Guard looks for turnaround with new plan

The Guard attrition rate fell to 17 percent this year, from 19.6 percent in 2000.
BALTIMORE SUN
WASHINGTON -- Once seen as a haven from the jungles of Vietnam or as a source of cash for college, the National Guard is struggling to reinvent itself in the age of terror with a bare-knuckled new ad campaign, hundreds of additional recruiters and a beefed-up financial package for its part-time soldiers.
But some active-duty officers and defense analysts doubt the Guard can quickly turn around its weak recruiting. They say the shortfall could be the first ominous sign of a fraying of the 30-year-old all-volunteer force, active-duty and reserve, due to strain of repeat yearlong deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.
"I wouldn't bet on their success," said David Segal, a military sociologist at the University of Maryland, who predicted that offering more money for soldiers would only help recruiting "at the margins." The Guard's inability to maintain its force, he said, could mean trouble not only for its support of the active-duty military but in its ability to respond natural disasters at home.
Numbers
With reservists accounting for 40 percent of the U.S. force in Iraq -- a percentage expected to slightly increase next year -- the National Guard is also struggling for recruits. It fell about 7,000 soldiers short last year of the 56,000 soldiers needed to maintain a 350,000-soldier force. Now the Guard is 10,000 soldiers short and facing an even bigger recruiting goal, 63,000 in the coming year.
"It's tough. We're using the Guard and Reserve heavily," said Rick Stark, a retired Army colonel and an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank that's studying the role of part-time soldiers. "The jury's out. They're not going to recruit their way out of it."
Lt. Col. Mike Jones, deputy recruiting and retention chief for the National Guard Bureau, admitted that officials failed to react quickly enough to the Guard's changing role, particularly the greater risk facing its soldiers without an increase in benefits. Since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, 143 Guard soldiers have died there and 15 have been killed in Afghanistan in the three years since the fall of the Taliban, officials said.
"It comes down to what's the risk, what's the reward," said Jones, a voluble officer with an ad man's rapid-fire delivery. "We were slow in recognizing we were asking a lot of our young soldiers."
Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, who heads the National Guard Bureau, calls his soldiers "21st century minutemen," likening them to the 18th century residents of Lexington and Concord who left their plows to pick up muskets.
While acknowledging "we're in a more difficult recruiting environment," he sees recruiting recovering by late next summer, spurred by a better benefits packages and a recruiting force that will swell from the current 2,700 to 4,100.
Retention
Stark said that while additional benefits and recruiters should help, the Guard also must work hard to retain soldiers. So far, he said, there is good news: The Guard attrition rate declined to 17 percent this year, from 19.6 percent in 2000.
"Folks who joined after 9/11 are very committed," said Jones, adding that Guard units deploying overseas have a higher retention rate than those within the United States. "We're finding out they're sticking with us."
Jones lists the Guard's expanding benefits for those who sign up for a six-year hitch or re-enlist.
Enlistment bonuses are increasing from $6,000 to as much as $10,000, he said. And retention bonuses for soldiers coming off active duty have been boosted to $15,000 from $5,000, matching the peak bonuses for regular soldier that were announced in August.
The Guard is also doubling the size of student loans it will help repay, to $20,000, and raising tuition assistance to $250 per credit hour, up to a total $4,500 per year.
At the same time, the Guard is going to spend 60 percent more on advertising next year -- about $68 million, up from $42 million.
"The American Soldier" campaign features gritty testimonials from Guard soldiers fighting insurgents in Iraq and helping to rebuild the country.
The new campaign replaces posters that focused on education benefits.
TV spots show Guard soldiers wearing the desert camouflage uniform from Afghanistan and Iraq, declaring, "I will never accept defeat." Radio ads, in English and Spanish, contain words rarely associated with Guard soldiers in the recent past: "I stand ready to deploy, engage and destroy the enemies of the United States of America in close combat. I am the guardian of freedom and the American way of life."
Segal, the military sociologist, said one problem for the Guard is that there is greater "intrusion on the citizen part of the citizen soldier," meaning more time away from families and jobs.
"Being in the Guard doesn't make economic sense," he said. "In wartime it intrudes on your employment and threatens continuity of your civilian career. If you want to go off to war, you're better off being a full-time warrior."
Sense of patriotism
But Jones, the Guard's deputy chief of recruiting, hopes to appeal to a potential recruit's sense of patriotism. And he said there is now more predictability on which units will deploy over the next two years for a 12-month rotation into Iraq or Afghanistan.
The Guard also hopes to reduce the length of its overseas deployments. "We know 12 months is too long," Blum told reservists during a meeting at the Baghdad airport in September. Blum would like to eventually limit active duty to six months to nine months every five or six years.
"That's a worthwhile goal," said Stark, the defense analyst. "But we're nowhere near that today."
The Guard also has been hampered by a smaller benefits package than its leaders requested. They had sought a signing bonus of up to $20,000 for recruits rather than $10,000 approved by the Pentagon.
"The Army has $20,000 for their active soldiers and thought the active soldier needed a higher compensation rate," Jones said. The decision, he added, reflects "pre-9/11 thinking."
"The Guard and Reserve are going to be on the front lines of this war on terror at home and abroad," he said.
The Guard is trying a new plan to entice active-duty soldiers coming off a deployment. Jones said the plan features a "12-month stabilization policy," assuring a post that would not be part of an overseas deployment for a year.