Rumsfeld memo raises Guard, Reserve training and pay issues

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said last month he fears that the training system for National Guard and reserve troops is "broken" and has ordered his deputies to review "the systems, procedures and business practices" of the military reserves and recommend fixes "before we discover they are not suited to the 21st century."

In an internal memo dated March 17 and obtained Tuesday by CongressDaily, Rumsfeld said the Pentagon has had "a series of difficulties over the past three years, where only after a period of serious problems with a [defense] system or process have we realized that we were still in the industrial age."

The secretary singled out the mobilization and deployment of Guard and reserve troops during the Iraqi conflict. While the current pay system can handle payments to so-called weekend warriors for their part-time drills, Rumsfeld said it is "seriously inadequate when we are mobilizing to the extent we have had to during the Iraq conflict." As of March 31, a total of 175,476 National Guard and reserve troops have been mobilized to active duty.

"I'm concerned about what we'll discover next that is broken," wrote Rumsfeld to a long-list of Pentagon and military officials in what one official called a "snowflake memo."

"You never know when they're coming and they float onto your desk," said the official, who read the memo but asked not to be identified.

Lawrence Di Rita, a special assistant to Rumsfeld, confirmed the existence of the memo. "This is the kind of thing the secretary does all the time," he said, adding, "He challenges [officials] to look at old systems" to review their usefulness.

Rumsfeld's memo did not include details about systems or procedures he highlighted in the concise, two-page memo. In some instances, he acknowledged that officials are working to solve the problems, but did not elaborate.

Rumsfeld called the balance between active and reserve components "clearly out of whack," but said Pentagon officials are "rebalancing" the two arms of the military.

Lawmakers have expressed concern that the current mix of skills among active and reserve forces is not properly balanced and the military relies too heavily on reserve troops for critical functions such as civil affairs that are key to nationbuilding efforts, such as those underway in Iraq.

The Pentagon has also publicly acknowledged the problem.

Rumsfeld also identified the deployment process for the war in Iraq as "broken," but added: "Now we are fixing it."

In addition, contingency plans for meeting various possible threats were "out of date," said Rumsfeld, and "the process for preparing them was antiquated, excessively long and not suitable for the 21st century."

The points hit on public statements made by military officials and lawmakers that the armed services need flexibility to quickly deploy reserve troops during a conflict.

Rumsfeld praised the Pentagon's work on the "operational side," but asked the agencies to review systems, procedures and business practices and advise him by April 16 of those the department needs to fix "before we need them."

"I'd like to try to get ahead of the curve," he added.

The memo was distributed to 21 recipients, including Army, Navy and Air Force secretaries, all undersecretaries and assistant secretaries of Defense, the joint chiefs of staff as well as the Central Command, which has overseen operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and all the other operational commands.