...I'm okay with being REALITY-based.




Wednesday, May 19, 2004
      ( 9:03 AM )
 
Joke's on Us

So was the whole hubub about calling up inactive reserves a hoax from the Army so they could try and up their volunteer enlistments?

Thousands of recent U.S. Army veterans nationwide were told to choose by Monday a new assignment in the Army Reserve or National Guard -- meaning a potential return to active duty -- or the military would decide for them. The Army now says the order was a mistake.

[...]

The consequence of the error appears to be a sharp increase in enlistments in Oregon and elsewhere by reservists who feared being assigned a unit without their consent. They face possible deployment to the Middle East.

Army Reserve officials said the order issued in early May prompted a flood of calls from confused veterans, who are among the estimated 118,000 reservists on inactive status. The Pentagon is not yet forcing re-enlistments but is "screening" inactive reservists for possible call-up, a spokeswoman said.

[...]

Lt. Gen. James R. Helmly, commander of the Army Reserve, declined comment on how the mistake was made, a spokesman said. How the mistaken order was issued is a mystery, said Steve Stromvall, the civilian public affairs director for the U.S. Army Reserve Command in Atlanta.

"God only knows at this point where the miscommunication started," he said.

What is happening, said Collins, is that the Army Reserve has been screening soldiers to determine how many can be assigned to active units.


What isn't certain is whether these inactives can "undo" their voluntary re-enlistments based on the fact they only re-enlisted under threat of being drafted into units they didn't want to be in. This article clearly states that the move toward activating the IRR is still going forward - however, the pressure put on inactive reserves these last few weeks was totally bogus.

So now they have a bunch of new enlistments from people who thought they were being forced to re-enlist, and never would have volunteered otherwise. What with that news from Intel Dump about the Army cannibalizing itself, and the total ineptness in the handling of the prison atrocities, it seems like the entire command structure is faltering.

This whole tricking people into voluntarily re-enlisting is really low. However, it is pretty unsurprising considering who runs the DOD and the totaly lack of ethics he consistently displays.

| -- permanent link