- WASHINGTON -- The war on
terrorism is setting historic - but not always welcome - benchmarks for
America's weekend warriors, especially the men and women of the Army's
National Guard and Reserve.
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- For the first time since World War II an infantry battalion
of the New York National Guard has been mobilized for combat. About 640
men and women of the 27th Infantry Brigade got word in late September that
they will be heading to Iraq this winter after training in northern New
York.
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- The 3,500 North Carolina National Guard troops preparing
for duty in Iraq represent the largest contingent from that state to be
mobilized for combat since World War II. The 30th Heavy Separate Brigade
was activated Oct. 1 and expects to remain on duty for up to 18 months.
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- Two Florida Guardsmen killed by hostile fire in Iraq
were the first reservists from that state to be killed in action since
World War II.
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- A Louisville, Ky., man, Sgt. Darrin K. Potter, became
the Kentucky Army National Guard's first combat death since the Vietnam
War when his military vehicle overturned and submerged in a canal in Baghdad
Sept. 29.
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- The Rhode Island National Guard suffered its first losses
to hostile fire since World War II when three soldiers from the 115th Military
Police Company were killed near Baghdad on Sept. 1.
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- As of Friday, 52 National Guard and Reserve troops had
died in the Iraq war. Although the Pentagon says it has no comparative
statistics readily available, that total apparently is the highest death
toll since the Vietnam War, a much longer conflict in which far fewer reservists
served.
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- Reservists have been called upon in virtually every U.S.
war over the past 15 years, but they play a vastly greater role in today's
military - partly because the active-duty force is stretched so thin around
the globe, partly because of the uncertain length of the war on terrorism,
and partly because the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, opened a new era in homeland
defense.
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- Citizen soldiers can no longer expect to do only the
minimum training -- one weekend a month and a two-week session each summer
-- nor expect to rarely, if ever, get called to active duty.
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- "Weekend warrior is dead," said Lt. Gen. H
Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, which oversees all reserve
forces. "The National Guard is and will continue to be used at a rate
that is unprecedented" in the 30-year history of the all-volunteer
military.
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- Soldiers with the Army Reserve's 310th Chemical Co.,
from Fort Polk, La., for example, which operates biological detection equipment,
were mobilized in October 2001 and remained on active duty in Afghanistan,
Kuwait, Iraq and elsewhere until August 2003.
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- "This is a new phenomenon," says Dan Goure,
a defense analyst at the private Lexington Institute.
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- The question is how long it will last. If the demands
on the Guard and Reserve ease in coming months, there may be no pronounced
effect on the military's ability to attract new people into the reserves
and to prevent an exodus among those citizen soldiers already on the rolls.
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- Blum said in a recent interview that he foresees a gradual
but steady decline in the number of reservists on active duty for the war
on terrorism, although he expects the total to remain above 100,000 for
the next two years. Today it stands at 169,279 - three-quarters of which
are Army. And that does not count the nearly 3,500 reservists on peacekeeping
duty in the Balkans.
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- But under a different scenario, such as a protracted
military commitment in Iraq or in Afghanistan, or the opening of a new
front in the war on terrorism, the Pentagon may have to use the Guard and
Reserve so frequently and for such long periods that it could break the
force.
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- "If I'm just brutish with regard to the treatment
of our people, then we won't have any people," Lt. Gen. James Helmly,
chief of the Army Reserve, said in an interview. "They'll tell us
... 'I'm out of here."'
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- Maj. Gen. Timothy Lowenberg, the Washington state Guard's
adjutant general, said in an interview that he met his recruiting goals
this year. Even so, he said, "I am very concerned, as are all military
leaders, about being able to minimize the frequency and duration"
of mobilizations.
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- Helmly believes that his 205,000 Reserve members accept
that they will be called up - and probably more than once.
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- That's a different mindset than reservists had become
comfortable with during the Cold War and even after the 1991 Gulf War,
when reservists who served were demobilized quickly after the fighting
stopped, reinforcing the conventional wisdom that short mobilizations would
be the norm.
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- Today's reservists enjoy much less certainty, and this
has led to disappointment and unease.
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- "A lot of the gnashing of teeth is about false expectations,"
Helmly said.
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- Frustration and anger among reservists' families can
be blamed in part, Helmly said, on the mistaken impression created by the
administration before and during the war that by this point "just
a few thousand troops" would remain in Iraq. Instead there are about
130,000 U.S. troops there, including an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 reservists.
Thousands more reservists are serving in Kuwait and other nearby countries.
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- So far, according to Blum and Helmly, there is no statistical
evidence of a drop-off in recruiting of reservists, although Blum said
intuition would suggest that recruiting would be harder now.
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- "Do I worry about it?" asks Helmly. "I
will tell you it's the No. 1 thing in my worry book."
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