Individual Ready Reserve

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO examined the Army's Individual Ready Reserve (IRR) training program, intended to train soldiers with previous Army service for swift mobilization and deployment in combat situations, to determine whether the Army focused training funds on skills that required refresher training and were most needed in the early days of conflict.

GAO found that the Army: (1) generally did not provide IRR members with refresher training consistent with their intended wartime roles, with the majority of the soldiers not receiving any mobilization training during fiscal year (FY) 1987 and FY 1988; (2) did not determine which skills of IRR members required refresher training; (3) assigned the lowest funding priority to IRR training within its reserve personnel account; (4) reprogrammed 25 percent of the $72-million FY 1988 mobilization training budget to other areas; (5) prioritized professional development education, which was required for promotion, over mobilization readiness training; (6) provided more training to IRR officers and members who would not be required during early combat than to IRR members in the lowest skill areas; (7) spent more than 26 percent of IRR mobilization training funds on non-training activities; (8) assigned multiple training tours to a small number of officers and IRR members, while most IRR soldiers received no training at all; (9) did not follow the Department of Defense's (DOD) directive that it determine IRR skill decay, identify the most appropriate timing for refresher training, and begin refresher training no later than FY 1988; and (10) lacked guidance to enable it to apply a model for prioritizing IRR member training decisions.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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