Oh, I will rebut this one.

i was an OIF I Infantry companay commander. Redeployed summer of '03, went on AC/RC duty and 12 months later was on an AST (later MiTT) from Jan 2005 to Jan 2006. Spent my 12 months training e-brigades for Iraq. That being said, I will now rail against the RC/NG MiTT guys.

When the Army resourced institutional training divisions to be MiTT's they went further back than the third string. When you have guys who have not been on active duty beyond PME or AT since Nixon was President, you have a problem. Furthermore, these guys constantly chnage MOS's for promotion they really don't know any very well. Example, you are a QM/trand/OD/MSC officer, get career course qualified, then a couple years down the road take the Infantry Captains career course by correspondance and get 11A as an additional skill identifier. The guy goes to Iraq, switches out collar insignia, has his reserve unit buddies staffing MNSTC-I to put him in charge of an Infantry battalion team. damn near gets evrybody killed in Ramadi. NCO's who are 55 years old, night blind, and haven't spent any time in the field (because they are TRADOC backfills) in 15 years. He doesn't know how to work anything on the team because he couldn't retain anything taught to him in the train-up. The reservists made a mess of the intial training program. I had a battalion team chief tell me staright out of the chute that the priorities were teaching the Iraqi's key control, a PY program, and helping them develop an OER system. I poinjted out that we weren't over there teach SIDPERS, MFT, or key control. that is what those jackasses thought we should be focusing on, never mind battle drills, marksmanship, basiic maintenance and actual leadership classes. The 98th DIV was a football bat and so was the 80th DIV. The guys from MTO&E units from the NG was considerably better than the federal reservists from the IT divs. The problem with the NG guys was what they did in their states. Guys who were working in their MOS's were pretty god, especially after getting brought up to speed on equipment. The guys they got out of IG offices and such ahd some issues. There were alot of RC people badge hunting, and they were doing at the expense of the mission. I can give examples, but I will give two. Two Army Reserve LTC's got promoted to COL while over there. The reservists I worked with pointed out that these guys only got promoted because they volunteered to stay in Iraq. One of them had to be forcibly sedated by a Navy corpsman when he lost it at his camp in southern Iraq. The Army Reserve messed the ISF up and I said in 2005 when I was over there that their incompetence probably put the Iraqi's 9 to 12 months behind where they could be.