COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Leaving Military: Stop-Loss
Army Reservists Ordered for Screenings
Associated Press
June 13, 2007
WASHINGTON
- For the first time since the Iraq war began, the Army is notifying
thousands from a special category of reservists that they must report
this summer for medical screening and other administrative tasks.
The decision to issue "muster" orders for 5,000 members of the
Individual Ready Reserve, or IRR, is not a prelude to a new
mobilization or deployment of reservists to Iraq, an Army spokesman
said. Instead it is part of a new effort to fix an IRR call-up system
that failed on multiple fronts early in the Iraq war.
One problem was that the Army simply could not contact many of its IRR
members; it had allowed them to ignore the requirement that they notify
the Army of a change in residence. Some turned out to be deceased;
others were physically unfit for duty or faced personal problems that
barred them from serving.
To correct that the Army is now requiring that they show up in person
for what it calls a one-day "physical muster." The idea is to ensure
that when and if more IRR members are needed for Iraq or other
active-duty deployments the Army will at least know which are fit for
duty and where to find them.
The Army planned to announce the decision on Thursday.
Eventually all IRR members will get the order to report for screening; the first 5,000 are considered a test group.
IRR members are people who were honorably discharged after finishing
their active-duty service but have not yet completed the eight-year
commitment they made when they joined the Army. While in the IRR they
are not required to train; they are not paid, and thus many believed
they had no further active-duty obligation. Some are former officers
who chose not to resign their commission and thus remained on the IRR
rolls.
There are now about 78,000 members of the IRR, down from more than 110,000 three years ago.
An Army spokesman, Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, said the 5,000 who are
receiving "muster" orders this month were picked at random, and they
are not necessarily in line to get mobilized and sent to Iraq.
The first 5,000 will receive orders to report to one of four reserve
centers - in Tacoma, Wash.; Fort Totten, N.Y.; Fort Meade, Md.; or Los
Alamitos, Calif. - and will be paid a $176 stipend once they finish the
one-day process, Gall said. All 5,000 live within a 50-mile radius of
one of the reserve stations, he said.
The reporting is mandatory. It will begin in mid-July and run through August.
The last time the Army required IRR members to report to a reserve
station for administrative processing was 2000, according to Raymond
Gall, a spokesman for the Army's Human Resources Command in St. Louis.
After that the Army considered it too expensive to repeat, but the Iraq
experience changed Army minds.
"The IRR pool is not in the kind of shape we would like it to be," Gall said.
Prior to the Iraq war, IRR members were rarely called to active duty -
and many believed they never would be called - but when the Army found
itself stretched by unexpected combat demands in Iraq in the summer of
2004 it began issuing mobilization orders. Hundreds of surprised IRR
members refused to report or simply ignored their mailed mobilization
orders, and the Army realized it had lost control of the situation.
About 5,700 of the approximately 10,700 IRR members who have been sent
mobilization orders over the past three years requested that their
mobilization date be delayed or that they be exempt from service, and
nearly 90 percent of those requests were granted by the Army, according
to Army figures as of March 7.
There are now about 2,000 IRR members on active duty, mostly in Iraq.
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