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The retraining is part
of a larger Army effort that over the next five years will reassign about
100,000 reserve and active-duty soldiers in the service's biggest
restructuring in 50 years. The U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps are also
rebalancing their forces for new missions, but the Army's effort is by far
the largest and most ambitious. The aim is to redesign
the Army to be faster to the fight, to relieve the stress on a relatively
small number of U.S. Army National Guard and Reserve soldiers who have been
called up repeatedly in recent years, and to tap 500,000 reservists who have
not been activated at all in the past decade. Since 1990, according to the
Defense Department, only 7 percent of the 876,000 reserves assigned to
specific units have been involuntarily mobilized more than once. The Army's facelift
reflects Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's
broader vision to revamp the military to respond more quickly to a wide array
of threats and be more deadly. What our transformation
will do is permit us to deploy more agile, lethal, adaptable forces, General
Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, told a
House committee in late February. Right now, though, the
Army, in particular, is out of sync with those goals. We have too few guard
and reserve forces with certain skill sets that are in high demand and too
many guard and reserve with skills that are in little or no demand, Rumsfeld told Congress in late February. Getting this balance
right is critical for the Army's war- fighting abilities and the long-term
health of its recruiting and retention efforts. Army officials said this week
that retention rates for active-duty and reserve soldiers were lagging
despite re- enlistment bonuses of at least $5,000 If we continue to
stress these very high-use units, we risk losing them, said Thomas Hall, assistant
secretary of defense for reserve affairs. In some cases, the
Army's restructuring means converting national guard heavy combat brigades
into more mobile light-infantry units. In other instances, the changes are
more notable. The Army's effort to regain
its balance is in full swing here at Fort Leonard Wood, a huge training base
in the Ozarks of south- central By early next year, the
Army plans to convert 18 national guard field artillery batteries, or about
2,200 soldiers, into military police units. About 55 percent of the Army's
38,500 M.P.'s are in the national guard or reserve.
For these soldiers and
their trainers, who are also reservists, the challenges are enormous. The
eight-week course for military police trainees fresh from boot camp has been
compressed to four weeks for the national guard soldiers, largely because
they are already familiar with many aspects of soldiering. In a mock village of
about 12 brick buildings, including a bar, dry cleaners, hardware store and
single-family home, the soldiers tackle training scenarios familiar to any
military cop on the beat. Earlier in the training, the soldiers rehearsed
urban warfare tactics and detainee procedures, essential tasks for Once the soldiers
finish, they are bound for bases in the Trainers and some
students say changing from artillery to law enforcement has been a jolt to
many in the guard. There's a lot of resentment by some reservists who didn't
sign up to be M.P.'s, said Staff Sergeant Sherry
Sorensen, 25, a military police instructor from Lexington, Kentucky. But they
need to understand this is something the Army has to do. Or, as her boss,
Colonel Joseph Rapone 2d, commander of the 14th
Military Police Brigade here, put it, Some are more motivated than others. Major General John
Batiste, commander of the First Infantry Division, ordered his troops to
undergo a sweeping reorganization in advance of their deployment to take
responsibility of north-central Transformation is a
reality of this mission, Batiste said in an interview at One of those soldiers,
Captain Travis Van Hecke, normally commands Paladin
artillery but will enter We are now a
patrol-type infantry battalion, Van Hecke said. We
have a new focus. We are motorized infantry.
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