Opinion | Why nobody wants to be a battalion commander in the Army Reserve

A sad situation for our AR. That officers opt out of promotion tells us we have one of two problems, maybe both at the same time: our system is so corrupt with politically correct bull that people are unwilling to serve, and/or the Army, and therefore AR, isn't providing our senior leadership the resources they need to be successful.

I served two years in the Reserve in the mid 80's, I can't say anything about the command at any higher level than the company that I was in because I never saw them, not even the CSM. What I do know is after the first two drills if I knew how I could have gotten out and transferred to the National Guard or to the IRR I would have. The leadership from squad level on up to the company were a joke. The most simplest task couldn't be performed if the person in charge didn't have the FM in hand, and then they messed up. My first drill after the first formation and being put into my Platoon & Squad I was left on my own, I was given no instruction on what to do or where to go, I just tried to get out of the way and watched how the unit did things. I watched one guy try to set up a NBC decon station, He had the FM in hand and he still had the different stops wrong, two months before in one of the last bit of training I did on active duty was helping to set up and run though the samething that was being done in the drill hall. Even though it had been 60 days since I did it I still remembered how to do it, and this guy had the book in hand with illustrations. I asked him how long he was told he had to learn to get it set up, and he said that he was told the month before, now I know that we were part time but he could have done a few hours of studying in the month and figured out how to do it, the CoC didn't even try to help him out. After watching him for about 20 minutes I stepped in and showed him how to set it up right, from start to finish it took me about 10 minutes doing it by memory. After that I was asked if I knew anything about the M-60 (the pig), I laughed and said yes (I was a 11B) I was told that I would be giving a class on how to disassemble & reassemble it to the Squad leaders in the company, so here I was a SP/4 teaching E-5s & E-6s how to do it. Now this was a MP company and I couldn't believe they didn't know the first thing about a basic squad level task, I was glad when on my last drill I turned in everything and got out of there.

Very sad state of affairs. And I understand, they now have active duty commanders in place.