By Harry Levins
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 30 November 2005.
Beset by recruiting shortages, the Army National Guard is turning for help to the young men and women who show up for weekend drills at the local armory. The National Guard has made Missouri one of the first five states to give Guard members a $2,000 bonus for every new soldier they recruit. The bonus is available only to "traditional" Guard members -- the citizen-soldiers who drill monthly. Full-time Guard soldiers are ineligible.
Like the Regular Army and the Army Reserve, the National Guard has been coming up short in meeting its recruiting goals, in large part due to repeated deployments to Iraq.
Nationally, the Army Guard fell short by about 13,000 recruits for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. It wanted 63,000 recruits and got 50,219, said Jack Harrison of the National Guard Bureau in Washington.
For the same year, Missouri had hoped to sign up about 1,300 recruits for the Army Guard. "But we fell about 100 shy," said Capt. Tammy Spicer, a Guard spokeswoman in Jefferson City.
The Missouri Army Guard is authorized 7,900 people but now has about 7,600. Officials hope the new program will close the gap -- and maybe more. Spicer said Tuesday that the state's adjutant general, Brig. Gen. King Sidwell, "has a personal goal of 8,200. He doesn't set low goals."
Spicer said Missouri's selection as one of the first states for the new recruiting program -- the others are Iowa, Kentucky, West Virginia and North Dakota -- reflected success, not failure.
"Back in December '04, we were ranked 37th nationally in recruiting success," she said. "But by the end of the fiscal year, we ranked 12th. We've been innovative in recruiting -- and that's why we were picked for this program."
The National Guard hopes to have the program in place in all states by Sept. 30. Soldiers who want to take part must finish an online training program. A Guard soldier who steers somebody to a recruiter will get $1,000 when the recruit signs up and $1,000 more when the recruit actually goes off to basic training.
"Making the payments incremental is a way of making sure that the Guard soldier mentors the recruit before shipping off to basic," Spicer said.
The Illinois National Guard was unable to come up with its own recruiting figures on Tuesday.
From Washington, the Guard Bureau's Harrison cautioned that recruiting wasn't the whole story. Although the Army Guard missed its recruiting goal for the last fiscal year by 20 percent, he said, it re-enlisted about 104 percent of its re-enlistment goal -- almost 34,000 soldiers nationally.
"So we've kept our end strength at 95.2 percent of the 350,000 we're authorized," Harrison said. "Our retention rate is very strong."
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Citation: Harry Levins. "Guard offers its members bonus for recruiting others," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 30 November 2005.
Original URL: http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/nation/story/05054CCB28B3C45B862570C9001867FF?OpenDocument
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