Pentagon trying to close the guardsmen employer data gap.

As demands on the National Guard and reserves grow, the Defense Department and private sector are hungry for better data to assess the economic impact of deployments, officials said.

"If the current tempo continues ... we may well begin to see stress to the business community," said Jeffrey Crowe, chairman of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "We have no good numbers of the number of companies affected, of sole proprietorships closed or the number of overtime hours of coworkers."

The Defense Department also recognized that its rough estimates of the civilian jobs from which soldiers are pulled are not adequate to meet the Pentagon's internal needs, officials said. In response, the Pentagon this year formed the civilian employment information program. Some of the overall results from data collected may be made public and used to fill the gaps in knowledge lamented by the Chamber of Commerce.

The program directs Guard and Reserve members to register information about their civilian employer and job skills on special websites, run by the defense manpower data center (DMDC), in order for the department to meet legally defined requirements.

The Pentagon is required to give consideration to civilian employees who hold jobs deemed necessary to national interest when considering members for recall. This requirement is designed to ensure that members with critical civilian skills, such as medical and safety professionals, are not called up in numbers beyond those needed.

Additionally, the Pentagon needs the information to inform employers of their rights and responsibilities under the Uniformed Services Employment and Re-employment Rights Act.

"The Defense Department is essentially the end user." said Lt. Col. Bob Stone. 2 spokesman for the Army Reserve. For anyone else to nave access to raw data "would probably be a violation of the privacy act," he said.

However, once DMDC collates the data. that information will be made public, giving percentages based on precise data. "It's a secondary consideration," Stone said. "But if this database gets populated, we should be able to ascertain, for example, how many deployed soldiers are self-employed, very quickly."

The information, self-reported by soldiers using on-line forms, is trickling in service-by-service. The Marines lead the pack, with 30 percent Of the select reserve and 13 percent of the ready reserve reporting by the end of May. Other services are moving slower, putting in doubt the ambitious targets set by Pentagon officials, who wanted 75 percent of the select reserve and half the ready reserve reporting by the end of 2004.

Stone said that public relations campaigns related to the project are ongoing or vet to be started, and that the Marines operate their own website to collect the data, rather than using a DMDC portal.

"We may have missed an initial window of opportunity on units mobilizing for Operation Iraqi Freedom II and those coming back from OIF I," Stone said.