National Guard Recruitment Plunges

(CBS/AP)  National Guard recruitment appears to be the latest casualty of the war in Iraq.

Enlistments have fallen about 30 percent short of recruitment goals during the past two months, according to the New York Times. The Guard is now offering bigger signing bonuses and taking other steps to slow the slide.

In a related development, the chief of the Guard said the organization needs $20 billion in vehicles, radios and other equipment over the next three years to perform all the overseas and homeland security missions it is being assigned.

Service in the Guard has often been viewed as a part-time job, but that is no longer the case. About 40 percent of the U.S. troops in Iraq come from the Guard or the Army Reserve.

And about 50 percent of the Guard's personnel needs have been met by soldiers leaving active service, but many of the departing GIs now view Guard service as a potential ticket back to Iraq or Afghanistan and are not signing up.

As of Sept. 30, 2004, more than 90,000 members of the Army Guard had been deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan or other countries considered the front lines on the war on terrorism. More than a third have been deployed more than once, Army statistics show.

"We're in a more difficult recruiting environment," said the Guard's commander, Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum.

The Guard is increasing its force of recruiters by 1,400 to bring in young people with no previous military service.

In some cases it has tripled the cash bonus for joining, or rejoining, the Guard with a six-year commitment, Blum said. A Guard member who has served in the military before will now receive $15,000 as a bonus — tax-free if the member signs up while deployed overseas.

The sales pitch for the Guard has also changed, Blum said.

"We are correcting some of our recruiting themes and slogans to reflect the reality of today," he said. "We're not talking about one weekend a month and two weeks a year and college tuition. We're talking about service to the nation."

Blum also told reporters at the Pentagon that the Army Guard is seeking $7 billion in equipment in an emergency spending measure to pay for U.S. military operations overseas.

Blum insisted that troops going into Iraq are receiving equipment on par with their counterparts in the regular Army. It was a member of the Tennessee National Guard who last week challenged Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld about armoring vehicles in the unit.

Blum said the Tennessee unit would not enter Iraq without every vehicle having some kind of armor. The unit's commander reported to Blum personally that the armoring was completed, he said.

Blum also tried to interpret the soldier's claim that he and his comrades "dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass" by saying it is common for soldiers to cannibalize spare parts from damaged vehicles at military salvage yards, much like auto repair shops take working parts from wrecks at the junkyard. He denied soldiers were going to actual landfills.

As of this week, 144 members of the Army and Air Guards had been killed and 1,158 wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan since the Sept. 11 attacks. Most casualties were Army Guardsmen serving in Iraq.