National Guard on the Joint Chiefs!?!?!

[cavtroop]

I was in an Armored Cavalry NG troop for almost 6 years, as a TC on an M901. Training was mostly a joke - show up Saturday morning, take a bus to the Cape, draw your vehicle, PMCS it, get briefed, and, if everything goes smoothly, you're ready to start training by 2pm. Some maneuvers for the afternoon, dinner, a night patrol. Sunday morning you had to have the vehicles back in by noon or so, which meant the motor pool by 10am, so you could perform maintenance on them - lube the chassis, etc. Back to the armory by 5pm, home by 7. So for a weekends of 'training' you got maybe 5 or 6 real hours in, not very valuable. about 1/2 the weekends, we'd forgo the vehicles and do dismounted stuff, so we could get more time in.

They had civilian mechanics that were supposed to take care of the vehicles for us during the week, but they were mostly concerned with making sure we gave them back to them cleaner than we got them, so they could screw off all week I guess. That pissed me off more than just about anything.

Then, you had your two weeks in the summer, which was balls to the wall. We trained harder during those two weeks than I ever did on active duty, trying to cram as much in as we could. This also meant that after 5 or so days of almost 24/7 training, you were useless. Also unfortunately, this was in the years after the GW1 so budget was tight - over the 6 years I was in the NG, we hardly ever got any live ammo (or hell, even blanks) to train with. Never once saw MILES gear in the NG, either.

In the end, it was fairly futile. Some very very good soldiers in my old NG unit, but we had our share of slugs that were promoted to E6 just because the 1SG liked them, etc. Fatties that had been in 18 years, couldn't do 5 push-ups, but maintained their rank, or got shuffled to the HQ platoon to drive a 5 ton or something. Supposedly the NG has moved to a points system for promotions now, but I've been out 12 years, so I have no clue.

So Webtrals point about the readiness of the NG to serve as combat unit mostly stands. With 90+ days tune-up and some real training with live rounds etc, I'm willing to bet most of the unit would have performed nearly as well as an AD unit, but the 10% that couldn't have cut it would have really hurt unit readiness.