A NUMBER OF DECISIONS by the Pentagon over the last 10 days leave the impression that it is scrambling to bolster the number of combat-ready, deployable forces in order to compensate for what has become an obvious shortage of manpower.
Earlier this week, the Defense Department announced that 3,600 soldiers, comprising one of two mechanized infantry brigades permanently stationed in South Korea, would be rotated to Iraq for a 12-month tour. While these troops represent only 10 percent of American forces on the DMZ, they represent a full 50 percent of combat ready forces on the peninsula.
In an article in the current issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Frederick W. Kagan discusses the many rumors surrounding the possible deployment to Iraq of the Army’s vaunted OPFOR. Short for “opposing forces,” OPFOR is the elite training unit for armored maneuver warfare stationed at Fort Irwin, California. The Associated Press reports that while a final decision has not yet been made, the Army is considering closing the training center at Fort Irwin, which, according to Kagan, would deal a severe blow to the future combat effectiveness of the armored corps.
On Tuesday, the Army confirmed that it had pulled the personnel files of 17,000 soldiers in the Individual Ready Reserve (IRR). The IRR draws on a pool of 118,000 soldiers who have not yet completed their 8 year contractual obligations to the Army, yet receive no pay and are not required to report for drill with either the Guard or Reserve. The Army claims that those 17,000 files have been pulled so that they may be screened for a few specialists, and since January they’ve only called 100 of them. While this is not unprecedented–in total, 7,000 have been called since September 11–the last major call-up was during the Gulf War, when 20,000 were called-up to buoy a substantially larger American military.
On May 19, Ron Soble of the Oregonian reported that an erroneous order had come down for a nation-wide call-up of the IRR. The order informed IRR soldiers that they were to reenlist in a National Guard or Reserve unit of their choice, or the army would choose for them. This led 1,063 inactive Army reservists to reenlist in active units. Sobel quotes Julia Collins, a civilian public affairs official for U.S. Army Human Resources Command as saying of the figure: “That’s a larger number than we usually have.” Senator John Warner, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, denied knowing anything about the order, while Lt. Gen. James R. Helmly, commander of the Army Reserve, declined to comment on how the mistake was made.
IN A POTENTIALLY RELATED DEVELOPMENT, on Tuesday the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported that the Defense Department has begun taking steps to use IRS data to track down the nearly 34 percent of IRR soldiers whom the Army can no longer locate. Lieutenant Colonel Bob Stone, spokesman for Reserve affairs at the Pentagon, claims the measure is unrelated to the Army’s current manpower shortage, and both Congress and the president would have to approve an amendment to the tax code for the measure to be legal. Still, this, like the redeployment of troops from the DMZ, is unprecedented.
For some time now, THE WEEKLY STANDARD has been making the case to increase in troop levels in order to insure that the military can maintain stability in Iraq, as well as our sizeable commitments in place like the Balkans, South Korea, and Afghanistan. The number most often quoted in this magazine is 30,000, roughly two full-strength army divisions. While this call has been repeated by numerous members of Congress, most notably Senator John McCain, the Pentagon seems unwilling, for whatever reason, to concede that the current size of the Army is inadequate for the tasks it has been charged with.
Michael Goldfarb is a staff assistant at The Weekly Standard.
