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Army National Guard: Enhanced Brigade Readiness Improved but Personnel and Workload Are Problems

NSIAD-00-114 Published: Jun 14, 2000. Publicly Released: Jun 14, 2000.
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Highlights

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO examined the readiness of the Army National Guard's Enhanced Brigades, focusing on: (1) whether the brigades are meeting training and personnel readiness goals; (2) the key reasons for any continuing difficulties in meeting these goals; and (3) whether the Army has an effective system for assessing brigade readiness and the time required for the brigades to be ready for war.

Recommendations

Recommendations for Executive Action

Agency Affected Recommendation Status
Department of the Army To improve training and assessments of the Enhanced Brigades' readiness for military missions, the Secretary of the Army, in consultation with National Guard leaders, should assess different ways of assigning missions to the brigades, including the option of assigning individual brigades parts of the overall set of missions on a rotating basis, and define a mandatory core list of tasks and focused training goals for each assigned mission.
Closed – Implemented
DOD concurred with the recommendation, and stated that the Army Chief of Staff's Army Transformation Plan establishes timelines to ensure that all Army units are missioned to meet the National Military Strategy and Defense Planning Guidance. In addition, it stated that training doctrine for mission essential task list development emphasizes that reserve component units must concentrate their limited training time on the most critical tasks. Finally, DOD also stated that the Army is working with the Army National Guard to determine the best utilization of the Enhanced Separate Brigades. These actions generally take into consideration the need to better focus the missions and the training of the Enhanced Brigades, but do not actually change their mission to a more realistic scope or provide a mandatory list of core tasks for training.
Department of the Army To improve training and assessments of the Enhanced Brigades' readiness for military missions, the Secretary of the Army, in consultation with National Guard leaders, should establish objective criteria for assessing training readiness, and use war plan requirements to set goals for the amount of time the brigades have to be ready for war.
Closed – Implemented
The Army revised Army Regulation 220-1, effective December 1, 2001, to require National Guard and other commanders to assess training readiness using the lower of (1) the number of days required to train to full proficiency in their mission-essential tasks, or (2) the percentage of their mission-essential task list for which unit personnel are trained. The Regulation states that the purpose of this change was to assist the unit commander to more accurately and objectively assess his/her unit's current training status against wartime requirements. The use of the percentage of mission-essential tasks trained should provide improved objectivity in training assessments, thus meeting the intent of GAO's recommendation.

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Topics

Army reservistsCombat readinessEvaluation criteriaMilitary trainingMobilizationNational GuardU.S. ArmyMilitary readinessMilitary forcesHuman resources management