Put on a sweater, I feel a draft

Yet another sign that we're running out of options to maintain the all-volunteer army. 40 percent of the troops in Irag are reservists, and that number will go up to 50 percent in the next batch. All of the combat brigades in the National Guard are there, and they'll need to come back. We're almost tapped, and nobody in the administration seems to be even looking at doing the obvious. (The obvious would be holding the elections, declaring victory, and replacing our troops with UN/NATO troops starting with the Shiite areas, who are bound to be happy with the new government. Of course, the idea of Bush going hat-in-had to the UN/NATO to ask for help is about as likely as him handing the twins over to a biker gang.)

From the article:

Army leaders are considering seeking a change in Pentagon policy that would allow for longer and more frequent call-ups of some reservists to meet the demands of conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, a senior Army official said yesterday.

Reservists are being used heavily to fill key military support jobs, particularly in specialty areas, but Army authorities are having increasing difficulty limiting the active-duty time of some normally part-time soldiers to a set maximum of two years, the official said. He described the National Guard's 15 main combat units as close to being "tapped out."
[...]
About 40 percent of the 150,000 troops now in Iraq have come from reserve ranks. That number will grow to 50 percent in the fresh group of forces deploying at the moment -- the third rotation of troops since the invasion in the spring of 2003. But with this rotation, the official said, the Army will have used all of the National Guard's main combat brigades.

Plans being drawn now for 2006 anticipate lowering the share of reservists to about 30 percent and relying more on active-duty soldiers. But even so, the Pentagon will continue to depend on reservists for such critical support jobs as civil affairs, engineers, medics and military police.

Under current policy, a reservist is not to serve on active duty for more than 24 months, although those months can be split among multiple deployments that occur over a period of years.

The change under consideration, the Army official said, would essentially make a reservist eligible for an unlimited number of call-ups but stipulate that no single mobilization would last more than 24 consecutive months. The official said the Army would attempt to use such expanded authority sparingly to avoid alienating soldiers.