Boswell expresses concerns about volunteer army

Congressman Leonard Boswell — a member of the House Intelligence Committee — says it’s time for the U.S. to beef up its fulltime military and reduce reliance on the Guard and Reserve. Boswell is concerned that support from private-sector businesses that have employed Guard and Reserve troops will be reduced because of the long periods of service in Iraq. Boswell, a Democrat from Des Moines who is a retired career military officer, is afraid Guard and Reserve troops will quit their part-time military service because they’ve been called up for such long periods of time — and sometimes called up repeatedly. Boswell says he’s very concerned because the heavy reliance on part-time troops has become too great a burden for many, and it threatens the all-volunteer military. Boswell recently visited a hospital at a U.S. military base in Germany where U.S. troops injured in Iraq were being treated, and he says their morale was good, but the uncertainty about how long they’d be called to active duty “weighs heavy on them.” As for the mission in Iraq, Boswell says it’s crucial to engage more Iraqis in the search for weapons of mass destruction.Boswell says it’s going to be the Iraqi people who will lead U.S. forces to the hidden caches of biological and chemical weapons, and it’s Iraqis who will reveal “the bad people.”