I went through OSUT (single unit training) at Fort Knox in 1985, which was a combined basic/AIT course that ran 14 weeks. It was Armored Reconnaissance (19D) combat arms training, with no real AIT phase like you have with support MOSs. My last 4 weeks were actually as tough as the first 4 weeks (with an "odd" two week slack off in the middle). The Drills still inflicted some "physical adjustments" though it was kept low key and out of sight since it was a no-no even then. I then spent 6 years as a military instructor (CTT and 19D skill set) in the Reserves alongside our unit DIs and conducted both active component training (at Ft. Knox and Ft. Hood) and reserve component retraining at Ft. McCoy.
An odd setup, since when not with trainees the lowest ranking people tended to be E3/4s and a formation for the squadron was about the size of a company.
The training was tough, not 1940s-1960s tough, but mentally and physically demanding, with a lot of fairly complicated skills to be passed along at the time. Smoking was discouraged greatly, dissent was not tolerated, professionalism ruled -- it was a tough, slick almost scientific process when I was on the receiving end and the administering end. As a reservist, there were only a very few units considered mission ready for an active army mission, and my squadron was one of them. Standards were upheld at both the training and trainee end. People were washed out, even with manpower demands.
However, apparently things have changed with the co-ed force, the overt PC and the need to meet numbers with an increasingly unpopular war, etc.
Here's a piece from Hackworth documenting the change in 2000 (I’ve posted it before), and I can only imagine it's gotten worse. I would hope the combat arms are still standing fairly firm on standards, but I have a bad feeling about that… Hackworth’s philosophy:
I feel the flashback coming-- the day I got off the train at Fort Knox ("Come here, dogface. Your bellybutton is mine.”). I see myself a few days later trotting around the parade ground, holding the 60-pound base-plate of a 81mm mortar over my head, screaming "I'M a BIG bellybutton BIRD" at the top of my voice, shouting and staggering until my arms finally give out, the steel plate misses my head by a hair, and I'm lying with my nose in the mud wondering if I'll ever get out of Basic alive.
The point being, of course, that the very ruthlessness of the drill hardened me for something one hell of a lot more brutal.
Combat.
"That's not our mission," Lt. Col. Henry says. The rough stuff's for the shock troops training at Benning. "Here we're inoculating them for the prospect of maybe having a fight, hanging in there until the cavalry or infantry arrives to save the day."
Tough training for the line units, marshmallows for the rear? Talk about denial. In modern warfare, there is no front. Command and control nodes, airfields, supply dumps, logistics units, transport, the hospital, everything's fair game. If anything, in guerrilla warfare and terrorist actions, those targets are even more likely to be hit. A young sergeant I know put it this way: 'That U.S. Army name tag on your chest is the biggest bull's-eye in the world. These young soldiers are going to be in Korea. They're going to be in Bosnia. They are really exposed, man. When our cooks and clerks ran convoys of deuces and hummers through the streets of Mogadishu, do you think the Somalis were not going to shoot at them because they were 'noncombatants'' http://www.hackworth.com/article04032002c.html
Charon
