Brigade commanders face tougher tests during combat training rotations

That almost sounds like during desert storm when the 48th BDE from the Georgia National Guard came out, we were told that they wouldn't leave, and after the first couple of fire fights we found out why they didn't even know the basics. we had training lanes set up for them where they would do a "Crawl-Walk-run" the first time though we would all just stand up in our ambush sites and show them where we were at, in the walk phase we would stand again but fire at them very slowly, in the run phase we'd be down in our position and go at them full force throwing everything we had at them. In the crawl we did everything but wave VS-17 panels at them, they were told that every time they came through we'd be in the same place. In the walk we destroyed them before they got half way down the lane, afterwards in the AAR besides the OC's we got to tell the officers and NCO's what we did and what they did wrong as we saw it & how to fix it. In the run they did much worse, some of us said the heck with this and ate lunch and took a nap, because they were going so slow. They couldn't even remember where we were at. They seemed more worried about when they could knock off for the day, so they could go on main post & go to the PX and see a movie, or they wanted to know when they could go home (they were allowed to go home for Thanksgiving, but had to return), we also found out that some of the officers worked for some of the enlisted men, and were afraid to push or discipline them for fear of loosing their jobs when everything was over with. Around the time that they were sent home for turkey day word came down from higher that the 48th GANG would never deploy and this was a exercise to see how much training it would take before a National Guard unit of their size would be able to deploy. They were supposed to be the round out BDE for the 24th ID. In the early 80's (82-83) I PCS'd from Germany to Stewart and we would go out and "fight" units of the 48th for their summer camp, they were weak then and it was almost a joke to try to train them, we'd go up to South Carolina and stop at the first fireworks place and buy up as much as we could and use the firecrackers instead of firing our 16's or 60's because it would have been a waste of time to clean them and not training them at all.