14 Days in Taiwan's New Reservist Recall Training
Tactical Girls’ Squad DDY | Reflection
Remember the formula for the area of a trapezoid? Most of us learned it in middle school, but you’d probably have to Google it to recall “(top base + bottom base) × height ÷ 2.” Taiwan’s new-style reservist recall training is basically the same idea: it’s meant to test so-called pre-combat readiness training, getting people who already have prior service experience quickly back up to speed as basic riflemen, ready for the battlefield.
But for those of us following what’s happening in self-training groups, I have to be honest: while the recall training policy itself has improved a lot, the actual experience varies wildly depending on which unit runs it. The new curriculum does fold in concepts that have become more widespread in recent years — cognitive warfare, combat trauma care, urban warfare, and close-quarters battle (CQB) — but whether any of it actually gets taught well is a different question entirely. The instructors’ skill levels vary enormously: some have been trained but can’t teach well, others can teach but aren’t necessarily accurate. It’s a bit like compulsory middle school education — some people race ahead, some don’t care to pay attention at all, and most people just find it boring and irrelevant to daily life. Self-training groups, by comparison, are more like cram schools: there’s more time to go deep on specific subjects and actually drill with the material, the teaching is more flexible and current, and there’s more time to practice. Recall training can usually only walk through a concept once — combat trauma care, for instance, basically just covers tourniquet and elastic-bandage bleeding control — whereas self-training groups or paid outside courses go into far more detail on first-aid skills and the underlying medical reasoning, with actual hands-on practice.
That said, what’s genuinely valuable about recall training is that it puts you in a fully militarized environment: the basic fire team (3 people), squad (3 fire teams), and platoon (3 squads) command structure, getting used to gear and the real tactical movements that go with a rifle, re-experiencing the actual aiming posture for live rifle fire (how breathing rhythm and grip affect it), and feeling the sheer noise and recoil against your cheek and shoulder pocket (compared to the gas kick of an airsoft gun, a real rifle feels more like bracing against a small cannon). But the things that need way more practice time — small-unit tactics that require real communication (division of roles, movement/positioning) and squad-and-platoon-level operations (formation deployment, coordination) — barely get any practice time at all.
So if you’re doing tactical self-training, here’s a scenario worth sitting with: if you’re actually on a battlefield, your squad leader and the people in your squad might not have any tactical concepts at all. You may need to practice small-unit combat leadership on your own time — beyond your own basic individual combat skills and combat trauma care, you should at minimum be thinking like a corporal squad leader: how to assign combat roles and tasks across each fire team (a 3-person element), how to operate squad weapons (squad machine guns, anti-armor weapons), and how to explain a situation clearly, assign tasks, and get the people around you to complete the mission safely. That’s something I hadn’t thought much about before.
In recent years, recall training has essentially been patching a policy gap left by the shortened conscription term. There’s been a lot of reform in how it’s planned and executed, but there’s still plenty of room for improvement. Whether the current two-week pre-combat training model actually works is still short on evidence — for comparison, a lot of Russian soldiers on the Russia-Ukraine front were conscripted from all over the country, given two weeks of training, and sent straight to the front line as expendable assault troops. For those of us doing self-training, going through recall training gives a much clearer picture of what policy implementation actually looks like on the ground, and it makes you appreciate even more how much self-training groups matter — both for skill-building and for building the relationships with the people near you. That might be exactly where we keep finding the motivation to keep improving.
This time I ended up with a different branch of service than usual — mostly doing basic training on an Air Force base — so what I got to observe was a bit different, but it gave me more of a basis for comparing the system and how it actually plays out in practice!