This doesn’t sound like a good idea:

Rushed by President Bush’s decision to reinforce Baghdad with thousands more U.S. troops, two Army combat brigades are skipping their usual session at the Army’s premier training range in California and instead are making final preparations at their home bases.
Some in Congress and others outside the Army are beginning to question the switch, which is not widely known. They wonder whether it means the Army is cutting corners in preparing soldiers for combat, since they are forgoing training in a desert setting that was designed specially to prepare them for the challenges of Iraq.

Asked about the effect of skipping the desert training, a spokesman for one of the units involved, the 2nd Brigade of the 3rd ID, said soldiers would lose nothing and would be deployed two weeks faster as a result. But a spokesman for Fort Irwin’s National Training Center, located in the Mojave Desert, observed training at the 2nd Brigade’s home base isn’t the same: “Your weapon won’t jam from sand at Fort Stewart.”