Straight to a Reserve Recon Unit?

[MotoDad]

As the father of a newly-minted, active duty Recon Marine, I am curious about something and would like to know the opinions of Recon Marines.

Currently, young men can enlist in the Reserves with a Recon contract. If these young men graduate from BRC, they return home and resume their civilian lives 28 out of 30 days per month.

Are you gentlemen in favor of this policy? The reason I ask is that it seems to me that the training regimen is so intensive and rigorous for Recon that Marines who have never served at least one, 4-year active-duty Recon tour will never be as thorughly trained as the active-duty guys....

Reserve personnel (in all branchs of the military) are extremely valuable and no doubt competent in 90% of MOS's.....however, Spec-Ops MOS's seem to me they may be the exception to the rule.

I had assumed (incorrectly), that Reserve Recon Marines were guys that had been active-duty recon for at least one hitch....then separated from active-duty and went reserve...I now understand that is not necessarily the case.

How would you guys feel being deployed in combat working alongside a reserve Recon Marine who had be called-up to active duty but had been out of BRC for several years?

Are most Reserve Recon units filled with prior active-duty Reconner's? Or is there a high % of 18-20 year olds straight out of BRC?

[bubblehead]

...will never be as thoroughly trained as the active-duty guys...
2 (Cpl's) out of the 5 Marines in my dive school class (circa '96) were from 4th RECON BN. The other 3 (a GySgt, and 2 Capt's), as well as us Navy folk, were active duty. I recall asking a similar question about their Reserve training and was told that they attend the same schools as their Active Duty counterparts (ie, dive school, jump school, SERE, etc.).

An outstanding group of Marines.

Hopefully, someone else with more adequate information will chime in.

[Silverbullet]

I always found it was hit and miss, with alot of misses.

With the war going on I'm sure the reserve guys are being put on the training block much more often and being enabled to keep their skills up beyond a jump and dive club so take my comments with a grain of salt.

When I was running 1st Forces Ops shop, I had to integrate reserve plt's into our structure on 2 occasions for contingency deployments. It wasn't always pretty but everyone made it work. Interestingly one of those Plt's was run by a Capt who had served in the company before failing to get augmented and leaving AD.