As I've argued before, the continued fighting in Iraq is making it harder and harder for the US military to recruit and retain the numbers needed to fight this war. USA Today ran some numbers today (two separate stories: here, and here) that provide generally bad news:
During the first two months of the 2005 fiscal year, which began in October, the Army Guard fell from 25% to more than 30% short of its recruiting goals. Earlier this month, the Army Reserve's top commander, Lt. Gen. James Helmly, sent a memo to Army leaders saying the Army Reserve was suffering severe personnel problems and becoming a "broken force."
The active Army was able to meet its 2004 recruiting goal of 77,000, in part because it rushed 6,000 recruits it had planned to enlist in 2005 to boot camp early, leaving less margin for error this year. In one sign of the concerns in the Army, the service is adding 574 new recruiters to bring its nationwide force up to more than 6,000.
So the Army, which was missing it's target by a bit under 10%, was only able to make the 2004 targets by pushing 2005 recruits into the training pipeline early. The Guard is off of its recruitment targets by 25 to 30%. These numbers cannot be sustained. And this is at a time when we clearly need more troops both in Iraq and the foreseeable future.
(The caveat to this is that wherever USA Today got the statistics from - it isn't listed in the article - doesn't include the retention numbers. In other words, the Army doesn't need to recruit as many if more stay in the Army. The other piece of good news is that both the Air Force and the Navy are over their recruitment targets, though that's mostly irrelevant given the kind of war we are in.)
Posted by baltar at January 25, 2005 04:03 PM | TrackBack | Posted to International Affairs