Key US Army ranks begin to thin

Army officials have expanded incentive programs to keep soldiers in, raising the ceilings on reenlistment bonuses for soldiers in specific jobs from $15,000 to $20,000. It's also paying as much as $150,000 to retain soldiers in special-forces jobs.

In addition, the service has created an extra bonus of $7,500 for those who reenlist during fiscal year 2007. Many of these bonuses are tax-free if the reenlistment occurs in a war zone.

A recent Associated Press review of bonus programs shows that the Army and Marine Corps will spend more than $1 billion on reenlistment bonuses during fiscal 2007, up from $174 million in 2003.

The service has also tried to reassign soldiers who have deployed multiple times to nondeploying jobs within the Army, says Army Sgt. Maj. Scott Kuhar, a senior Army career counselor in the Pentagon.

All this raises both short- and long-term concerns about the health of the Army, says Larry Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank in Washington.

"The Army has got a tough job," says Mr. Korb, a personnel chief at the Pentagon in the 1980s. "They didn't start this war and they probably didn't want to have it, but now they have to deal with the consequences of it."

Korb worries that various pay-to-stay programs that the Army is employing may have a long-term effect by retaining soldiers who might otherwise have gotten out. "You want the people who love the Army and want to stay in," he says. While the money keeps them in for now, Korb adds, they won't stay when the reenlistment cash disappears.

Army officials counter that the average bonus paid to reenlist a soldier – about $11,000 – is not enough to fundamentally change the nature of the Army's soldier population and is only helping get the service through this rough period.

Others are not sounding the alarm, at least not yet. One who does not see a crisis is Bernard Rostker, who left as head of the Pentagon's personnel department in 2000. "There is going to be burnout, and this war is burnout No. 1," says Mr. Rostker, a senior fellow at the RAND Corp. "The miracle is that the force is still with us, not that we're down from 96 to 84 percent. To me, that's a good news story."

Army officials have found one interesting trend among soldiers who've been polled informally on what is driving them away: While many joined the service to go to combat in a war zone, it's the lack of time at home, or "dwell time," that hurts, Sergeant Major Kuhar says.

Under a new policy, units will not deploy with less than 12 months of time at home. But the larger goal is to give them two years between deployments – a goal the military won't reach anytime soon.

"The No. 1 thing was dwell time," Kuhar says. "It came back loud and clear to us that they just want more time with their families or with their friends before they deploy."

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