Shaking slump, Army National Guard sees boost in recruits

WASHINGTON -- The Army National Guard, which has suffered a three-year recruiting slump, has begun to bring in soldiers in record numbers, aided in part by an initiative that pays Guard members $2,000 for each person they enlist.

The Army National Guard said last week that it has signed up more than 26,000 soldiers in the first five months of fiscal 2006 -- its best performance in 13 years. At this pace, Guard leaders say they are confident they will reach their goal of boosting staffing levels from the current 336,000 to the congressionally authorized level of 350,000 by the end of the year.

''Will we make 350,000? The answer is: Absolutely," said Lieutenant General H. Steven Blum, National Guard bureau chief.

The rebound is striking because, since 2003, the Army National Guard has performed worse in annual recruiting than any other branch of the US military. In addition, the Guard was shrinking while it was being asked to shoulder a big part of the burden in Iraq. Together with the Army Reserve, it supplied as many as 40 percent of the troops in Iraq while also dispatching tens of thousands of members to domestic disasters.

Today, the Guard is surpassing its goals and is growing in numbers. It has been a welcome boost for an all-volunteer Army stretched thin by unprecedented deployments. In recent months, the Guard enlisted nearly as many troops as the active-duty Army, even though it is a much smaller force.

Indeed, the Army National Guard, present in about 3,500 US communities, will launch pilot programs this year to recruit for the entire Army.

''We're seeing quantum leaps," said Lieutenant General Clyde Vaughn, director of the Army National Guard. A driving force in this year's success, Guard leaders say, is that thousands of guardsmen have returned from Iraq and are reaching out to friends, old classmates, and co-workers; these efforts tend to widen contacts.

Guard members ''are staying with us and want to fill up units with their neighbors and friends," Blum said in an interview.

The prospect of serving in a violent Iraq is still part of the equation for potential recruits, and Army officials say that more frequent deployments have hurt recruitment for the active-duty Army, which began suffering shortfalls last year.

The Guard has tried to address that concern by establishing a rotation cycle of one year abroad for every five years at home.

''Fear of the unknown hurts people. We want to take away the fear," said Major Kristine Wood, the recruiting commander for West Virginia. Since 2004, the Guard has had nine brigades deployed in Iraq and elsewhere, but that figure will decline to two by year's end, officials say.

One factor in the recruiting success is the initiative, expanded to 22 states in December, that made 31,000 Guard members ''recruiting assistants" who can earn $2,000 for every enlistee -- $1,000 when the recruit signs a contract and anot$1,000 when he or she enters boot camp or completes four months of service.

West Virginia was one of five pilot states to launch the program in November.

Today, the new program's recruits are coming in fast, growing from 10 a day to more than 120 one day last week.

The active-duty Army has also met its recent monthly goals. But that is in part because the Army had set the goals significantly lower for the first part of the fiscal year, banking on dramatic increases in recruiting this summer to meet its annual target of 80,000.

The fresh wave of recruitments arose at a critical time, as the Army National Guard faced funding cuts based on manpower shortfalls. Guard strength declined to 331,000, after it met only 80 percent of its enlistment goal last year.