Strained Army National Guard having tough time recruiting
Tue Jul 20, 6:39 AM ET Add Top Stories - USATODAY.com to My Yahoo!
By Dave Moniz, USA TODAY
The nation's largest part-time military force is suffering personnel strains from extended call-ups of troops.
Pentagon (news - web sites) and National Guard figures show that the 350,000-member Army National Guard is having increasing difficulty recruiting soldiers. It also continues to lag behind the other services in the quality of enlistees as measured by military aptitude tests.
Signs of trouble:
• The Army Guard's total number of soldiers - "end strength" in military terminology - is 343,846, more than 6,000 below its target of 350,000. End strength has been declining since January. Guard officials say they can recover by Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year.
• The Army Guard is having trouble recruiting new soldiers. At the end of May, the most recent figures available, it was more than 5,400 recruits short. That's about 14% below its goal of 37,486 recruits by May 31.
• Only 58% of Army Guard recruits this year have achieved "quality recruit" scores on military aptitude tests, compared with 72% for the Army Reserve and 80% for the Air National Guard. The Pentagon's target for quality recruits is 60% for enlistees. The last time the Army Guard met that was in 2001.
• The Pentagon recently activated more than 5,600 members of the Army's Individual Ready Reserve (IRR), in part to fill gaps in the Army Guard. The IRR is a rarely used group of soldiers who have finished their voluntary active-duty tours.
Personnel experts and some members of Congress had predicted problems would surface this year. The Army National Guard and Army Reserve make up nearly 40% of the 141,000 U.S. troops in Iraq (news - web sites). Overall, 131,000 Army Guard and Reserve soldiers are on active duty in the United States and overseas, in most cases for 15 to 18 months. Full-time soldiers' foreign deployments typically are one year.
"We can't continue like this," says Paul Monroe, a retired commander of the California National Guard. He says recruiting will get harder as long as the National Guard or Army Reserve are called up for full-time duty as frequently as they have been since 9/11.
The Army Guard and Reserve were established as part-time forces. Unlike the Army Reserve, a federal force, the Guard also has a state role and is controlled in peacetime by governors.
Lt. Col. Mike Jones, a senior recruiting officer, says that although the Army Guard is behind its recruiting target, "we are hopeful we will make our goal." Jones says that the summer months are typically the best for recruiting and that Guard recruiters "don't ever consider defeat" a possibility.
The Army National Guard's retention rate - the rate at which soldiers choose to remain in the service - is above expected levels this year, but there are signs that repeated call-ups could begin affecting it. Monroe says that surveys of California Guard troops called up for extended duty showed earlier this year that as many as half of those who were mobilized plan to leave the Guard at the earliest opportunity.
The active-duty Army and Army Reserve are on track to meet their 2004 recruiting goals. Experts say it's easier for the active-duty Army to recruit because it offers more benefits. |
