Part-Time Soldiers Head Back to Iraq

Our structure was a Cold War structure, a peacetime command-and-control structure with large administrative headquarters that didn't deploy. Their responsibility was to make sure the troops were getting paid for their weekend drills and making sure they had a plan of where they were going for their annual training for summer. They weren't functional; they weren't wartime. We can't afford that structure. We are converting those headquarters into sustainment brigades that work in Kuwait and Iraq. We are converting them into maneuver enhancement brigades that oversee the engineers and the military police in theater, and into more of a civil affairs capability for reconstruction efforts-standing up water plants and building hospitals. I'm trying to get us to a train, mobilize, deploy process. Currently, we are in a mobilize, train, deploy process. You mobilize a force; you send them to a training center for three months to train and then they do 12 months' boots on the ground. So now you're up to about 16 months or longer that they are away from their employer and their family. We can't continue to do that. We have to get to a process that says we are going to train before we ever mobilize, so when we mobilize it's 12 months every so many years, not 16 to 18 months. We must have predictability for our soldiers, for their employers, their families, and predictability for the Army that says here is what I can give you every year on a sustained basis. I can give you this much of engineer capability, this much of MP capability, this much of transportation capability. Out of the 160,000 reservists, I think about 30,000 to 35,000 have deployed more than once. A lot of those are your leaders, your noncommissioned officers and officers. A lot of the soldiers we have that haven't deployed yet are our younger soldiers, those who were recently recruited into the force. [Reservists] understand that it is no longer one week in a month, two weeks in the summertime. They understand that under Title 10, the Army Reserve exists to provide trained and ready soldiers and units when the nation calls. And so our soldiers say, "I got it. I understand. I'm part of the Army." We're still short officers. Most of the officers coming out of the ROTC programs are going on active duty now. We need to look at our ROTC scholarship program. Maybe we [should] offer a scholarship for two years of active duty instead of four years of active duty, and then four to six years of active reserve. I could tell that young college student, I'm going to give you stability to get your career going before you're expected to go back [on active duty] again. The Individual Ready Reserve system we're dealing with was not built or designed to sustain a long war. When soldiers came off active duty or other status, we just put them into the Individual Ready Reserve. It was a database of names that if we ever had to go to war, World War III, we could reach out and touch these individuals. Now, when we start calling upon them, what we find is the database is outdated. What I would like to look at is changing the whole IRR system to an affiliation system. An affiliation system says, you come off active duty at Fort Campbell, Ky., and you tell me you're moving to California. I say, affiliate him with one of the units in California. So we are your point of contact and we maintain accountability for you and your information. Then when we need you, we know where you are and your status. The active Army is looking for a soldier or an individual who is not sure what he is going to do in life. Somebody who is graduating from high school, doesn't have a job, doesn't have the money for college, maybe the parents are telling him it's time to get out of the house. So the Army is a career for him; it's an opportunity and it's a full-time job. I'm not looking for that individual, I'm looking for someone who has a plan, who says, I'm graduating; I'm going to college, or I have a job, but I see the Army Reserve as an opportunity to enable me to do some better things in life, to give me skills, or money to do things that I want to do, or I want to serve my country, but I want to keep my civilian career. Our recruits are three or four years older than active Army recruits and better educated, with some college, or they are college grads. In that 17-to-24 age group of males that we recruit from, over 40 percent are not educationally qualified to join the Army. Out of that whole group of 17- to 24- year-olds, only three out of 10 can actually join the Army, meaning they meet either the educational or the moral standards. Two percent of them are already in jail. So the problem we've got is the pool of people we're trying to recruit from is limited. Out of the three in 10, half are in college. I can recruit those individuals because I want them to stay in college and to join the Army Reserve. The active Army has a difficult time because they want them to go on active duty and forgo their college. I'm also competing with other agencies like the FBI, which has an internship program now with high school seniors to try to get them engaged so they can hire them after high school. I'm competing against industry. I'm sitting down with employers and saying listen, we're really trying to recruit the same individual. Why don't we share them? I can say I've got a pretty good individual for you to hire because you can trust him, he's going to be drug-free and he's going to be physically fit and he's going to come back after he serves that one year with me-having been given authority, making his own decisions, being responsible-a pretty good employee. What we've got to figure out now is how do we share them.