The Army Remedies A Serious Problem

The Washington Post reported last Friday that the Army has put an end to call-ups of inactive soldiers.

Despite intense pressure to fill manpower gaps, Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey said the Army has no plans for any further call-up of the Individual Ready Reserve (IRR) beyond the current level of about 6,500 soldiers. The IRR is a pool of about 115,000 trained soldiers who have left active-duty or reserve units for civilian life, but remain subject to call-up for a set period.

The Army also announced, in a memo released this week, that it will no longer involuntarily mobilize from the IRR an estimated 15,000 Army officers who have already completed their eight years of required military duty, stating that under a new policy it will offer them a chance to resign instead.

[...]

One of the most contentious issues involves thousands of Army officers who have completed their eight years of military duty but have been kept in the reserve pool indefinitely because they have not formally resigned their commissions -- a requirement some officers say they knew nothing of.

Unfortunately, however, the Army has no plans to recall soldiers who have served their time but have already been deployed.

[For some], the shift came too late. The Army will allow officers who fall under the policy to resign if they are still in the United States. But if they have already left for Iraq or other assignments, they will have to stay for the entire deployment. "If they have already been deployed, they'll be required to fulfill the terms of their mobilization orders," said Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, an Army personnel spokesman.

I was unaware that the Army was even pulling from its IRR list until one of my best friends found out two weeks ago that he was to be deployed to Iraq for a year and a half. However, the problem doesn't seem to be that soldiers no longer attached to active-duty or reserve units have been called up so much as those who are no longer even required to be on IRR status apparently have never been so informed.

Such was the case for my friend, a West Point graduate, who only last week found out that his service to the Army - including any obligation to remain on IRR status - was fulfilled in 2003 and thus was able to officially resign his commission. As he explains it:

Some people on the [IRR] list still have service obligations (e.g., their initial contract was for 5 years active and 3 years on the IRR, they have served say 6 years and have to stay on the list for 2 more years). The issue is that after those two years are up no one takes them off the list or lets them know that they can get off the list. Hence a bunch of officers (i.e. me) were no longer required to be on IRR (they started counting my obligation in 1994) but we didn't know that we were past our MSO (mandatory service obligation).

It's my understanding that soldiers on IRR have traditionally only been activated when the Army needed to fill specific needs, like staffing doctors, dentists, or perhaps in a war of this type, chemical engineers who may need to analyze seized weapons. But pulling everyday soldiers from IRR who've settled into civilian life, in many cases beginning new careers, building houses, and starting families - much less those who have already satisfied their service requirement - may not be the wisest way to attract new volunteers to the armed forces.

Thankfully the Army has made the smart decision to try to keep better tabs on those who have nobly served their country.