***** Army exceeds retention goals By Jon R. Anderson, Stars and Stripes European edition, Friday, November 7, 2003
. . . "We needed 51,000 soldiers to re-enlist, and we got 54,151," said Sgt. Maj. James Vales, a senior retention manager at Army headquarters in Washington.
Of those, Vales said, 1,955 soldiers re-enlisted at the last minute, taking advantage of an 11th-hour $5,000 bonus offered in the last two weeks of the fiscal year. Nearly half of those takers were midcareer soldiers with fewer than 10 years in the Army, he said.
Re-enlistment quotas are designed to help manpower managers keep the Army at full strength with 480,000 active-duty soldiers, Vales said.
This year's re-enlistment success comes after the Army dropped its goals twice over the past 12 months. Initially, Army officials had tasked retention noncommissioned officers to keep 57,000 soldiers from getting out of the Army.
"The goal for careerists was totally unattainable," said Sgt. Maj. Luis Santos Jr., referring to the re-enlistment quota for soldiers who had already spent 10 years in uniform and are widely considered the easiest to persuade to re-enlist because they're over the halfway hump to a 20-year retirement. Santos is the top retention manager in Europe.
In response to the outcry from retention NCOs in the field, the goal was quickly reduced by 3,000 troops at the beginning of the fiscal year. A few months later, another 3,000 troops were dropped from the first-termers' goal. . . .
- Stars and Stripes reporter Kent Harris contributed to this report.
<http://www.estripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=17852&archive=true> *****
-- Yoshie
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