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End-strength increase eases new officers’ wait

For most Americans, Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ decision to increase the Army’s end strength by 22,000 soldiers is designed to relieve some of the pressure of repeated combat deployments. But for a legion of newly commissioned lieutenants in limbo, it offers the hope that we won’t have to wait so long before we get the opportunity to serve our country.

I am a recent Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) graduate and spent my summer waiting for space in the active Army to open up.

A few months before commissioning, Lt. Gen. Benjamin Freakley, commanding general of U.S. Army Accessions Command, visited my ROTC battalion. A fellow cadet stood up and asked, “I commission two weeks after my friend. Our rankings are nearly identical and we’re going to the same unit. But I get there six months later. How did this happen?” Good question.

In May, the Army ran up against its authorized end strength of 547,000 soldiers. One measure taken was to force the Army’s newest generation of officers to wait months before reporting to active duty, many not drawing pay until well into 2010.

The troop increase will allow young and motivated lieutenants, put on hold as the Army hit end strength, to be employed in the capacity to which they committed.

While commissioning classes have grown in the past two years to numbers unseen since the end of the Cold War, the required post-commissioning Officer’s Basic Courses have failed to expand to accommodate the increase in students. Keeping the schoolhouse sector small serves two goals for the Army. It keeps slots within the institutional Army to a minimum, freeing up more personnel for service in operational units. It also stanches the flow of lieutenants into the Army.

Because lieutenants from West Point are given priority slots for Officer’s Basic Course, the burden of the wait falls mostly on those coming out of ROTC. While many ROTC cadets have full tuition scholarships, well over a third do not and are under pressure to repay loans upon graduation. Unpaid, unemployed and indebted lieutenants are forced to spend months of their lives on call awaiting a job they were promised upon graduation.

In determining Army end strength, the Congressional Budget Office identifies two “key” determining factors: the number of personnel coming in and the retention rate of existing active-duty personnel. This calculation ignores the 55,000 to 60,000 non-deployable soldiers – a significant omission. With 190,000 troops in theater by the end of the year, this leaves only about 300,000 deployable Army personnel to rest and train in addition to staffing the institutional Army. We have too few people doing too many jobs, while an eager but increasingly disillusioned back bench waits to be put in.

The Army is neither meeting current operational demands nor sowing the seeds for a strong future force.

From 2005-2007, when casualties in Iraq were peaking, the stock market was roaring and the Army was hemorrhaging personnel, the commissioning class of 2009 was signing contracts committing to a minimum of four years active duty. Now while the nightly news and our friends in command tell us that we are needed, we sit at home wondering when the Army will come to the same realization.