Rowan Scarborough reports some counterintuitive news:
Army divisions that fought the past 12 months in Iraq have met virtually every re-enlistment goal, a sign that the all-volunteer force remains strong under the stress of frequent deployments and hazardous duty.
The Pentagon has been closely monitoring the re-up rate for five Army divisions that fought in Iraq for about a year. Some officials feared the time away from home and the gritty duty would prompt a large soldier exodus. After all, the war on terrorism is unchartered territory. The 30-year-old volunteer Army has never been this busy in combat.
But numbers compiled this week for the first half of fiscal 2004 show that those five combat units met, or nearly met, all retention targets for enlisted soldiers — the privates, corporals and sergeants who total 416,000 of the Army’s 490,000 active force.
“This tends to rebut armchair critics who said the sky is falling and the vultures are circling and the Army is gong to lose all its troops,” said Lt. Col. Franklin Childress, an Army spokesman at the Pentagon. “This is not true. The soldiers get it.”
Frankly, I’ve long been among the “armchair critics” on this one. Logically, one wouldn’t think that soldiers would continue to volunteer for hazardous duty and near-constant deployment to places they’ve never heard of at great cost to families. And one would think this doubly true of reservists who, by definition, aren’t military professionals first and foremost. Time and again over the past decade-plus, though, the facts prove that logic wrong. Indeed, it is almost always the case that units that deployed have higher retention rates than those that don’t. The only thing one can conclude is that, contrary to the idea that most of these folks are in it for free college and other benefits, most soldiers not only know what they’re signing up for but they actually want to do it.
