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December 29, 2003

Stop Loss Blues

In addition to the risks every soldier overseas is taking from hostile fire, many soldiers are facing another enemy that, while far less deadly, can be far more painful: stop-loss. Stop-loss refers to the military's refusal to allow certain (or all) personnel to leave the service during times of emergency. Since the September 11 attacks, stop-loss has been used almost continuously to maintain certain personnel in the ranks who would other wise have retired or left the service when their contracts expired. When a unit is placed under stop-loss orders, their original retirement or ETS orders no longer apply. It doesn't matter if you were getting ready to retire or leave; once the stop-loss is announced, you won't be going anywhere until it is rescinded. Many military experts who have been calling for a larger military are using stop-loss as an example that our forces are too small. While I agree with the goal of expanding the force, the stop-loss doesn't necessarily prove the case, though.

Stop-loss was first used prior to the Gulf War. It was intended to maintain unit integrity as forces went to war. There were no manpower issues in the first Gulf War. While we did send a large number of forces to Saudi Arabia, we still had plenty of other forces available for other missions. The concern was based more on the difficulties of integrating new soldiers into a unit just prior to entering combat. The Army performs a similar exercise prior to many units' CTC rotations, freezing all personnel in place so that the unit will have time to train everyone on SOP and will not go into simulated combat conditions with inexperienced personnel. Prior to CTC rotations people can still retire and ETS, of course, but CTC rotations are only mock combat. It's hardly surprising that unit leaders wouldn't want anyone to go in the weeks leading up to real combat. The military's more extensive use of stop-loss is quite understandable in view of the numerous combat operations U.S. forces are currently involved with, regardless of the manpower situation.

Of course, just as stop-loss doesn't prove the military has a manpower shortage, the fact it was used when there was certainly no manpower shortage doesn't prove that there isn't one now. More importantly, it doesn't address the question of the pending manpower shortage U.S. forces will face. As I have argued many times, the reason we need to expand the Army is not because it doesn't have enough personnel to do its current missions, but because it will probably not have enough personnel to conduct future missions. Stop-loss can hold soldiers for a time, but it sends a strong message to all soldiers that their enlistment documents are not ironclad guarantees that they'll be able to leave when they want. Just as many reservists are learning that 'one weekend a month, two weeks a year' doesn't apply anymore, many active soldiers are discovering that a two year extension to their enlistment could really mean an indefinite expansion of their military responsibilities. These issues will almost certainly affect recruiting, making it difficult for the services to refill their ranks once the stop-loss orders expire.

The Bush Administration was roundly criticized after September 11 for not calling on the American people to lend a hand in the war. While I don't subscribe to the notion of the benefits of shared suffering, the President would have done well to use the patriotism and anger following September 11 to expand the Army, and to call on Americans to volunteer for service in the military. Now it is probably too late to make such a call, so other means will be required to expand the Army, such as improved benefits. Even without expanding the force, such new enticements will be required to keep people enlisting for the service, otherwise the Army will eventually simply not be capable of fulfilling all of its missions. Calling for a few extra divisions now would go a long ways towards eliminating that problem before it becomes one.

Update: Jim Henley offers an alternative solution: pulling our troops out of Europe and Korea to reduce our other committments. This might be sufficient, as we've got two brigades in Korea and two-plus in the Balkans as well as four brigades normally stationed in Germany. That's more than two divisions, so it would probably go a very long ways towards resolving our manpower problems, especially because the units in the Balkans are all drawn from National Guard brigades. Whether it's feasible politically is another question, but I don't see that it would be any less feasible than paying the costs to build two new divisions from the ground up. In fact, it would probably be more feasible, albeit it would give people yet another reason to scream about 'unilateralism' and so on. But they'll scream regardless of what we do, so there's little point in worrying about that.