March 19, 2005
Army seeks to extends enlistments for two more years.
The US Army is getting so short of manpower for its various wars, that it has asked Congress for permission to arbitrarily extend the maximum enlistment time for soldiers from six years to eight years.
Article via
channelnewsasia.com.
Army Deputy Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Franklin Hagenbeck told a House subcommittee that yearly recruitment goals for the Army reserve and the National Guard were "at risk."
"In the manning area, we need Congress to change the maximum enlistment time from six years to eight years in order to help stabilize the force for longer periods of time," Hagenbeck went on to say.
The appeal coincided with the release of a new congressional report that showed that the intensifying anti-American insurgency in Iraq and continued violence in Afghanistan were followed by a distinct drop in the number of volunteers willing to serve in the branches of the military that see the most combat.
The Army reserve and Army National Guard respectively met only 87 percent and 80 percent of their overall recruiting goals in the first quarter of fiscal 2005, according to the study by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress.
The Air Force Reserve attained 91 percent of its target, the Air National Guard 71 percent and the Navy Reserve 77 percent.
How would you feel if you'd signed up for a six year contract, and then at the end of the time, were told you had to do two more?
Add: Ann Scott Tyson reviews the personnel shortages facing the US military in
Two Years Later, Iraq War Drains Military. Via
Truthout and the
Washington Post.
In a sign of deeper problems, career citizen-soldiers frustrated by broken units and long, grueling war-zone duties are increasingly leaving the Guard. Attrition among career guardsmen is running at nearly 20 percent, said Schultz, who expects that as many as a third of the members of some units rotating back from Iraq will quit.
Recruitment is sluggish, reaching just 75 percent of the target for the first quarter of fiscal 2005 -- meaning that the Guard is unlikely to reach its desired strength of 350,000 soldiers this year.
The viability of the Army Guard and Reserve will prove decisive, senior Army leaders say, as they consider in 2006 whether to permanently increase the size of the active-duty Army, and if so by how much. It also marks a critical test of the military's ability to appeal to the civilian population, not only with bonuses and education benefits, but also with an ethos of self-sacrifice that it considers the bedrock of the all-volunteer force.
"For the all-volunteer force to work, it has to work all the time, not just in peacetime," Schultz said. "It's now time to answer the call to serve, to assemble on the village green."
Maybe so, but that's getting harder for many people to do. Another aspect of this problem is covered in this
article detailing the growing resistance to further service among veterans already in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the various ways they are trying to just get out.
Soldiers, their advocates and lawyers who specialize in military law say they have watched a few service members try ever more unlikely and desperate routes: taking drugs in the hope that they will be kept home after positive urine tests, for example; or seeking psychological or medical reasons to be declared nondeployable, including last-minute pregnancies. Specialist Marquise J. Roberts is accused of asking a relative in Philadelphia to shoot him in the leg so he would not have to return to war.
... These soldiers come from all different towns, all over the country, but their reasons for wanting out echo one another. Some described grisly scenes from their first deployments to Iraq. One soldier said he saw a wounded, weeping Iraqi child whom no one would help; another said he watched as another soldier set fire to wild dogs just to pass time. Others said they had simply realized that they did not believe in war, or at least not in this war.
