Gen. Peter Schoomaker, testifying Dec. 14, said that the policies of restricting access to these soldiers were “not right.”

With 55 percent of the Army in the National Guard or Army Reserve, “recurrent, predictable and assured access” to them during a time of war was “critical to readiness. … We need to reframe our mobilization policies and practices [which were] written 50 years ago” for a conscripted force at a time when the reserve components’ role was that of a strategic reserve.

He said that there were three options before the Department of Defense: reduce the demand for forces – “something we do not control;” grow the active component – “a wise and prudent action; optimistically, we could add 6,000 to 7,000 soldiers a year” and also realize that in such a move there would also be an impact on equipment needs; or gain the necessary authority to access the reserve components.

Current Defense Department policy limits that access to 24 continuous months.

Many of the guardsmen and reservists who have been mobilized served between 15 and 18 months on active duty. “The reason we went to the 16-month model” to get 12 months “boots on the ground” in Afghanistan and Iraq, was the continuation of the Cold War practice of having individuals and units re-certified as ready after they arrived at the mobilization site, Schoomaker said.

This policy translates into having about 90,000 soldiers -- of the more than 520,000 guardsmen and reservists available -- for mobilization according to a chart shown at the hearing. Its headline was: “We’re out of Schlitz,” referring to an advertisement for a popular beer in the 1960s.

Telling the congressionally-created Commission on the National Guard and Reserve that the deployment cycle in the war on terrorism was “unprecedented” for the All-Volunteer Force and was running four to five times what it was in the Cold War, Schoomaker said that burden on the 507,000 soldiers in the active force was great.

Soldiers in the active force now are spending about one year at home before deploying again.

The Army’s force generation model would have active duty soldiers spend one year deployed and two at home. Soldiers in the Army Reserve would spend one year deployed and four at home. Soldiers in the Army National Guard would spend one year deployed and five at home.

“We must start this clock again,” Schoomaker said, while banging his hand on the table. “We must change this policy.”

Testifying the day before, David Chu, under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, told the commission that the reality was different. “The issue is what commitment have we made to the guard, the reserve and active force. … We need to be judicious and prudent” when looking at the changing policies regarding access to guardsmen and reservists who have been previously mobilized.

“We take volunteers all the time.” He added that the turnover in reserve component units run between 15 and 20 percent annually, and that soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines who had never been deployed would be available for mobilization.

To meet deployment needs in all components, soldiers from one unit have been sent to another to ensure that the first unit was fully manned with soldiers who were qualified in their military specialties.

This process -- called cross-leveling -- has grown as the war on terrorism continues into its fifth year, Arnold Punaro, commission chairman and a retired major general in the Marine Corps Reserve, said.

Citing Army statistics, he said Army Reserve units, that had originally seen 3 to 6 percent of its soldiers coming from other units in 2002, were now showing 62 percent of the soldiers from the reserve being cross-leveled to a deploying unit.

He called the practice “evil.”

Schoomaker said, “Military necessity dictates that we deploy organized, trained, equipped cohesive units – and you don’t do that by pick-up teams.”

In his testimony, Chu said that training together for six months before deployment restored unit cohesion.

“This is a historic problem,” Schoomaker said, citing the nation was not prepared for war in 1941, 1950 and 2001.

In the active force, armored divisions, airborne divisions and light divisions varied not only with each other but, within the same category.

In 2001, the active Army had 481,000 soldiers and has plans to grow temporarily to 512,000.

Adding to the problem was the fact that in the guard and reserve “you find more structure than people,” and that means “you have hollow units.”

Filling out those undermanned units at the start of the war on terror with volunteers was “the number one mistake,” Schoomaker said. “The best volunteer.”

But the impact on unit cohesion was high especially for follow-on deployments.

Maj. Gen. R. Martin Umbarger told the commission that “A lot of our volunteers were from our high-speed units. That was probably a mistake.”

Umbarger is Indiana’s adjutant general and chairman of the National Guard Association of the United States.

Chu said that the department is changing the training paradigm that requires units to be recertified at mobilization stations. “More should be accomplished a in non-mobe status” with three weeks or longer annual training and fewer drills during the year.

“That’s what they’re doing with the Stryker Brigade in Pennsylvania,” Thomas Hall, assistant secretary of defense for reserve affairs, said.

Maj. Gen. Raymond Rees, who has served three times as Oregon’s adjutant general, added, “What I’m seeing now is a veteran force. … We need to shorten the time that people are mobilized.”

In addition to the personnel questions, Schoomaker said, “We entered this war flat-footed” with a $56 billion shortfall in equipment. In the time between the ending of the Cold War in the late 1980s and the 9/11 attacks, only 16 percent of Defense Department spending on equipment, research and development and science and technology was being done by the Army -- and that has had a major impact on the Army now, he said.

At the same time, “We are using equipment over there at a huge rate,” Schoomaker said, citing the example of a Stryker being driven 40,000 miles in a year when the Army’s peacetime requirement for the vehicle was 800 miles.

He said that the $17.1 billion in the recently passed supplemental spending bill would meet 20 to 30 percent of the Army’s equipment reset needs, and estimated that it would take three to five years more of similar spending to meet the equipment needs.

What has also changed is how the Army measures its readiness, Schoomaker told the commission. “What we’re doing is reporting against 100 percent” of the manning, training and equipping requirement.

As he has in the past, Schoomaker called the 3.7 percent of the gross domestic product being spent on defense as “historically low during wartime,” and he estimated the nation needs to spend between 5 and 6 percent of the GDP to fight the war on terror.

The commission is to make its final report to Congress by Jan. 1, 2008.