As demands on the National Guard and reserves grow, the Defense Department
and private sector are hungry for better data to assess the economic impact
of deployments, officials said.
“If the current tempo continues … we may well begin to see stress
to the business community,” said Jeffrey Crowe, chairman of the U.S. Chamber
of Commerce. “We have no good numbers of the number of companies affected,
of sole proprietorships closed or the number of overtime hours of coworkers.”
The Defense Department also recognized that its rough estimates of the civilian
jobs from which soldiers are pulled are not adequate to meet the Pentagon’s
internal needs, officials said. In response, the Pentagon this year formed the
civilian employment information program. Some of the overall results from data
collected may be made public and used to fill the gaps in knowledge lamented
by the Chamber of Commerce.
The program directs Guard and Reserve members to register information about
their civilian employer and job skills on special websites, run by the defense
manpower data center (DMDC), in order for the department to meet legally defined
requirements.
The Pentagon is required to give consideration to civilian employees who hold
jobs deemed necessary to national interest when considering members for recall.
This requirement is designed to ensure that members with critical civilian skills,
such as medical and safety professionals, are not called up in numbers beyond
those needed.
Additionally, the Pentagon needs the information to inform employers of their
rights and responsibilities under the Uniformed Services Employment and Re-employment
Rights Act.
“The Defense Department is essentially the end user,” said Lt.
Col. Bob Stone, a spokesman for the Army Reserve. For anyone else to have access
to raw data “would probably be a violation of the privacy act,”
he said.
However, once DMDC collates the data, that information will be made public,
giving percentages based on precise data. “It’s a secondary consideration,”
Stone said. “But if this database gets populated, we should be able to
ascertain, for example, how many deployed soldiers are self-employed, very quickly.”
The information, self-reported by soldiers using on-line forms, is trickling
in service-by-service. The Marines lead the pack, with 30 percent of the select
reserve and 13 percent of the ready reserve reporting by the end of May. Other
services are moving slower, putting in doubt the ambitious targets set by Pentagon
officials, who wanted 75 percent of the select reserve and half the ready reserve
reporting by the end of 2004.
Stone said that public relations campaigns related to the project are ongoing
or yet to be started, and that the Marines operate their own website to collect
the data, rather than using a DMDC portal.
“We may have missed an initial window of opportunity on units mobilizing
for Operation Iraqi Freedom II and those coming back from OIF I,” Stone
said.