Guard chief says dangers inflated

WASHINGTON – The dangers faced by American troops in Iraq have been exaggerated, adding to the difficulty of recruiting soldiers at home, the Army general in charge of National Guard forces said Tuesday.

The casualty rate for Guardsmen is low compared with any previous armed conflict, said Lt. Gen. Steven Blum.

He said he recognizes that every death is a tragedy for that person’s family. “But I lose, unfortunately, more people through private automobile accidents and motorcycle accidents over the same period of time,” he added.

“It is dangerous, but it is – I shouldn’t say it to this group but I’m going to – it is misrepresented, how dangerous it really is,” Blum said during a breakfast with defense reporters.

Surveys of recruit-age Americans and their parents have shown that fear of being killed or wounded in Iraq is one of the major reasons that young people are choosing other careers after high school. The National Guard also has been squeezed by a slowdown in the number of active-duty soldiers switching to the Guard.

Blum said more than 250,000 National Guard soldiers and airmen have been mobilized for active duty since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and 262 of them have been killed in the global war on terrorism. Pentagon casualty statistics show more than 90 percent of those deaths were in Iraq.

National Guard soldiers represent about 40 percent of the U.S. ground force in Iraq, although that is scheduled to decline substantially next year when the Army deploys two newly expanded active-duty divisions – the 101st Airborne and the 4th Infantry.

By next year, the level of National Guard commitment in Iraq will decline, Blum said, and that bodes well for a reversal of the decline in recruiting. He hopes to go from a total of eight Guard combat brigades and one Guard division headquarters in Iraq, totaling about 35,000 troops, to two or three brigades.

Blum said he does not expect the National Guard to achieve its recruiting goal for the budget year ending Sept. 30. “Is it likely? No,” he said, adding that he hopes to make up the difference in the next 18 months.