By December 1990, the view of the reserves role changed to follow the President's decision in early November to prepare for an offensive. With the increase in call-up authority the 15,000 Marine reservists on November 14, 1990, and then to 23,000 reservists on December 1, 1990, the reserves were used for two roles:

• To increase Marine amphibious and land combat capability against Iraqi forces.
• To maintain the Marines global responsibilities in the other theaters. With no active units available in the United States to do it, this meant using reservists beyond those needed for Southwest Asia:

Caught in Midst of Revitalization

         When the Gulf crisis began, the Marine Corps Reserves were in the midst of a revitalization. Major improvements had been made, but the reserves had not overcome some long-standing deficiencies.

• One officer, an active-duty adviser to a tank unit, said this tank company had gone from " a bean - counting, statistics - driven, good - old - boy unit that never fired its tank guns for one 14 - month period, and never even thought about mobilizing and going to war " to a unit of dedicated people focused on deployment readiness and hard training. Despite the progress, the unit still had mid - 1970s tanks and had never been evaluated in the basic live fire tests of tank crew and platoon proficiency.
• Active and reserve commanders alike said that the deficiencies in the command and control of battalion - sized reserve units were linked to limited peacetime training time and the dispersed locations of subordinate units.

Making the Units Ready For Deployment

         The Marine Corps required that all deploying units beat a C - 2 level of readiness, and said that all mobilizing units met that standard.

         Unlike the Army, the Marine Corps had faith in the accuracy of the readiness reporting system because of the smallness of the force, the close supervision exercised by the active-duty Marines over the reserves, the widespread active - duty experience among Marine Corps reserve officers, and the operation of all active-duty instructor and inspector detachments down to reserve company level.

         For these reasons, coupled with the reinvigorated training program, the active Marines generally believed that small combat units such as companies, batteries and platoons were trained to do their basic wartime tasks. There was no formal validation process.

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