Soldiers are leaving the Army National Guard at a faster rate than they are enlisting.
FILE - National Guard members take a staircase toward the U.S. Capitol building before a rehearsal for President-elect Joe Biden's Presidential Inauguration in Washington, Jan. 18, 2021. Soldiers are leaving the Army National Guard at a faster rate than they are enlisting, fueling concerns that in the coming years units around the country may not meet military requirements for overseas and other deployments.
The losses reflect a broader personnel predicament across the U.S. military, as all the armed services struggled this year to meet recruiting goals. And they underscore the need for sweeping reforms in how the military recruits and retains citizen soldiers and airmen who must juggle their regular full-time jobs with their military duties.
According to Gen. Daniel Hokanson, head of the National Guard Bureau, both the Army and Air Guards failed to meet their goals for the total number of service members in the fiscal year that ended last Friday. The Army Guard's authorized total is 336,000, and the Air Guard is 108,300. Baldwin said that as operations in Iraq and Afghanistan began to decline several years ago, states started to see higher than expected losses in personnel. In exit interviews, he said, troops cited a number of reasons why they weren't reenlisting. “But, unexpectedly, they found that one reason common to many of their soldiers was based on the perception that the war was over,” said Baldwin, adding that they had joined to serve their country, not make the Army Guard their career.
While the shortfalls for 2022 may be small percentages, the Guard is facing increasing losses over the next year due to the U.S. military's requirement that all troops get the COVID-19 vaccine. Currently about 9,000 Guard members are refusing to get the shot, and another 5,000 have sought religious, medical or administrative exemptions.
The cost of providing health care coverage to those who don't have it would be about $719 million a year, he said.
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