It's been 26 years since I was in the Army, so my observations about training at the unit level are probably out of date. At the time it seemed to me that the individual training of soldiers was almost invariably the Task-Condition-Standard stuff as it was written in the Soldier Qualification Test manuals with little deviation, especially if there were training inspectors with clipboards making the rounds. Unit training, on the other hand, was always an imitation ARTEP (Army Training and Evaluation Program) in which we tried to do everything at once--fire the howitzers, either live or dry, camouflage the guns and vehicles, have a chemical agent attack, and occasionally have aggressor activity on the perimeter.

When I'd suggest that we ought to concentrate on particular tasks until we got them right, the standard response was to "Train the way you fight," which meant to do everything all at once. My feeling was that we were doing everything in a sort of mediocre way, and if we didn't focus on getting specific things right we'd always be half-*ss. I was in field artillery, so the main ARTEP criteria were the speed and accuracy of the fire missions--all the other stuff was of secondary importance. Before the ARTEPs came along in about 1978 the artillery used to have "service practice," which meant firing the guns without all of the other distractions getting in the way.

In one of his books Russell F. Weighley said that of all the branches in the Army the artillery comes the closest in peacetime to doing what it does in war, so perhaps the units I was in had it better than I realized. I never went to the training center at Fort Irwin so I have no experience of how good the simulations there are.