The U.S. Navy, fearing a shortage of field medical service technicians ("corpsmen" or "medics") because of the demands of the Iraqi operations, have issued a stop loss order for junior enlisted men (E1-E6) in that job. This means that the 500 or so corpsmen involved will not be able to leave the service as they were scheduled to (because their enlistments were up.) So far, the U.S. military has issued stop loss orders for a variety of critical skills involving over 50,000 troops.