Training Challenges
As the 40th Infantry Division's primary wartime trace was to the Eighth United States Army and the defense of South Korea, the 140th Military Intelligence Battalion was configured to specialize in the Korean and Mandarin Chinese languages. Obtaining and retaining language-qualified reserve soldiers in Southern California proved difficult.
Modest gains were made with the Army Reserve's institution of the Military Intelligence Special Training Element (MISTE, pronounced "misty") program, in which military intelligence units, including the 140th, were assigned language-qualified, MOS-qualified reserve soldiers (primarily those with prior active duty service) residing hundreds or thousands of miles away. Given the distance to be traveled, the MISTE soldiers would fly in to drill only bi-monthly, usually at Regional Training Site – Intelligence (RTS-I) at Hamilton Army Airfield north of San Francisco, California. The MISTE soldiers participated in annual training with the rest of the battalion.
Maintaining technical skills was also a problem, as much of the equipment—such as direction-finding trucks, radio intercept trucks, radio jamming trucks, inter alia—was prohibitively expensive for the Army to provide just to have it sit in storage twenty-eight days or more per month. Because of likely damage to streets, the battalion's M113 armored personnel carriers, M577 tactical operations center vehicles and M578 recovery vehicles were stored at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton; the three-hour round trip negated monthly training on the tracked vehicles.
When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, the four-year-old battalion was neither adequately manned nor trained for mobilization. Even had the battalion been at full, qualified strength, proficiency in Korean and Mandarin would have been of little use in Southwest Asia. Several of the battalion's reserve soldiers, however, were individually cross-leveled into other units and mobilized for Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm in 1990–1991.
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