By Charles Aldinger
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Army, stressed by global deployments, is offering re-enlistment bonuses of up to $10,000 to soldiers in Iraq (news - web sites), Afghanistan (news - web sites) and Kuwait, Army officials said on Monday.
Soldiers currently in those countries -- and others headed there in the coming three months to replace them -- could receive lump payments of between $5,000 and $10,000 for enlisting for at least three years of additional Army service, the officials told reporters.
The drive to keep troops came as the Army said it would prohibit soldiers serving in or rotating home from Iraq and Afghanistan this winter and spring from retiring or leaving the service for other reasons while there or for up to 90 days after returning to their home bases.
Col. Elton Manske, a spokesman in the office of the Army's deputy chief of staff, said the Army had budgeted $63 million for the re-enlistment program in the current fiscal year ending next Sept. 30.
"It (the money) is there and we are aggressively looking to get soldiers to take advantage of it," Manske said. But he said studies showed no indication that troops were preparing to leave the volunteer service in large numbers when their current contracts ended.
The American military, especially the Army, is suffering stress from global deployments of tens of thousands of troops in the wake of the 2001 attacks on America.
Officials said regular Army troops now in Iraq and Afghanistan who will rotate home in the coming months will not be allowed to retire or leave while they are there in order to maintain key "in-together, out-together" unit integrity.
Manske and other army officials said the 90-day "stop loss" period after the units return home was to allow soldiers whose enlistments are up or who wanted to retire after 20 or more years of service to muster out of uniform efficiently and to take advantage of job training for the civilian sector.
There are 1.4 million active-duty troops in the American military, including 480,000 Army soldiers, and some senior Army officers have privately called for increases in the number of troops in that service because they have borne the brunt of the deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.
REPLACING SOLDIERS
The Pentagon (news - web sites) is preparing to begin replacing the roughly 123,000 U.S. troops serving in Iraq and 11,000 in Afghanistan -- most of them Army soldiers -- with fresh troops. Among the first units rotating home beginning this month will be the 101st Airborne Division from Fort Campbell, Kentucky.
Members of both parties in Congress have argued that the Army is too small to perform its duties in Iraq, Afghanistan, South Korea (news - web sites) and elsewhere and needs thousands of more soldiers.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said he remains "absolutely open-minded" about a possible increase in the number of soldiers in the Army but told reporters earlier that he has seen no evidence of that need.
Ted Carpenter, a defense analyst with the Cato Institute think tank, said the "stop loss" decision undercuts the concept of an all-volunteer military, which America has maintained for three decades.
"Clearly, if large numbers of personnel have their terms extended against their will, that violates the principle of volunteerism," Carpenter said. "It also suggests just how strained the military is in trying to provide for the Iraqi occupation plus all the other U.S. obligations around the world."