{"id":4866,"date":"2011-09-26T15:12:21","date_gmt":"2011-09-26T19:12:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=4866"},"modified":"2011-09-29T09:21:59","modified_gmt":"2011-09-29T13:21:59","slug":"as-fort-drum-booms-soldier-cuts-loom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2011\/09\/26\/as-fort-drum-booms-soldier-cuts-loom\/","title":{"rendered":"As Fort Drum booms, soldier cuts loom"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Fort Drum is in the middle of a huge expansion right now, but with the US government facing a deep budget crisis, the Army is moving toward massive cuts in the number of enlisted men and women over the next five years.<\/p>\n<p>A total of roughly 50,000 soldier positions will be cut.<\/p>\n<p>According to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.armytimes.com\/news\/2011\/09\/army-to-cut-nearly-50000-soldiers-over-5-years-092511\/\">the widely respected Army Times<\/a>, the downsizing will be on a scale that matches the post Cold War cuts of the 1990s.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Lt. Gen. Thomas P. Bostick, service personnel chief&#8230;said the pending drawdown initially will focus on the  temporary 22,000-soldier increase launched three years ago to support  the Afghanistan troop surge&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>The  second phase of the drawdown involves 27,000 soldier spaces that were  added to end strength during the Grow the Army program, leaving the  service with 520,400 active-duty soldiers on Sept. 30, 2016.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>In all that represents roughly a 9% cut in the number of soldiers on active duty.\u00a0 It&#8217;s unclear how that force reduction will affect operations at Fort Drum.<\/p>\n<p>Those job cuts will sting especially hard in many rural, blue collar towns, where the recession has made a stint in the Army a far more attractive starting career opportunity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Fort Drum is in the middle of a huge expansion right now, but with the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[10,997,6561],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4866"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4866"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4866\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4867,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4866\/revisions\/4867"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}