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| Balancing the Guard and Reserve |
October 10, 2003 |
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Dear Friends,
Our Guard and Reserve have been doing a fantastic job performing the missions the country has asked them to do. It`s time to consider whether we are asking them to do too much.
After the Vietnam War, the U.S. Army put a lot of units -- like security and logistics -- into the Guard and Reserve so that we could never conduct a major combat operation without the support of the American people because we would have to call up the Guard and Reserve.
Then, in the 1990s, as post-Cold War peace and posperity settled in, we reduced the size of the Army from 18 Divisions down to 10. But the operational tempo for our troops increased during that time. From 1992 to 2003, Guard or Reserve units were called up for roughly 16 major deployments from Desert Storm to Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo and others. That compares with seven major call ups in the previous 46 years.
Then we had September 11th.
Over the last two years we have had about 55,000 Guard and Reserve members called up each year. Currently, there are 170,000 on active duty in support of operations in Iraq. And this is in spite of the fact that the military ended the fiscal year with about 28,000 more people on the active payroll than it was supposed to have -- mostly because they stopped letting people leave when their committments were up.
This year the Army Guard did not meet its recruitment targets.
People who sign up for the Guard or Reserve know that they will be called up in a crisis if the country needs them. But the war on terror is not a temporary crisis that we can surge to meet and then send everyone home.
We need to increase the size of the active duty force an shift some functions like security and infantry from the Reserves and Guard to the active duty force.
And we need to commit to do that in this next year so that our men and women in the military know that help is on the way. Otherwise, we risk large numbers of mid-level people deciding to get out. And they can`t be replaced quickly. You can`t hire a Master Sergeant; you have to grow them.
Wish you were here,
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