National Guard Not Meeting Recruitment Goals

The sights and sounds of deployment pull at the heart strings...

Natural Sound, 731st deployment

Still, they answer the call.

Natural Sound, 731st deployment

But fewer are coming forward to sign up for the guard.

This year's goal of 56-thousand is down 5-thousand recruits...that's a decline of roughly 10 percent.

Chattanooga recruiters have noticed the trend.

Sgt. 1st Class William Ziegler, Recruiter, Tn. National Guard "Times have been tough, times have been tough."

The big reason?

These citizen soldiers aren't just playing soldier one weekend a month, and two weeks during the summer.

They're on the front lines.

Natural Sound, Iraq

Sgt. 1st Class William Ziegler, Recruiter, Tn. National Guard "There's a perception out there that you're going to go to war and die."

Recruiters counter that by saying, statistically, it can actually be safer overseas.

Sgt. 1st Class William Ziegler, Recruiter, Tn. National Guard "A lot of ways to die here in Chattanooga too...drunk driving, drive-bys, I mean it happens every day here in Chattanooga."

Spc Curtis Roberson, Tn. National Guard "I just liked the money for school and like I could serve my country and still be around my daughter."

Specialist Curtis Roberson was undergoing basic during the push into Iraq...and he realizes he will have to leave his daughter if deployed.

Still, he says he would do it again.

Spc Curtis Roberson, Tn. National Guard "Yes, I'd do it again, 'cause freedom isn't free, you've got people thinking everything is handed to them, but somebody fell for them before we came on the scene, ;and we've got to do it for our children."

Recruiters say they are beefing up the pluses...pay, benefits, educational opportunities...and if anything, are getting a higher quality of recruit now.

Sgt. 1st Class William Ziegler, Recruiter, Tn. National Guard "They enter into it knowing full well what they're getting into, and they expect the worse, and still stand up."

Natural Sound, deployment

In Chattanooga, Mike Chambers, News 12.

There may be light at the end of the tunnel for new recruits, however.

Responding to the drop in recruitment, the U-S Army is now considering cutting the length of it's 12-month combat tours of duty to 6 to 9 months.

That's roughly the equivalent to the seven-month tours that are the norm for U-S Marines.

http://www.wdef.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=WDEF/MGArticle/DEF_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1031778266387&path=!home

HARTFORDConn. - The war in Iraq is making recruitment tougher for Connecticut's National Guard, NBC 30 Connecticut News reported.

The Guard reports its numbers are down at a time when more soldiers from the state are about to be deployed.

Pvt. Courtney Robbins, a member of the 134th Military Police Company out of Norwich, Conn., joined the Guard under the GI Bill, which provides her with free college tuition and a sign-on bonus. Robbins has not been deployed, but she says she's ready, even though her family is not.

"They're nervous and scared seeing what's going on. They're concerned for me and my unit," Robbins said.

An especially deadly day in Iraq boosted the American military death toll past 1,000 on Tuesday. More than 80 percent of the 1,003 U.S. military deaths have occurred since President George W. Bush declared an end to major combat.

About 150 Connecticut National Guard soldiers are now in Iraq. In two weeks, that number will grow to around 500, NBC 30 Connecticut News reported.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5940633/

St. Paul, Minn. — (AP) - Former Gov. Jesse Ventura, who during his time in office diligently avoided commenting on military decisions, joined the fray over the war in Iraq on Tuesday.

"Now that I'm a civilian, I'm here to speak out that I think the current use of the National Guard is wrong," Ventura said Tuesday.

Ventura is serving as an advisory board member for a new group called Operation Truth, a nonprofit organization set up "to give voice to troops who served in Iraq."

Emphasizing that he is an independent, not a Republican or Democrat, Ventura said the National Guard was designed to protect the homeland, not fight overseas.

http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/features/2004/08/24_ap_venturairaq/

A new government report says the Pentagon could run out of reservists if current deployment rates continue — even as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs has confirmed plans for the next call-up announcement in November. Over the past three years, the military has deployed 20 percent of its active-duty force but closer to 28 percent of its reserve forces, and officials say they’re concerned about long-term effects on recruiting and retention. More than 40 percent of troops in Iraq are reserve and National Guard members, a percentage expected to climb to nearly 50 percent in the months ahead.

If the Pentagon sticks to its policy of mobilizing individual reservists for no more than 24 months total, “it is possible that DoD will run out of forces,” the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, reported in mid-September.

“There are already indications that some portions of the force are being stressed,” the GAO said. “For example, the Army National Guard failed to meet its recruiting goal during 14 of 20 months from October 2002 to May 2004 and ended fiscal 2003 approximately 7,800 soldiers below its recruiting goal.”

Equally significant is the growing stress on reserve-component retention in certain skills that are tapped repeatedly for operational missions. While the Army faces the greatest levels of involuntary mobilizations over the next few years, all the reserve components have career fields that have been highly stressed, the GAO said.

