Backdoor Draft: Army to Call Up Retired, Discharged Troops

The soldiers will be summoned from the Individual Ready Reserve, a seldom-tapped pool of 111,000 people who remain eligible to be called to active duty for eight years after completing their voluntary Army service commitment.

Army officials said these soldiers will be deployed this year to Iraq and Afghanistan to fill shortages in specific jobs such as military police and civil affairs.

"It's a management tool which we've always had available to augment our forces when we need additional personnel in a time of war," said Lt. Col. Pamela Hart, an Army spokeswoman at the Pentagon. "This is nothing that's new or unusual."

The move is the latest sign of the strain on the military as the Pentagon struggles to maintain a larger-than-expected force of 138,000 in Iraq through the end of 2005 amid a fierce insurgency whose tenacity caught officials off guard.

Hart said the last involuntary mobilization from the Individual Ready Reserve came during the 1991 Gulf War, and before that in 1968 during the Vietnam War.

The Army has previously said it would prohibit tens of thousands of soldiers designated to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan from leaving the service when their volunteer commitment ends.

This "stop-loss" order means soldiers who otherwise could have retired, starting 90 days before being sent, will be compelled to remain to the end of a yearlong deployment and up to another 90 days after returning to their home base. Some may remain in the Army up to 18 months beyond when they were originally scheduled to leave the service.

'BACKDOOR DRAFT'

Rand Beers, national security adviser to Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, said:

"The fact is that this involuntary call-up is a direct result of the Bush administration's diplomatic failure to get real international help in Iraq." Kerry has called the stop-loss order a "backdoor draft." The latest move shows that this back door has "swung wide open," Beers said.

California Democratic Rep. Ellen Tauscher, a member of the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, said the call-up from the Individual Ready Reserve was "a dangerous step that could bring us closer to breaking our military.
America has relied on an all-volunteer military since ending the draft three decades ago.

Retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich, a Boston University international relations professor, worried about damage to the concept of a volunteer military and said the latest moves indicate the Army is too small for its current missions.

"These are people who used to be soldiers and no longer are," Bacevich said.

"The informal contract -- the one as understood by soldiers regardless of what they actually signed -- is that I have volunteered for a certain period of time. And once that time is up, then the choice returns to me to decide either to continue my service or to opt out. What the Bush administration is doing is just shredding that informal contract."

Bacevich said current service members may feel like they have been treated unfairly and potential volunteers may have second thoughts.

Heritage Foundation defense analyst Jack Spencer said, "It is certainly a sign of our military being stretched thin."

Relying on the Individual Ready Reserve differs from mobilizing members of the Army Reserve, Spencer said.

"It is different because these are guys who are retired. You would prefer not to have to call them up."

The Army Reserve, the better known pool of reservists, consists of part-time soldiers who regularly train together as units on weekends and in the summer.

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