Push-me Pull-you Pentagon

Last updated on: July 21, 2004 at 2:35 pm by Fred Clark

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Push-me Pull-you Pentagon 2004-07-21T14:35:12-04:00 Fred Clark

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In the late 1990s, a friend of mine worked for a dot-com in Newtown Square, Pa., that was growing faster than it could hire people. She helped another friend get a job there and, on his 90th day of employment, she received a $2,000 recruiting bonus.

On his 93rd day, they were both laid off — along with about 70 percent of their coworkers. And they both received a generous severance package that included three months of salary. It seems that even as one set of executives was pushing more and faster recruitment, another set was planning massive layoffs.

The company is still around, sort of, but it's hugely diminished thanks to executives who couldn't keep it various branches working in harmony.

Right now, the U.S. military desperately needs more troops, as Mark Mazzetti of the L.A. Times reports:

In yet another sign of the strains on the U.S. military in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks and the Iraq war, the Pentagon for the first time is considering extending the mobilization of National Guard soldiers who will soon hit the federal limit of 24 months of active service, defense officials said Tuesday. …

Doing away with the 24-month limit would be certain to upset many long-serving soldiers and their families, who say they are increasingly bearing the weight of a military stretched beyond its capacity. Over the last year, the conflict in Iraq has forced the Pentagon to keep more than 100,000 soldiers and Marines in the country for months after the Bush administration had expected to draw down the troop presence.

The Pentagon has issued orders preventing military personnel from leaving active duty, extended the tours of thousands of troops when insurgent activity in Iraq crested in the spring, and pulled troops out of South Korea to fill out Iraq rotations.

Last month, the Army was forced to dip into its pool of Individual Ready Reserve soldiers — troops who are not members of a specific reserve unit but have unexpired obligations to complete their military service — looking for roughly 5,600 to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan.

The military has gotten so desperate that even a 67-yead-old retired Colonel has been called back to active duty (see Xan's "Grandpa Got Run Over by a Draft Board" at Corrente).

Oops. Did I say "the military"? I meant "the Army." See while the Army is so overstretched that it's recalling retirees and extending already extended limits, the Air Force and the Navy are apparently coping with the opposite problem.

To all the reservists and National Guardsmen serving extended active duty, who haven't seen their families or their civilian careers in months, the Air Force and the Navy have a simple message: "If you worked here, you'd be home by now."

Scripps Howard's Tara Copp reports:

Thousands of Air Force and Navy troops will be able to ditch the last year of their active-duty requirements and still keep their money for college because both branches need to shed thousands of people from their payrolls.

Under the "force shaping" plan, about 50,000 troops from both branches would eventually be cut. …

To meet 2005 reduction goals, both branches are offering incentives to leave as much as 12 months before a service member's duty would have ended.

WTF? There's a war on. No, wait, there are two wars on. But the divide between the different branches of our military is apparently so vast that the country's desperate need for troops is trumped by the "2005 reduction goals" of the Air Force and Navy.

Could anything like this be happening if we had a sane and/or competent secretary of defense?

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