Article

September 2003

National Guard Stretching To Perform New Missions

by Harold Kennedy

The National Guard—the oldest component of the U.S. armed services—is being reconfigured in an effort to fulfill new assignments in the war against terrorism.

Until now, the nearly 400-year-old Guard may have been best known for providing relief during local or statewide emergencies, such as hurricanes, fires or civil disorders. Most of its members serve part-time, usually one weekend a month and two weeks each summer.

Now, however, in addition to these domestic assignments, they are being asked, with increasing frequency, to fight in overseas combat operations, such as Afghanistan and Iraq, and to protect against terrorist attacks within the United States.

In fact, the Army in July alerted two Guard brigades to prepare to relieve battle-weary Marine and Army troops in Iraq. If mobilized, the brigades would deploy this winter, possibly for as long as a year or more.

Fulfilling such missions requires changes in organization and equipment for the Guard, said Lt. Gen. H Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, headquartered in Arlington, Va. “There’ll be some rice bowls that will be—if not smashed—then unsettled,” he told National Defense. “But the National Guard cannot remain the way it is.”

Blum, formerly chief of staff of the U.S. Northern Command, took over the bureau in April. A month later, he told a conference of state and territorial adjutants general that each of the Guard units under their command would be required to consolidate its three top headquarters into one joint operation.

Currently, each of the 50 states, three territories and the District of Columbia has three Guard headquarters—one for the state’s overall Guard organization, another for its Army Guard unit and a third for its Air Guard, for a total of 162 offices. By October 1, 108 of these will no longer exist, he said.

The multiple headquarters are “just too excessive,” Blum said. “And it is not in keeping with the way that the Defense Department needs to go to deal with emerging realities and the way we will fight in the future.”

Increasingly, U.S. armed services “fight jointly,” pooling units from different services as needed to perform specific missions, Blum said. The Guard needs to do the same, he said. “We need to train and operate on a daily basis in a joint environment.”

Blum is urging the states to include members of other military reserve components within their borders, such as those from the Navy, Marine and Coast Guard, in their new joint headquarters. He said he plans to do that at the Guard Bureau in Arlington.

“This will give the best and brightest in all of our Guard and reserve units a chance to serve in a joint headquarters that they wouldn’t ordinarily have,” Blum said. “It will give the states, for the first time ever, a chance to harness all of the reserve resources that the Pentagon has residing within their borders.”

These changes are as important as two other milestones in Guard history, Blum said. One was the Militia Act of 1903—known as the Dick Act—that established federal guidelines for organizing, training and equipping the Guard. The other was the creation of the Air Guard in 1947.

Despite their significance, however, Blum cannot order the states to make the changes. He can only recommend. As chief of the Bureau, he does not command the 466,000 members of the Army and Air Force Guards.

Instead, Blum is the senior uniformed officer responsible for developing and coordinating all policies, programs and plans for the Guard. He is the principal advisor on National Guard affairs to the Army and Air Force secretaries, chiefs of staff and NorthCom. He also serves as the official channel of communication of the Army, Air Force and NorthCom with the governors and adjutants general.

During peacetime, Guard units are commanded by state and territorial governors, through their adjutants general. Each governor can call out the Guard to respond to domestic emergencies within their borders.

In May, for example, nearly 200 Guardsmen were deployed after tornadoes hit Missouri, Kansas and Tennessee and flooding ravaged parts of Alabama.

The president can activate Guard units to participate in federal missions. In fact, the Guard has fought in every U.S. war since 1607, when the English colony at Jamestown, Va., organized a militia. During World War II, the Guard contributed 19 divisions, doubling the size of the regular Army. Guard units also served in Korea, Vietnam and Desert Storm.

After the active-duty services were downsized at the end of the Cold War, the Guard became even more active. In the past 13 years, its units have been mobilized eight times, Thomas F. Hall, assistant secretary of defense for reserve affairs, told a breakfast gathering of reporters.

