Marine reservists to be called up

WASHINGTON – The Marine Corps is planning to call up as many as 2,500 Marine reservists for combat duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, dipping into a rarely used pool of troops to fill growing personnel gaps in units scheduled to deploy in coming months, officials said Tuesday.

The decision is the first time the Marines have resorted to involuntary call-ups since the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003, when about 2,000 Marines were ordered into service for a short duration. It means thousands of Marines across the country who have left active service soon could be forced to return.

The Marines would come from a pool of about 59,000 members of the Individual Ready Reserve, a group of Marines with specific skills who have left active duty and returned to civilian lives but are obligated to serve if called. Marine Corps officials said Tuesday that reservists in their first or last years of enrollment will not be subject to recall.

Officials said they would try to choose Marines with the smallest number of combat tours, leaving about 35,000 subject to the call-up.

Marines who receive a recall notice will have five months to report to active duty and could serve tours of 12 to 18 months, Marine officials said Tuesday.

President Bush authorized the involuntary recall on July 26, and Marine officials are waiting to determine what skills are in short supply for deployments early next year before sending out notices to individual Marines. The authorization allows the Marine Corps to activate involuntarily a maximum of 2,500 Marines at any one time.

The authority for involuntary recalls is until the end of the “Global War on Terror” – a conflict for which there is no realistic end in sight. That could mean thousands of Marines could be involuntarily activated over coming years.

Col. Guy Stratton, who is in charge of the Marines Corps’ manpower mobilization plans, told reporters at the Pentagon on Tuesday that the service is seeing a “shortfall” of volunteers from the IRR who had previously offered to go back to active duty to fill gaps in units deploying overseas.

Stratton said the “volunteer numbers are on a downward trend” and that outreach to certain specialists in recent months has met with resistance.

The shortfall, Stratton said, means that the Marines need about 1,200 people in a number of areas, from infantrymen to engineers, military police, intelligence personnel, aviation mechanics and truck drivers – even though 1,366 members of the IRR were still on active duty as of Monday.

By creating a pool of 2,500, the Marines would be able to train and deploy enough troops to fill the gap for two rotations.

“Since this is going to be a long war, we want to be able to use all our assets,” Stratton said.

The Army has used its IRR several times since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and has mobilized a total of about 5,000 soldiers from that pool over the past five years, most of them since the middle of 2004, according to the Army.

Some members of Congress have characterized the involuntary recalls and other measures as a “back-door draft” employed because the nation’s military is overly stressed by ongoing wars. The other measures include “stop-loss” orders, which keep soldiers on active duty longer than expected.

Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that the involuntary recall reflects the “wear and tear” on the U.S. military.

Retired Army Maj. Donald Vandergriff, who has studied military personnel issues, said the IRR call-ups are both a necessary and expected part of the U.S. military’s wartime operations.

“The IRR is there to fill the needs when there are gaps,” Vandergriff said. “That’s what that tool is there for.”