Army Reserve seeks to toughen up training for part-time soldiers.

As reservists encounter tough fighting in Iraq, the Army is revamping training programs to better prepare these troops for combat, according to Lt. Gen. James R. Helmly.

Helmly serves both as head of the Army Reserve Command, headquartered at Fort McPherson, Ga., and as principal advisor to the Army chief of staff on reserve matters.

The planned reorganization, he said, is geared not only to producing more proficient warriors but also to lend a greater degree of stability in the unit rotation process.

Traditionally, the primary role of the reserve's 205,000 members is to support the Army's combat units, Helmly told a recent gathering of defense writers. If the Army needs additional combat soldiers, it usually gets them from the National Guard.

Reservists have been used to serving well behind the battle lines, Helmly explained. They were not trained for the kinds of assignments they have found in Iraq, where there are no front lines, but plenty of ambushes, roadside bombs and kidnappings.

"This is a hard war, and frankly, we inside the Army Reserve have not been properly prepared for it," Helmly conceded.

The Army Reserve resembles, in some ways, the National Guard, noted Col. William Hamilton, the reserve's deputy chief of staff for training. The difference is that Guard units are commanded ordinarily by state governors, while the reserve is a completely federal force, Hamilton told National Defense.

Like guardsmen, however, most reservists traditionally have expected to spend most of their enlistments performing non-combat duties near home, Helmly said. Their training has reinforced that expectation.

As active-duty soldiers, reservists receive their initial training during the Army's standard nine-week boot camp, where they learn the basics of military life, such as marching, introduction to weapons and physical fitness. They then go on to advanced individual training where they learn one of the 120 job skills available to reservists.

Once they are assigned to their units, reservists are required to attend one weekend of drills each month and two weeks of training each year. Traditionally, they have spent that time mostly on administrative matters and polishing military job skills, not combat techniques.

That began to change when Helmly took command of the Army Reserve in 2002 in the aftermath of the September 2001 terrorist attacks. As a veteran of nearly four decades of military service, including two tours in Vietnam with the 101st Airborne Division and leadership of an infantry company in Panama, he didn't like what he saw in his new command.

The reserve was being asked to play a major role in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the troops were not prepared. "What we have seen to date, inside our force, is that the training across the board is insufficient to the task," Helmly said. "It is more form than substance."

With reservists headed to Iraq in large numbers, they need more meaningful combat training, Helmly said, adding, "Reality has caught up with us."

Since 9/11, he noted, half of all reservists have been mobilized. About 38,500 are mobilized right now. A total of 12,000 to 15,000 have been mobilized twice. Deployments to Iraq last 12 months, twice as long as peacekeeping assignments in Bosnia and Kosovo.

Some reserve organizations are being given assignments that they have never had before. The Rochester, N.Y.-based 98th Division--which normally helps train U.S. soldiers at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo.--was asked in October to help build the emerging Iraqi army.

Some 800 soldiers from the 98th will become the nucleus of the Army's new Foreign Army Training Assistance Command, providing troops for most of the 39 advisory support teams that mentor, coach and advise Iraqi units. They eventually will replace U.S. Marine and Australian army trainers. This will be the division's first deployment since it was an active-duty unit in World War II.

Meanwhile, other units--in such fields as military police, civil affairs, military intelligence, transportation, and biological detection and surveillance--are operating at high operational tempos, Helmly said. In fact, he pointed out, some, such as military police and truck transportation units, are overextended.

At the same time, casualties are climbing to the highest rates since the Korean War, Helmly said. At last count, 63 reservists had died in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Even normally routine, unexciting jobs have become dangerous. "Truck drivers and MPs are frontline troops these days," Helmly said. Truck driving "is one of the most hazardous damned occupations we have in Iraq." In October, five reservists--including a lieutenant colonel and a major--died in Iraq, all of them while in convoys.

For one platoon in the 343rd Quartermaster Company, events reached a crisis point in October, when 18 reservists allegedly refused to accompany a fuel supply convoy in Iraq's Sunni Triangle. The reservists argued that the fuel was contaminated and that convoy protection measures were insufficient for the mission.

The incident set off a flurry of investigations to determine if disciplinary action is warranted and congressional inquiries into whether U.S. troops in Iraq are adequately protected.

To help improve survival skills for its troops, the reserve is embarking on a major effort to make training more "battle-focused," said Helmly.

Emphasis has moved away from bureaucratic, peacetime concerns toward skills necessary for survival on the battlefield, such as marksmanship, weapons maintenance and fitness.

Weekend drills now are called "battle assemblies," Hamilton said. "In the past, the drills spent too much time on administrative matters. Now, the focus is on the things the troops need to go to war. The whole paradigm has changed."

Previously, for example, weapons training received little emphasis in the reserve, Hamilton said. That's no longer the case.

"Every soldier must be proficient in weapons," Hamilton said. "He must be able to defend himself in an ambush." Reservists now qualify twice a year on the rifle range. The training includes use of Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System marksmanship equipment, known as MILES.

Soldiers also conduct live-fire exercises, practicing how to defend convoys against ambushes by snipers and attackers using rocket-propelled grenades. In addition, they learn how to detect and cope with roadside bombs, and how to control entry points at strategic locations.

"What we're emphasizing are the 'no-kidding' soldier tools," Hamilton said. "The message is, 'Every soldier is a warrior first.'"

Reservists welcome the increased combat training, he said. "Soldiers recognize these things will keep them alive and help them get back to their families. We're sending them down range with training packages that give them a chance to do that."

To meet the needs of battlefield commanders, reservists who hold low-key, stateside jobs, such as installation maintenance and port operations, are finding themselves being retrained as military policemen, truck drivers and civil affairs specialists.

"We're turning a lot of those jobs that can be done by non-military personnel over to contractors and civilian employees," Helmly said.

The first thing that he did after becoming reserve chief, Helmly said, was to change the name of the 10 reserve support commands in the continental United States to regional readiness commands to drive home the point that they exist to produce trained, ready units and soldiers.

To increase their effectiveness, the Army plans to reduce the number of those commands--which provide resource, logistics and personnel-management services to units within their region--from 10 to seven larger installations, Helmly said.

Reservists have to realize that times have changed, and that they are likely to be deployed eventually to a combat zone, he said.

To encourage reservists to reenlist despite this likelihood, the Army is attempting to reorganize the mobilization process so that they will have a better idea of when they are likely to be called up.

"We've come up with a 'one-in-five' mobilization ration in force planning," Helmly said. The Army is placing all reserve units into new organizations called "reserve expeditionary forces." Each of these forces will move through a five-year mobilization cycle.

Starting in reverse order, in year five, a unit will stand down from readiness to mobilize and move into a refit, reconstitute and reset mode, with time for individual training, retirements, reassignments and other adjustments. In year four, the unit will begin to retrain as a group. In years three and two, it would reach the highest level or organization. In year one, the unit will train to sustain itself at the highest level of readiness, prepared to mobilize within five days of notification. After year one, whether it actually is mobilized, the unit will start the process all over again.

That will give reservists some assurance that they will face possible mobilization in only one out of every five years, Helmly said. "That's important, because most of our soldiers said the deciding factors in whether they reenlist or not are the feelings of their families, and most of them are married."