At most recent count, 147,000 Guard troops were deployed in 44 different countries, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia and Kosovo. In fact, Blum—a career, fulltime Guard officer—commanded the Multinational Division (North) in Bosnia. Other examples, cited in Guard press statements, included these:

In Afghanistan, members of the Virginia’s 20th Special Forces Group captured more than 20 Taliban and al Qaida fighters. They also took or destroyed more than 30 caches of weapons and munitions.

In Iraq, .50 caliber machine-gun teams from the Texas Air Guard’s 204th Security Forces Squadron maintained the perimeter at a forward-operating airfield. Other teams from the squadron were deployed with an anti-terrorist joint task force on the Horn of Africa.

The Guard also is playing a major role in homeland security. Just minutes after hijacked airliners crashed into the World Trade Center in 2001, two F-15 combat aircraft from the 102nd Fighter Wing of the Massachusetts Air Guard began patrolling the skies over New York City.

Four F-16 jets from the 147th Fighter Wing of the Texas Air Guard joined Air Force One, carrying the president, and escorted it from Florida, to Louisiana, to Nebraska and finally to Washington, D.C.

The 10 fighter wings of the 1st Air Force—primarily an Air Guard unit—began combat patrols over the United States. Previously, they had guarded against intruders trying to enter U.S. air space. Now, they were watching for suspicious activity within U.S. airways.

On the ground, nearly 9,000 Guard troops, dressed in camouflage uniforms and bearing M-16 rifles, were deployed to guard 444 airports across the nation. Others protected ports, bridges and other important structures.

The District of Columbia Guard stationed troops on Capitol Hill, the first time that armed military units had been assigned there since the May Day demonstrations of 1971.

To help state and local authorities respond to incidents that involve possible weapons of mass destruction, Congress in 1999 established a system of full-time Civil Support Teams in the Guard. Each of these teams is made up of 22 troopers who are specially trained and equipped to help civil authorities cope with WMD incidents. (related story p. 38)

At the order of their state governors, CSTs deploy to possible WMD sites to help identify suspicious substances, assess the situation and advise on an appropriate response.

Congress has authorized a total of 55 CSTs—at least one for each state and territory. Because of its large population, California has two teams, one based in the Los Angeles area and the other in greater San Francisco.

Thus far, however, only 32 of the CSTs have been set up. The Senate Appropriations Committee in July passed a 2004 defense spending bill that included $22 million to field 12 additional teams, which would result in a total of 44 units by the end of that fiscal year. The version passed by the House of Representatives does not contain a similar measure. At press time, it was not clear whether the Senate bill would prevail, but observers note that, until now, the teams have had considerable political support. In fact, pressure is growing for Congress to fund all 55.

“The ongoing threat of terrorist activities and the recent military action in Iraq make the presence of at least one Civil Support Team in every state all the more imperative,” said Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis.

While waiting for Congress to act, some states have set up so-called “light” Civil Support Teams, without federal funding and made up of part-time Guard members. Feingold said that his home state, Wisconsin, is one of the states with a light CST. Because of the lack of a fulltime team in Wisconsin, the CST from neighboring Minnesota had to be called in to help protect Major League Baseball’s 2002 All-Star Game in Milwaukee, he said.

There’s no doubt that the CSTs “have proven their worth,” Blum said. “They are universally accepted as a necessary asset. I don’t know of a single governor who would give up one.”

The teams also are staying busy, Blum said. “There’s not been a single day that I can recall without a CST response somewhere in the country.” In fact, during the year following the 9/11 attacks, CSTs performed nearly 800 missions, Blum told a Senate hearing.

New York’s team was on duty within hours of the attacks upon the World Trade Center, sampling the air to ensure than no biological or chemical contaminants were present. The Los Angeles team provided security for the 2003 Academy Awards, two World Series, a Super Bowl and last year’s Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

After the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated in the skies over Texas in February, teams from Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana helped collect, test, photograph and catalogue potentially hazardous debris along the route.

Should a major WMD incident occur, the lead federal agency—usually the Federal Emergency Preparedness Agency—can request the assistance of the Joint Task Force Civil Support.

JTF-CS, headquartered at Fort Monroe, in Hampton, Va., is a part of NorthCom, which was established in 2002 to defend the domestic United States. NorthCom is developing a close relationship with the Guard, Blum said.

