Why maintain a reserve force at all if we can take someone off the street, train them, and ship them overseas in the same time it takes to bring a reservists up to speed?
Because you can't.
Even if our theoretical Reservist has never even seen a Coyote in person, he still has a truckload of skills that Johnny fresh off the street does not. He knows how to live in the field. He knows how to take and receive orders. He knows how to move tactically, stand guard, call for indirect fire, use proper voice procedure on the radio, participate in a running replen, man an OP, carry out a held up drill, take a trace, report a contact, cam a vehicle, read a map, etc etc etc etc etc.
And while a lot of these skills can and will be taught to Johnny off the street, he won't have the mastery of them that a Reservist does - and no, a Reservist won't have the mastery of them that a salty Reg Force soldier with TI does, but he is farther along the path than Johnny is.
When I came to the Reserves after being in the Regs, I ate a lot of crow, because the gap in skill level between Regs and Reserves was nowhere near as wide as I had supposed.
Crew commanding is crew commanding. It takes a little time to adapt to each vehicle's particular quirks, but that hurdle is much smaller than the initial hurdle of learning to crew command at all. As I pointed out earlier, we put two troops of Reservists onto a vehicle that most of them had never seen before, (Bison) and they had adapted to it in a little over a week.
Coyote is a little more complicated because you have turret systems, 25mm gunnery, and the surv system to learn. But we used to deal with turrets and gunnery all the time in the Cougar days, and we've dealt with electronic surv systems (of an admittedly lesser complexity) before just fine. Once you know the basics, the rest is just practice.
I think you'd find a Reservist could be brought up to speed on Coyote in suprisingly little time - and now that we are getting C&R GWagons (which will use the CI intercom system and a roof mounted weapon system) there are two more skills that can be taught and practiced at the unit.
The issue here is not of capability - Reserves can do the job. The issue here is the commitment to give the Reserves the training and equipment (which need not be the full-bore high speed kit, just something that provides reasonable approximation) to get the initial skills and then practice them.
If *I* were CDS ( :
) I'd see that the planned course list at all the schools (not just Armour, but all the trades) was published to all Reserve units, and then invite the Reserves to nominate candidates for "standby" positions. If the course cannot be filled by Regulars (for whatever reason) run through the standby list until all the slots are filled.
Same goes for instructors - once you have Reservists qualified on those systems, they go into a pool of potential instructors, and are canvassed on a course-by-course basis to see if any from the pool are willing to go on a list of standby instructors.
There's no reason why every single course at the schools shouldn't be 100% manned at all times, backfilled with Reservists whenever possible. You'll have no problem finding volunteers - hell, I'd happily redo Phase 3 and Phase 4 if I could do it on Coyote. Or make me a course officer, let me sit in on the training I don't have, and run me through the Coyote-specific POs and EOs. There are ways to make this happen, if there is the motivation from higher to see it done.
DG