Its Recruitment Goals Pressing, the Army Will Ease Some Standards
NY Times ^ | October 1, 2004 | ERIC SCHMITT
WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 - To help meet its recruiting goals at a time when its forces are strained by operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army has lowered some requirements for recruits.
The changes are among the clearest signs yet of the military's growing problems in recruiting and retaining soldiers. They mean that many hundreds of recruits who would have been rejected in the past could be enlisted this year.
Army officials characterize the changes as modest and well within quality standards mandated by the Pentagon and Congress. But they amount to the first relaxation in Army recruiting standards since 1998, when a strong economy was hurting military recruiting.
Army officials said Thursday that for the recruiting year that started this week, at least 90 percent of new recruits must be high school graduates, compared with 92 percent last year. And up to 2 percent of recruits will be enlisted even if they scored in the lowest acceptable range on a service aptitude test, compared with 1.5 percent last year.
Given the total of 101,200 incoming soldiers whom the Army and the Army Reserve say they need to send to basic training this year, the changes mean that as many as 2,000 or so recruits who would have previously been rejected could be enlisted.
"In difficult recruiting environments, it is inevitable that either quality standards or recruiting resources be subject to adjustment," said Richard I. Stark Jr., a retired Army colonel who is a military personnel specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies here. "The Army has been forced to adjust to both."
The Army's decision to loosen standards comes amid calls for the House Armed Services Committee to investigate accusations by Iraq war veterans at Fort Carson, Colo., and other Army bases that, nearing the end of their enlistments, they are being pressured to choose between re-enlisting and being sent back to Iraq with another unit. Army officials have denied using any such approach to encourage re-enlistment.
In another sign of strains within the Army, more than 35 percent of nearly 3,900 former soldiers mobilized for yearlong assignments in a little-used wartime program have resisted their call-up, seeking delays or exemptions. Some of the former soldiers, members of the Individual Ready Reserve, may face criminal charges for failing to report, Army officials said.
Taken together, these issues have energized a bipartisan effort in Congress to increase the size of the Army by 20,000 to 30,000 soldiers, have helped to spur calls by Senator John Kerry to enlarge the Army by 40,000 troops and have prompted many lawmakers to warn of a tough challenge for recruiters.
"Recruiting for the United States Army is going to be a major challenge in the days ahead," Representative Ike Skelton of Missouri, the senior Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said this week. "You are wearing them out."
Officials said Thursday that the Army met most of its goals for the 2004 recruiting year, which ended on Monday. The active-duty Army exceeded its recruiting target of 77,000 soldiers by 587, and the Army Reserve exceeded its goal of 21,200 by 78, according to Douglas Smith, spokesman for the Army Recruiting Command, at Fort Knox, Ky. But the Army National Guard missed its recruiting target of 56,000 soldiers by 5,000, the first shortfall by the Guard since 1994.
One main reason the Army has changed its quality standards is that it is entering the new 12-month recruiting cycle from one of its worst starting points in a decade.
Typically, the Army wants to enter each recruiting cycle with a cushion of incoming volunteers whose entry has been deferred from the previous year - about 35 percent of its overall goal for the year. But several weeks ago the Army projected that it would reach only 25 percent, and officials said Thursday that the cushion was actually only 18 percent.
The Army is adopting a range of incentives including bonuses, educational benefits and choice base assignments to help meet its recruiting and retention goals, as it typically has during years when it starts with so few recruits already identified. In addition, it is bringing on 1,000 new recruiters.
But aides to two Colorado lawmakers, Representatives Diana DeGette, a Democrat, and Joel Hefley, a Republican, said their offices had received calls from several soldiers at Fort Carson, as well as Fort Riley, Kan., and Fort Lewis, Wash., complaining of pressure to re-enlist with the alternative being deployment to Iraq.
One sergeant at Fort Carson, who served nearly a year in Iraq with the Fourth Infantry Division's Third Brigade and whose enlistment is to end in February 2006, said Thursday that he would take his chances on being reassigned rather than re-enlist.
"I can understand we're in a war, and extraordinary things happen in war, but the Army is moving the goal posts on me," the sergeant said in a telephone interview, speaking on condition of anonymity.
A spokesman for Fort Carson, Lt. Col. Dave Johnson, said a new Army program to create more stable units whose members will stay together for three years required troops whose enlistments end before December 2007 to re-enlist, extend their current enlistments a bit or take no action and possibly be assigned to another unit.
But Colonel Johnson said the Army was looking closely at each soldier's record and was not using the threat of Iraq deployment to increase re-enlistments. "We're not strong-arming anyone," he said. |