The task force, commanded by a Guard major general, consists of about 160 military and civilian personnel, whose mission is to provide command-and-control capability for military forces helping to manage the consequences of a nuclear, biological or chemical event.

In addition, the head of NorthCom, Air Force Gen. Ralph E. Eberhardt, has asked the Guard to develop larger units “roughly analogous to the Marines’ CBIRF (Chemical Biological Incident Response Force),” Blum said.

CBIRF, based at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Indian Head, Md., just outside the nation’s capital, is much larger than the average CST. It has about 350 Marines and sailors trained to extract, decontaminate and treat mass casualties in a chemical, biological or nuclear incident.

CBIRF is intended to respond quickly to such incidents anywhere in the world, but its primary focus is protecting federal agencies and U.S. military forces in Washington, D.C., around the country and throughout the world.

The Guard units are being designed to protect targets within each state, Blum said. The first 10 teams are scheduled to stand up by October.

To make it easier to respond to the frequent pace of deployments at home and abroad, the Guard has embarked upon a wide-ranging program to modernize its structure, weapons and equipment, Blum explained.

In September 2002, then-Army Secretary Thomas E. White introduced the Army National Guard Restructuring Initiative. The plan is to convert the Guard’s existing eight divisions and 18 separate brigades—which constitute about 40 percent of the Army’s fighting force—into more agile and effective units tentatively called “multi-functional divisions” and “mobile light brigades.” The first unit could begin conversion as soon as 2005, Blum said.

A key component of this reorganization will be the transformation of the Pennsylvania Guard’s 56th Brigade into a Stryker Brigade Combat Team—one of six in the entire Army—by 2008. The Stryker units are intended to become rapid-deployment forces that can be deployed anywhere in the world within 96 hours.

Such changes ultimately will result in a 30-percent reduction in the number of tracked vehicles, including its oldest Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles, Guard officials said.

The Guard also is working to modernize its helicopter units, which represent almost half of those available to the Army. Hundreds of Black Hawk, Chinook and Apache choppers have been transferred from the active-duty Army to Guard units.

But the Guard has not received enough aviation equipment to perform its expanding missions, Lt. Gen. Roger Schultz, director of the Army Guard, told the Senate hearing. Tool kits, test equipment and parts needed to support the helicopters often were not included in the transfers, he said. Furthermore, he said, the Guard has not received enough helicopters.

The Air Guard, meanwhile, is updating its fixed-wing aircraft, its director, Lt. Gen. Daniel James III, told the Senate hearing. In Afghanistan, he noted, Guard pilots flew Block 25/30/32 F-16s, equipped with Litening II precision-targeting pods, enabling them to provide close air support to Special Forces engaging Taliban and al Qaida units on the ground.

The Guard’s A-10 Warthogs also are receiving upgrades, including a new cockpit designed to ease the pilot’s workload, precision-guided munitions and the Joint Tactical Radio System, James said.

The Senate Appropriations Committee, in a report accompanying its 2004 defense-spending bill, noted that the Guard needs to improve its fleet of C-130 cargo aircraft, many of which are decades old. The Guard relies upon them to provide 49 percent of the nation’s tactical airlift and 9 percent of its strategic airlift.

Concern, meanwhile, is growing about the impact of frequent deployments upon Guard personnel. A Guard member’s chances of being mobilized once—for a period of six months to a year, and perhaps longer—is about 65 percent, Hall said. The chances of being mobilized twice are about 4 percent, and three times, 1 percent, he said.

Those numbers, however, don’t tell the whole story, he said. “What we are doing is mobilizing the same group of people a number of times. If you are a military policeman, air traffic controller, mortuary affairs, civil affairs, you are getting mobilized perhaps all or the time or too many times.”

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has ordered the Guard and reserves this summer to come up with a plan to reduce the rate of mobilizations. One possibility, officials said, is to increase the number of these specialists in the active-duty forces. Whatever solution is chosen, the plan is likely to be implemented in fiscal year 2005, Hall said. Added Blum:

“We do not want to lose the national treasure of the National Guard and the citizen soldier. We have to be very careful that we don’t go beyond the elasticity that this soldier will tolerate.”

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