The line that I got over and over again from new privates coming out of infantry OSUT was that, the attitude from Benning was "We'll train you to be a soldier here, and you learn to be an infantryman when you get to your unit." Which was terrible, because it set in a permanent disconnect: all the privates came out, looking to learn their actual job at the unit, and at the unit, all of us were expecting to get new guys that knew how to do their jobs.
I remember when I was in OSUT (this is 1997... I'm young
), we got one day of land-nav, one day of battle drills (all of them), and one day of squad tactics... except, the cadre on that day decided it was too cold, and so led us into the woods and sat us all down and just bullshitted with us all day.
I'm not sure of the solution. You can leave everything as it is but make OSUT longer to fit additional training; you can cut out 'extraneous' or obsolete training in order to add more combat/weapons training; add more FTXes, and do more on them (I remember scratching out a hasty and sitting in it for about five days on our only FTX).
How about this. If you (question open for everyone) could remake OSUT to your own plan, how would you do it? Would you modify what we already have? Scrap it and start with a whole new paradigm?
--Dan