Army Org: How They Get Soldiers

[jmowreader]

Troops don't just sprout like mushrooms. There is a long, formal procedure for acquiring them.

Step 1 is to forecast a need for a soldier in a particular Military Occupational Specialty (MOS). The process takes into account many things, including present and future fill rate (ratio of soldiers currently in MOS and grade to soldiers needed in that MOS and grade), rate at which soldiers separate from the service, rate at which they reenlist... From all this, and far more, they come up with a number of soldiers needed at the permanent party level.

Step 2 takes this a little farther: How many soldiers do we need to enlist to gain one soldier at a permanent party unit? This takes into account soldiers who fail basic training, soldiers who fail advanced individual training (AIT) and go to a different MOS, soldiers who can't get security clearances, soldiers who get discharged while in AIT, and so on. This number varies according to MOS. It is harder to get troops through a course that requires foreign language proficiency or the ability to copy Morse code than it is to get them through...oh, let's say infantry school. Once we have gone through all of this, the call goes down to US Army Recruiting Command: get us fifteen people to train to be military police. We would prefer six college grads and nine high school grads, and we want half of them to be females over 66 inches tall.

Step 3 is up to USAREC. They send recruiters out all over America to find fifteen prospective MPs. Our recruiters work and work and come up with 25 candidates. Of them, five aren't qualified to be in the Army and the other five aren't qualified to be MPs but are suitable for other MOS. The twenty people sign on the line, raise their right hands and head off for basic training.

Steps 4-5 happen at the basic training installation. The first step is reception station. You get your uniforms, your shots, your head shaved...by the time they're done, a few more prospective MPs are now prospective something else because the MP school didn't like what they saw. (One example: There are several tests you must pass to get a military driver's license, and if you don't pass a particular one of them you can't get a driver's license to operate a vehicle with a rotating light on top of it. If you can't drive that kind of vehicle, you can't be an MP.) Let's say two of them are going to be supply room specialists. Everyone else goes to basic.

In basic training several things can happen that can get the soldier put out under the Trainee Discharge Program. Let's say two more of our MPs drop out along the way.

Step 6 is military police school. During this course, say four more troops drop out. Now we're down to nine soldiers who walk across the stage, swear the MP Creed and receive their MP brass. If they wanted ten MPs, they now have a shortage situation; if they only wanted eight, they've got an overage.

During step 6 each new MP receives his or her first duty assignment.

This is an ongoing process.