LEWISTON – Maine Army National Guard leaders hope to boost recruitment with a new program aimed at getting soldiers to sign up their friends.
The bait: money.
Any traditional guard member who recruits someone will earn $2,000. And they can do it again and again.
“No one really knows what this will do,” said Maj. Lance Gilman, recruiting and retention commander for the Maine Guard.
The aim is to add more than 200 troops to state units.
The Maine Army National Guard currently has 1,939 soldiers in uniform. However, by this fall, leaders want those numbers to swell to 2,175.
“We’re quite a bit shy of our goal,” said Maj. Michael Backus, spokesman for the Maine Guard.
The state has lost some of its soldiers through retirement, Backus said. However, the loss has been sharper in many other states.
Maine is among the top 10 U.S. states in the percentage of its soldiers who re-enlist, said Backus, though numbers to prove his assertion were unavailable.
“We know we could do better,” he said.
The Pentagon-funded program was announced Tuesday by Gov. John Baldacci and Maj. Gen. John Libby. Similar announcements were planned in 25 other states.
To earn the $2,000 bounty, a soldier must do more than submit a name to a recruiter.
Guard members must complete a two-hour training course on the Internet, administered by a private contractor in Alabama called Docupak.
Completion of the course earns soldiers a $50 bonus and designates them as “recruiting assistants.”
Soldiers will then lend a hand through each piece of the process, supplying recruits with information and shepherding them through required exams.
The work will not take the place of full-time recruiters, though.
In some ways, the new program will merely formalize something guard members have been doing for decades, Backus said.
Traditionally, soldiers have steered friends and family to the guard.
“Now, they’re getting paid to do it,” Backus said.
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