Summary

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO examined the Army's training of its National Guard and Army Reserve units to determine the: (1) extent of individual reserve component soldiers' training in both critical job tasks and battlefield survival skills; and (2) factors affecting reserve units' ability to provide adequate training.

GAO found that the Army reservists' training: (1) provided little instruction on equipment that the Army expected reservists to operate and sometimes provided instruction on equipment it never expected reservists to use; (2) was frequently limited by shortages of essential equipment; (3) sometimes omitted skills reservists needed to perform their units' mission-essential tasks, since commanders lacked the necessary guidance or experience to design effective training programs; (4) did not comply with Army policy and regulations to train reservists in survival skills or under realistic conditions to help them cope with complex, stressful, and lethal battlefield situations; (5) was hindered by the wide geographic distribution of units and reservists' limited training time; and (6) did not always effectively use the scarce training time available for reservists. GAO also found that: (1) only about 60 percent of reservists required to take a skill qualification test actually did so, and the percentage of reservists who passed was about 25 percent lower than the percentage of active-duty soldiers who passed; (2) information on reservists' proficiency was essentially limited to commanders' perceptions; (3) deficiencies in reservists' training could significantly affect the Army's ability to carry out its defense strategies; and (4) the Army's plans to improve reservists' training focused on training reservists in fewer mission-essential tasks than their active-duty counterparts.