[31.03] So far I haven't used schedules or alerts. I just give my squads a barracks, mark it for training, and 90% of them will then do individual combat drills for the rest of their little dorf lives. 10% will refuse to train, so I take them out of a squad, free the barracks, and they eventually return to civilian life. Freakin' conscientious objectors
Freeing the barracks temporarily also gives your squads a chance to clean the goblin blood off after combat, and to move any clothes that they've dropped down to the cabinets in their bedrooms. Of course, the downside of no schedules is no group teaching or learning, so I have hammer lords who are still novice dodgers and shield users.
Without alerts, I manually order my squads into position when danger threatens. About half of the attack orders I've ever given have been abject failures, with dwarves running back to the weapon/armor stockpile to drop everything and then reshuffle their equipment. So I've learned to just order the squads to move next to the target instead, where they hardly every drop things first. Since dwarves attack anything they can see, this has the intended effect. I'm hoping that as the arsenal dwarf gets more skilled the equipment-dance will finally be eliminated (I have him dual-tasked as my manager, so he's turning into a hardcore organizer).
I gave up on food in backpacks after an abandoned ration flooded the barracks with miasma, but they seem to be able to handle waterskins and booze ok (again, you need to free the barracks to let them go and fill their waterskins).
End result: I'm 3 years in and my first squad is level 14-20 in their chosen weapons, while the second squad is level 7-10. They've slaughtered three goblin ambushes, losing two big toes and getting one left arm cut up (stupid recruit ran out without his gauntlet).