For example, the Navy and Marine Corps have mobilized 60 percent and 100 percent of their reserve enlisted law enforcement specialists and 48 percent and 100 percent of their intelligence officers, respectively. The Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve mobilized 64 percent and 93 percent of their enlisted law enforcement specialists and 71 and 86 percent of their installation security personnel, respectively.

And while overall retention rates in the reserve components are not yet declining noticeably, the rates in some skill fields are, particularly in the Army.

The retention rate for military police in the Army Reserve, for example, dropped from about 67 percent in 2000 to 49 percent in 2003, while rates for Army National Guard members in aviation skills plummeted from 80 percent in 2000 to about 30 percent in 2002, the GAO said.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, more than 335,000 reservists have been mobilized for active duty —nearly 234,000 for the Army, almost 56,000 for the Air Force, more than 24,000 for the Marine Corps and more than 21,000 for the Navy. Tens of thousands more have volunteered for active duty. As of Sept. 22, some 168,340 reservists were mobilized.

Reassessing the reserve’s role

At the same time it is waging the war on terrorism, the Defense Department is in the midst of a massive overhaul of personnel assignments to determine which jobs should be handled by active-duty forces and which by the reserve components.

But the chief of the Army and Air National Guard warns that some wartime skills must remain in the reserves so the American people remain intimately involved in overseas missions.

“As a father, I don’t want to send my kid to a war unless the American people go to war and are committed to that war,” Army Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, said at a Sept. 21 conference on the future of the total force at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. “When you call out the Guard and reserve, you call out America.”

Reserve deployments by their nature yank Americans from their homes and jobs, Blum said, sending an unmistakable signal to those left behind that the nation’s military is going into harm’s way.

This “reality-check” role for the reserves was built into the deployment system after the Vietnam War, when military leaders crafting the all-volunteer force wanted to ensure that, unlike Vietnam, future reserve call-ups would be essential to any large overseas military campaign.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his staff argue that these 30-year-old motives no longer are relevant and that military leaders need more flexibility to quickly and stealthily launch swift, decisive combat operations. Plans call for redesigning reserve units so that those needed for the first 30 days of combat could be made up nearly entirely of volunteers who have been trained for the fight.

Blum said the reserves no longer can follow the “old model” of training and equipping as second-tier units that would arrive in “the late innings of the ballgame.”

A ‘secret plan’?

The Bush administration is experiencing political echoes of those reserve-forces decisions originally made under the Nixon and Ford administrations.

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry accused the Bush administration of quietly planning another reserve call-up immediately after the Nov. 2 elections. Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, replied that the “notifications for these troop rotations have been going on for months in plain view of … the military, the public and Congress. The so-called ‘secret plan’ is actually the beginning of the next scheduled rotation of troops.”

In a Sept. 20 letter to Hunter, Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, addressed the November call-ups, which will likely include more members of the Individual Ready Reserve, veterans who still have a service commitment.

“There has never been guidance to defer notification until after the presidential election,” Myers said. “In the case of the current rotation, we announced our plan in the spring of 2004 … and deployed the first unit in the fall of 2004. For the next rotation, we will announce our plan in November 2004, with the first unit deploying in May 2005.”

As of mid-September, 800 Individual Ready Reservists had been activated out of a total of 5,600 slots the Pentagon wants to fill by December, “with a potential to go higher, if required,” Myers wrote.

‘Ominous’ signs

Observers inside and outside government have voiced concern over the Pentagon’s extensive use of reservists in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., a West Point graduate, joined other Democrats in calling for an increase in the overall size of the armed forces, a move opposed by the Pentagon for budget reasons.

The Pentagon has argued that this situation is temporary and a permanent increase is not necessary, Reed said at the Georgetown conference. “I would argue that this is a problem that is not going away.”

He noted the Pentagon projected that over the next three to five years, 100,000 to 150,000 reserve-component members will be continuously mobilized.

“The question is, will the all-volunteer force break?” asked Bernard Rostker, a Pentagon personnel chief in the Clinton administration. “It hasn’t broken yet, but the signs are ominous.”

One such sign is reflected in the way the reserves are recruiting. In the past, the reserve and Guard often filled their ranks with people leaving active duty.

But now combat veterans thinking about leaving active duty express little interest in joining the reserve components due to the likelihood of another long-term combat tour.

This, in turn, means the reserves must recruit more people with no prior service, putting reserve recruiters in direct competition with their active-duty counterparts who are also struggling to make their numbers.

It’s unclear how many currently serving reservists will choose to stay in the military after their combat tours are over, partly because of such policies as stop-loss, which require mobilized members to remain on active duty beyond the end of their regular service contracts.

Richard Stark, a researcher with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, noted that reserve units are filled with young people who want to be part of something “larger than themselves.”

On the other hand, he said, “There is some limit to their ability to be a good sport.”

http://www.independent-media.tv/item.cfm?fmedia_id=9151&fcategory_desc=Under%20Reported