November 29, 2005Prior-service troops asked to come back
By Gordon Lubold
Times staff writer
They’ve been there, done that — but the Army wants to know if they’ll do it again.
In the increasingly tough struggle to fill its ranks, the Army is contacting nearly 78,000 prior-service soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines — including about 7,000 former officers — to see if they might be interested in returning to active duty in Army green.
Since early November, Army officials have been mailing out glossy, four-color brochures to prior-service enlisted members and officers that invite them to take another tour.
“Put your previous military experience to good use,” the brochure reads. “You’ve served our country before, and maybe you miss the adventure, camaraderie, teamwork and leadership opportunities that the military offers.”
Army officials hope the “Unity of Effort” program will pique the interest of at least 1,600 prior-service people — about 2 percent of the number being contacted.
Eligible prior-service members are particularly appealing to the Army because these people know what they’re getting into and don’t need as much training.
“That’s trained manpower you can pull back in,” Lt. Col. Roy Steed, the Army’s deputy division chief of enlisted accessions, said Nov. 23.
The Army is offering bonuses of between $5,000 and $19,000 to those willing to come back and also is loosening regulations that had required service members to re-enlist in their previous chosen career fields and accept lesser ranks to come back, Steed said.
It’s the latest effort by the Army to overcome recruiting woes that have steadily worsened as the Iraq war has gone on. The active Army, the Army Reserve and the Army National Guard all fell short of their annual recruiting goals for fiscal 2005 — the active Army by 8 percentage points.
Although the service made its active recruiting goal in October, the first month of the new fiscal year, the service likely will continue to struggle in fiscal 2006 to achieve its mission of about 80,000 recruits.
Part of the problem is that the Army has been drawing down its delayed-entry pool to shore up its recruiting efforts, a stopgap measure that cannot continue indefinitely. The delayed-entry pool is made up of individuals who have enlisted in the service but have yet to ship to boot camp, and serves as a “cushion” to help each service achieve its recruiting mission each year.
The Army began last fiscal year with a start pool that was about 18 percent filled. At the start of fiscal 2006 on Oct. 1, that had shrunk to about 12 percent.
That means the Army has far fewer enlistees on standby and recruiters increasingly must find eligible applicants, enlist them and send them to boot camp right away. Less time in the delayed-entry pool can mean higher attrition or failure rates down the road, officials have said.
Senior defense officials say the Army is the “bellwether” for recruiting because it is the largest service and bears the brunt of the mission in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
While the Army hopes such initiatives as the Unity of Effort program will help plug its manpower gaps, the program required two major personnel policy changes to make it a go.
First, the service removed the restriction that prevented former soldiers returning to service from retraining in a different skill than they were in before. Recruiting officials typically require former troops returning to service to stay in the previous field in which they were trained.
Second, the Army made it more appealing to return to military service by removing a policy under which returning former service members lost rank. Prior to the program, soldiers out of uniform for more than two years would be returned to service at one paygrade lower than where they left. Each additional six months out of service meant another grade reduction. Now, E-1s to E-5s don’t lose a stripe if they return within four years of getting out.
Army officials said the previous policy didn’t reflect the current recruiting reality.
“We were not facing these shortfalls … when we implemented that policy,” said Al Green, a former sergeant major who now is civilian chief of the Army’s recruiting policy branch.
Individuals who return to the Army under the new program do not have to go through basic training again. They even are exempt from the four-week Warrior Transition Course at Fort Knox, Ky., that has been a requirement for former airmen and sailors joining the Army under a separate “blue-to-green” initiative launched last year.
Contacting prior-service members is not the only thing the Army is doing to fill its ranks.
The service announced earlier this year that it would offer free music downloads to 18- to 25-year-olds who agreed simply to be contacted by a recruiter.
The service also is putting 1,160 more recruiters on the streets, rolling out new advertising aimed at parents, coaches and other adult “influencers” and also doubling maximum enlistment bonuses to $40,000.
------------------------------------------------------------ Out of every 100 men, ten shouldn't even be there, Eighty are just targets, Nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior, and he will bring the others back." - Hericletus, circa 500 BC
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