied with 2 tk, 1 mech and 1 FA Bn with an attached troop of cavalry and a engineer company (the later were "augmentation" for the 1st Cavs engr/cav units, but both of those were at full strength. There was a lot of arguement going into Desert Storm that the roundouts could not perform their mission, this was the reason that the 197th MIB replaced the 48th MIB GA-NG in the 24th ID as well as the 1st Cav leaving the 155th at home. Both units argued that they were mission capable, but I would have to go with the DOD decision, neither unit had as much field time as the RA units.