The retraining is part of a larger Army effort that over the next five years will reassign about 100,000 reserve and active-duty soldiers in the service's biggest restructuring in 50 years. The U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps are also rebalancing their forces for new missions, but the Army's effort is by far the largest and most ambitious.

The aim is to redesign the Army to be faster to the fight, to relieve the stress on a relatively small number of U.S. Army National Guard and Reserve soldiers who have been called up repeatedly in recent years, and to tap 500,000 reservists who have not been activated at all in the past decade. Since 1990, according to the Defense Department, only 7 percent of the 876,000 reserves assigned to specific units have been involuntarily mobilized more than once.

The Army's facelift reflects Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's broader vision to revamp the military to respond more quickly to a wide array of threats and be more deadly.

What our transformation will do is permit us to deploy more agile, lethal, adaptable forces, General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, told a House committee in late February.

Right now, though, the Army, in particular, is out of sync with those goals. We have too few guard and reserve forces with certain skill sets that are in high demand and too many guard and reserve with skills that are in little or no demand, Rumsfeld told Congress in late February.

Getting this balance right is critical for the Army's war- fighting abilities and the long-term health of its recruiting and retention efforts. Army officials said this week that retention rates for active-duty and reserve soldiers were lagging despite re- enlistment bonuses of at least $5,000

If we continue to stress these very high-use units, we risk losing them, said Thomas Hall, assistant secretary of defense for reserve affairs.

In some cases, the Army's restructuring means converting national guard heavy combat brigades into more mobile light-infantry units. In other instances, the changes are more notable.

The Army's effort to regain its balance is in full swing here at Fort Leonard Wood, a huge training base in the Ozarks of south- central Missouri. Tennessee National Guard artillerymen trained to blast 155-millimeter howitzers are struggling as military police to master the nuances of rape kits, domestic violence and traffic-stop procedures.

By early next year, the Army plans to convert 18 national guard field artillery batteries, or about 2,200 soldiers, into military police units. About 55 percent of the Army's 38,500 M.P.'s are in the national guard or reserve.

For these soldiers and their trainers, who are also reservists, the challenges are enormous. The eight-week course for military police trainees fresh from boot camp has been compressed to four weeks for the national guard soldiers, largely because they are already familiar with many aspects of soldiering.

In a mock village of about 12 brick buildings, including a bar, dry cleaners, hardware store and single-family home, the soldiers tackle training scenarios familiar to any military cop on the beat. Earlier in the training, the soldiers rehearsed urban warfare tactics and detainee procedures, essential tasks for Iraq or Afghanistan.

Once the soldiers finish, they are bound for bases in the United States and Germany, freeing up active-duty military police officers there to deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan.

Trainers and some students say changing from artillery to law enforcement has been a jolt to many in the guard. There's a lot of resentment by some reservists who didn't sign up to be M.P.'s, said Staff Sergeant Sherry Sorensen, 25, a military police instructor from Lexington, Kentucky. But they need to understand this is something the Army has to do.

Or, as her boss, Colonel Joseph Rapone 2d, commander of the 14th Military Police Brigade here, put it, Some are more motivated than others.

Major General John Batiste, commander of the First Infantry Division, ordered his troops to undergo a sweeping reorganization in advance of their deployment to take responsibility of north-central Iraq from departing forces of the Fourth Infantry.

Transformation is a reality of this mission, Batiste said in an interview at Camp Udairi, Kuwait, where his troops were preparing for convoys north. We have taken engineers and our field artillery batteries and turned them into first-rate infantry battalions. They will patrol territory. They will find and kill the enemy.

One of those soldiers, Captain Travis Van Hecke, normally commands Paladin artillery but will enter Iraq as a member of Task Force 1-6 under the division's Third Brigade.

We are now a patrol-type infantry battalion, Van Hecke said. We have a new focus. We are motorized infantry.

Sound Off...What kind of "overall" affect will this have on the retention of the Reserves and National Guard? Join the discussion.


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