George Putnam
Saturday, Jan. 29, 2005

Story Continues Below

  The reality of life is that at some point we've got to stand up and fight for these things and put our money where our mouth is. But the question is, with our military running out of troops and the strain of fighting a longer, bloodier war in Iraq, is our own military in danger of running out of reserve troops?

At first glance the answer would appear to be a clear NO! We have nearly 1.2 million men and women on the reserve rolls, about 70,000 now in Iraq to supplement the regulars. But a look inside the Army National Guard, Army Reserve and Marine Corps Reserve suggests a grim picture. At the current pace and size of our troop deployments to Iraq, finding enough suitable reserve combat troops is becoming more and more of a problem.

Recently Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard, reported that the Guard is 15,000 soldiers below its normal strength of 350,000 and he expects further short-term declines. The National Guard, like the smaller Army Reserve, faces difficulties filling its slots because of the extended and unpredictable deployments required by the war in Iraq in which the National Guard has been forced to play a major role. The National Guard and Army Reserve now make up better than 40 percent of the nearly 150,000 troops serving in Iraq.

Gen. Blum now seeks congressional approval to pay $15,000 bonuses to entice active duty military members to join the Guard. The present $50 bonus carries little weight. (That may have been a big deal 50 years ago, but it doesn't buy much today.)

Blum offers two main reasons the Guard has found it harder to get active duty soldiers to switch to the Guard: The Army has invoked a special authority known as "stop loss" that freezes soldiers in place for months at a time. And those who can leave active duty are less interested in joining the Guard if they believe their prospective Guard unit is in line for deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan.

The Marine Corps Reserve is in a comparable position; most of its 40,000 troops have been mobilized at least once already. There are no figures available on how many are available for future deployments to Iraq. And both the Army and the Marines are soliciting reservists to volunteer for duty in Iraq.

The chief of the Army Reserve, Gen. James Helmly, recently advised other Army leaders that his citizen militia is in grave danger of being able to meet all of its operational responsibilities. His exact quote: "The Reserve is rapidly degenerating into a broken force." The mix of troops in our U.S. force rotation now under way in Iraq is about 50 percent active duty and 50 percent reserves.

But the biggest problem we face is that we do not have troops who have the right skills. A portion of our best-trained reservists are now approaching the 24-month limit and some senior officials inside the Army are considering whether the limit should be redefined so that mobilizations over the past three years would, in effect, not count against the 24-month limit.

The Guard and Reserve are hurting desperately in other ways. Casualties in Iraq have been mounting (16 deaths in October, 28 in November, 20 in December, at least 15 in the first 13 days of January and, as this is being written, we have lost 30 Marines and a Navy corpsman in a helicopter crash in Iraq). Add to these casualties the fact that the National Guard and the Army Reserve are missing their recruiting goals.

It's a sad picture as our military looks for new ways to bolster thinning ranks. We may yet be forced to reinstitute a draft.

Editor's note: