National Guard and Reserve in crisis.(Insider Report)

In early October, an Army National Guard unit in Sacramento "that usually processes paperwork for other soldiers going overseas was called up to serve for more than a year in Iraq," reported the San Francisco Examiner. "The soldiers were told how to apply for life insurance and were told how much their children and spouses would receive if they were killed in action."

At about the same time, 800 members of the 98th Army Reserve Division in Rochester, New York, learned that they were assigned to a year-long tour in Iraq beginning in November. The unit, which normally trains reserve and active-duty soldiers here in the U.S., "is a non-combat unit that doesn't even have its own weapons or vehicles," reported Rochester's CBS affiliate KWTX. Lt. Gen. James Helmly, chief of the U.S. Army Reserve remarked: "This is a hard war and we, frankly, inside the Army Reserve have been not properly prepared for it."

The Iraq war has also ravaged the Army Reserve's Individual Ready Reserve (IRR), a pool of retired soldiers who can be mobilized in the event of a national emergency. "About 30 percent of the 3,664 Individual Ready Reserve soldiers who have been called to active duty failed to report for ...