Kerry blasts Bush for military call-ups

WASHINGTON -- Senator John F. Kerry's campaign yesterday seized on the Pentagon's call-up of thousands of former soldiers for duty in Iraq and Afghanistan to step up its charge that the Bush administration's management of the military has left the Army spread dangerously thin.

The move demonstrated the Kerry campaign's increasing willingness to engage Bush on what had been the president's perceived strength, his handling of national security.

Kerry advisers contend that the call-up of the Individual Ready Reserve is the result of a series of bad decisions and poor war planning by Bush and his top advisers. His campaign released a ''fact sheet" and brought forward a retired Air Force chief who campaigned for Bush in 2000 to reinforce its claims.

''The troops are paying the price for arrogant mismanagement and poor planning at the civilian policy level," retired Air Force Chief of Staff General Merrilll ''Tony" McPeak, a Kerry adviser, said in a conference call with reporters yesterday. ''The force we have in Iraq today is part of what I call an in-between force -- too small to solve the problem and too big to be supported by our force structure."

The return to duty of 5,600 former military officers and enlisted personnel is the latest issue which the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has sought to use to draw distinctions between himself and Bush in the area of national security. Both candidates are trying to persuade voters that they are the best stewards of the nation's defense, and recent polls have shown the public's confidence in the president's handling of the war in Iraq is slipping. Kerry has previously called for increasing the size the Army by 40,000 to meet the demands of overseas deployments, a move that has been repeatedly rebuffed by the White House despite growing support in Congress.

The Bush administration maintains that the call-up of soldiers that are required to keep in touch with the Army for as many as four years after leaving service does not mean the Army isn't large enough. ''I don't think the Army's too small. We're using a manpower pool that's available to us," Robert Smiley, a senior Army official who oversees training, readiness, and mobilization, told reporters yesterday. ''This is good personnel management. This is a group of people we can use to fill vacancies."

The troops, being culled from a total of 111,323 soldiers in the Individual Ready Reserve, are needed to fill jobs as truck drivers, engineers, and military police, officials said. Smiley said that more would probably be called in the future.

Army officials noted yesterday that this is not the first time they have tapped into the IRR. During the 1991 Persian Gulf war over 20,000 former soldiers were mobilized. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, 2,533 IRR soldiers have been called-up, 226 of them volunteers. Of the 5,600 IRR soldiers that now have 30 days to report to active duty, officials said more than 300 have volunteered.

But the Kerry campaign called the move ''a desperate attempt to raise more troops," noting that earlier this month the Pentagon also announced it was expanding the so-called stop-loss program, requiring soldiers to stay on for extended tours to complete their military service. It suggested that signaled they may not be ready to fight. These soldiers ''do not drill with a unit, and have no responsibilities other than to report their current address and contact information to the military," according to the fact sheet.

In addition, the campaign said, the Army has announced plans ''to utilize the Internal Revenue Service to track down thousands of soldiers." It added that some soldiers have reported being pressured by the Army to reenlist voluntarily or be sent against their will to Iraq or Afghanistan.

''A few weeks ago, the Pentagon announced an expansion of the stop-loss program, effectively forcing thousands of troops to extend their deployments," said Rand Beers, a top Kerry campaign foreign policy adviser and former member of President's Bush's National Security Council staff. ''At the time, that move was called a backdoor draft. Today that backdoor swung wide open."

In recent months Kerry has focused on Bush's handling of national security, accusing the White House of giving short shrift to beefing up homeland security, diverting resources from the hunt for Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda terrorists, and failing to fight aggressively enough the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in Iran and North Korea.

The campaign yesterday also sought the help of one of the administration's fiercest critics, Senator Carl M. Levin of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee.

Levin, who has unsuccessfully pushed to increase the size of the Army, told reporters that the Bush administration's failure to enlist the help of substantial numbers of international troops, including from Muslim countries, has put the Army, which has 141,000 troops in Iraq, under heavy strain.

McPeak, the retired Air Force general, and a growing number of retired senior military officers backing Kerry are considered among the Massachusetts senator's best weapons to contend that the president's policies have hurt national security.

''I did support this President Bush in 2000," McPeak said. ''Turns out I made a major mistake there."

Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com