To continue to meet growing deployment requirements around the world, the U.S.
National Guard is changing its force mix, said Lt. Gen. H Steven Blum, chief
of the National Guard Bureau.
“We do not want to use the same units over and over,” Blum told
defense writers. “We have great concern that, if we do, we may not be
able to sustain those units indefinitely. The guard is an all-volunteer force
that has to balance a civilian career, or a civilian education, or a civilian
life with military service.”
To achieve that balance, Blum said, the Guard is developing a more predictable
force structure based on the Air Force Air Expeditionary Force concept, which
the Army also is considering. “The [AEF] structures buckets of capabilities
against windows of time,” he explained. “That’s kind of what
I want to do with the Army National Guard.
“If you’re a member of the Army National Guard, you know, ‘Okay,
in about ‘07, if the country needs me, that’s probably when I’m
going to be mobilized and deployed.’
“I am frankly taking the best that I can extract from the Air Guard model
and applying it to the Army Guard situation,” Blum said. The two services
are experimenting with interchangeable, modular units, which can be mixed and
matched, as needed, he said.
“We’re kind of making ‘plug-and-play’ units that will
exist in the Army, the Guard and the Army Reserve,” Blum explained. “It
isn’t going to matter which component these components come from, as long
as they come with the same capabilities wanted by the combatant commander.”
For example, Blum said, the Air Force, the Air Force Reserve and the California
and Nevada Air Guards are cooperating to stand up a fully integrated Predator
unit at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev.
“This is huge,” he said. “They’re forming it right
now. It’s imminent. It’s moving very quickly.”
The RQ-1A Predator is a long-range, medium-altitude unmanned aerial vehicle
designed for surveillance and reconnaissance missions. Blum declined to comment
on whether the new Predator unit being formed at Nellis will be equipped with
Hellfire missiles.
In October, the Colorado National Guard and the U.S. Army Space and Missile
Defense Command, at Peterson Air Force Base, Colo., established the nation’s
first ground-based Midcourse Defense Brigade. “That’s 100 percent
Army National Guard,” Blum said. “We transitioned from air defense
units, that we don’t think we’ll need in the future, to the kind
we absolutely will need.”
The brigade has to be operational by October of this year, Blum said. “We
are ahead of schedule in filling the positions, training the soldiers and getting
the people assigned and ready up there.” Whether or not the missiles are
ready by then “is outside my purview,” he said.
Some Guard units not needed in Iraq and Afghanistan are being retrained in
career fields that are in demand, Blum said. For example, the Guard is retraining
more than 4,000 troops from artillery and transportation units for duty as military
police. Additional MPs are needed to guard detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and
Guantanamo Bay and to provide security at U.S. air bases and other military
installations around the world, he said.
Those troops “will be available for whatever requirements come up,”
Blum said. “They will be trained to the point where, if they are needed
in Iraq, they could be deployed.”
The retrained troops will be very useful in relieving over-deployed units,
Blum explained. “If I only have two MP companies, then I almost have to
send every other one every other time,” he said. “If I can make
three or four MP companies, then I can get this rotation down to one in five
or one in six years. I can get to something that’s reasonable and sustainable.
“We’re going to be in a pretty high-stress environment for probably
another 18 months, until we get this about right,” he said. “Then,
we should be able to do this with a little less energy, a little less angst,
and not abuse our members quite as much as I think we’re doing right now.
At the moment, Blum said, the Guard is preparing to send three brigades—the
81st from Washington state, the 30th from North Carolina and the 39th from Arkansas—to
Iraq to relieve units currently deployed there. The Army has made a special
effort to make sure that the three brigades have better equipment than the first
Guard troops who went to Iraq, he said.
Too often, those troops are going into combat without the weapons and equipment
they need to survive, Sen. John Kerry, D.-Mass, told a gathering at the University
of California in February. “National Guard helicopters are flying missions
in dangerous territory without the best available ground-fire protection systems,”
he said. “Unarmored Humvees are falling victim to road-side bombs and
small-arms fire. And families across America have had to collect funds from
their neighbors to buy body armor for their loved ones in uniforms ...”
Blum said that he has visited two of the three brigades, and the situation
is improving. “The two that I’ve visited have better equipment than
the soldiers that I saw when I was in Iraq in September,” he said.
Gen. Peter Schoomaker, Army chief of staff, “has put his money where
his mouth is on this issue,” Blum said. This year, “they have moved
$1.7 billion—with a B—to ensure that the Army National Guard units
that go over to Iraqi Freedom have exactly the same individual uniforms, weapons,
radios, protective body armor, the new ballistic helmet. They have them now
in training, prior to being deployed.”
This is a “huge” change in Army culture, Blum said. “I was
present when Gen. Schoomaker gave instruction to his staff that he did not ever
want to hear the words ‘reserve component’ used again when it came
to equipping soldiers. They are Army soldiers. They will be equipped as Army
soldiers.”
Despite this, however, anyone going to Iraq three months from now is likely
to find that U.S. forces don’t have enough up-armored Humvees, Blum said.
“The Army is pressing the industry to produce these faster, and they’re
reinvesting their money against these kinds of requirements,” he said.
