Hey Zawahiri, National Guard recruiting is way up

AP via Washington Times:

National Guard officials yesterday said recruiting has accelerated so much in recent months that they expect to expand the Guard even as the Bush administration proposes to shrink it.
For the first time since 1993, the Guard exceeded a quarterly recruiting goal, signing up 13,466 recruits in the final three months of 2005, up from 12,605 the previous fall, said the National Guard Bureau, the Pentagon office that administers the Guard.
Mark Allen, a National Guard Bureau spokesman, attributed the 7 percent improvement to a new advertising campaign, a large increase in financial incentives and a near doubling of the number of recruiters, from 2,700 to 5,100.
In a statement released yesterday, the Guard said it is "aggressively working" to reach the 350,000-troop level that it is funded for by the end of the current budget year on Sept. 30, despite Mr. Bush's call to cut the force next year to its current level of 333,000 troops.
It is unusual for a military organization such as the Guard Bureau to publicly suggest that it is moving in a direction that appears to differ from the administration's. Any talk of cutting the Guard is politically sensitive because Guard units are controlled by governors, except when they are mobilized by presidential order.

...
This has to be disappointing news to Zawahiri and John Murtha.

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