“But that isn’t going to be fixed overnight.”
If soldiers aren’t wearing the body armor, Blum said, “its because
they chose not to wear them, and they should be disciplined by their chain of
command.”
On the homeland security front, Blum said the Guard needs more civil support
teams, which are trained to assist local authorities in dealing with mass-emergencies,
particularly terrorist attacks involving weapons of mass destruction.
“Right now, we have 34 [such teams] that are certified and trained,”
he said. In March, the Defense Department announced plans to field the next
12.
Congress has mandated a total of 55–one for each state and territory.
“You could argue that California could use two, because of its geography
and demographics.”
Each team includes 22 members of the Guard, trained and equipped to detect
chemical, biological, nuclear and explosive agents in a suspected terrorist
attack. They stay busy, Blum said.
“There is not a single day that a CST is not deployed,” he noted.
“Every single day, my BlackBerry [handheld computer] comes on, and a CST
goers out to check some strange substance somewhere in the United States.
“They can go there and say, ‘This is not anthrax, or this is not
ricin, or this is not something hazardous,’” Blum said. “This
has kept somebody—pranksters, terrorists, criminals, whoever put this
stuff there, somebody with an evil bent—from disrupting the economy and
terrorizing people in our nation.”
The CSTs “have been highly, highly valuable,” Blum said. Yet, they
could be reorganized, he noted. “It’s no secret, I don’t think,
that the Department of Defense sees their rightful place in the Department of
Homeland Security.” That decision, Blum said, “is not mine to make,”
but if they stay with the Guard, Blum would like to make them a part of the
new joint standing headquarters in each state and territory. “To me,”
he said, “that would make some sense.”
The current conflict is the first real test of the all-volunteer military force
in its 30-year history, Blum said.
U.S. military services—including the Army and Air National Guards—have
been dependent upon volunteers to fill their ranks since the demise of the draft
in 1973, at the end of the Vietnam War. The question now is whether men and
women will continue to volunteer, when facing the possibility of long deployments
and bloodshed, Blum said.
“This is the acid test,” he said. The war on terror is putting
the all-volunteer force “through the crucible,” he said. “Can
it sustain the pressures of a war, where we’re [experiencing] casualties
on a continuous basis over a long period of time?
“So far, the indications are that the volunteer force ... is a reliable
force, and that it is resilient enough to take the pressures that it’s
being put under right now, which are pretty extraordinary. So, so far, it looks
like it is working.”
Blum, however, did voice some concern about attrition rates. About 460,000
men and women serve in Army and Air National Guard units, he said. Of that number,
nearly 120,000 members are on active duty. Some serving in Iraq were deployed
previously in Afghanistan, Kosovo and elsewhere.
A recent Guard survey of 5,000 volunteers from 15 states indicated that long
deployments could increase the percentage of those planning to leave the service
from 16 percent in 2003 to 20 to 22 percent in 2004.
The survey indicated, “as we expected, that as many as one in four of
our soldiers is not exactly, totally thrilled about what is going on,”
Blum said. “Yes, I am concerned, but the sky is not falling.”
Despite the survey results, “our loss rate actually is improving over
the last several months,” Blum said. “So we’re doing better
now in keeping our trained human resources—our soldiers and airmen—than
we were prior to 9/11.”
Before the terrorist attacks, Blum said, people joined the Guard for a variety
of reasons—for military training, adventure, job skills, educational subsidies,
part-time work. “Since 9/11, anybody who has joined knows they’re
joining a different National Guard than existed for the previous 365 years of
the Guard’s history. I would say that the youth of this nation are answering
the call to arms, and patriotism is transcending any of the minor gripes that
they have with their own situation.”
The men and women in the Guard are “very highly trained and motivated
people, and they came in to do a job,” Blum said. “Now, the job
is there. Combat has a way of stripping away all of the peacetime ambiguities,
and people are able to focus on the mission.”
Over the past year, Blum said, the Guard has been reorganizing its structure
to “make it a more ready, relevant, reliable and accessible force in today’s
world.” The goal, he said, was for the Guard to be able “to operate
both at home and abroad in a joint context,” in other words with other
military services.
In October 2003, Blum noted, the Guard merged 162 headquarters in 50 states
and four territories into a single joint unit for every state and territory,
eliminating 108 organizations. “That gives the [U.S.] Northern and Pacific
Commands—the two combatant commands which have responsibility for the
defense of our homeland—an organization that looks like them.”
The change strengthens the military resources available for use in an emergency
in every state and territory, Blum said. If the country needs to send military
forces into a state or territory, an apparatus will be already in place to receive,
help stage and work with the incoming units, he said.
Meanwhile, he said, the Guard is “restructuring and re-balancing the
force so that we, in fact, are more relevant and more ready in a sooner period
of time.”
For homeland defense, “there is no allowable time for mobilization,”
Blum said. “We have to respond truly in minutes and hours. Days and weeks
are late.”
Historically, mobilization time has been “painfully long,” Blum
said. The reason for that is, traditionally, Guard units have been equipped
and trained after mobilization. Doing those things before mobilization “could
have reduced that time dramatically,” he said. “That’s what
we are moving to do right now.”