ARTICLE

September 2004

Overextended National Guard Undergoing Sweeping Changes

by Joe Pappalardo

National Guard leaders are planning a fundamental re- structuring that is aimed at making the force more versatile and relevant.

Planned changes include a slight reduction in the number of Army National Guard brigades, new roles for personnel, the formation of specialized units to meet specific threats and an attempt to close the gap between capabilities of Guard and active units.

These efforts come as the Guard faces dilemmas and stresses which experts say are the result of overuse as an operational force in deployments.

“There’s a perception we won’t walk away from our old structure,” said Lt. Gen. H Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard, at a recent defense conference. “Wrong. I’ll walk away from anything that doesn’t make sense.”

The redesigned Army National Guard will feature 34 brigades, according to officials at the National Guard Bureau. This number reflects 10 heavy brigades; 23 light brigades, including a scout group, and one Stryker brigade. That is a decrease from the current 36 brigades.

“Every division in the Army … has over time become different. This concept brings them back to standard designs,” said a National Guard Bureau official, who did not want to be identified. “For deployments, this simplifies planning and execution of operations.”

Of the 36 existing brigades, only 15 currently are properly staffed and resourced, according to Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker. The reformed force structure is meant to increase effectiveness, as well as efficiency. “Tailoring of forces is simplified when you know how units are designed, what they are capable of and how they need to be supported,” the official said.

The presence of the Stryker brigade will provide the Army with a quicker maneuver capability, Guard officials said, even though it will pose a challenge in training leaders and soldiers rapidly.

“We have always had an ability to employ light forces quickly,” noted another Guard official. “However, they have limited lethality against armored and mechanized enemy formations. The Stryker brigade combat team is capable of being deployed anywhere in the world within 96 hours. Having one in the Army National Guard is the right thing to do.”

Reorganization also includes forming specialized units with unique capabilities. For example, the Guard is creating 10 enhanced response forces, consisting of a weapons of mass destruction civil support team, a revamped division medical company able to treat and decontaminate 150 patients per hour, a search-and-rescue-oriented engineer company, and a combat unit geared for law enforcement support. “Enhanced” units receive priority equipment and resources, and are expected to deploy overseas within 90 days.

Other specialized units are growing as the need for their skills increase. The Guard is establishing weapons of civil support teams that are trained to respond to terrorist strikes. Teams already exist in 34 states, and that number is expected to rise to 55 by the end of fiscal year 2005.

“The National Guard is given training and certification from the other branches, paid out of pocket, to handle nuclear, chemical, biological and radiological threats,” Blum told conference attendees.

He also wants to expand the Guard’s involvement with missile defense, cyber security, intelligence operations and space-related defense missions.

Blum’s push comes on the heels of a wider reorganization. By late last year, the Guard formed joint forces headquarters in each state by directing state adjutants general to consolidate 162 state headquarters into 54. All Army and Air Guard activities are now coordinated from these headquarters. Senior officers have labeled it the largest Guard reorganization since World War II.

The Guard’s effort to create joint forces headquarters may include permanently assigned military liaison officers from each service, according to testimony by Maj. Gen. Timothy Lowenberg, adjutant general for the state of Washington and the homeland security chair at the Adjutants General Association of the United States.

The change would replace a weaker version of the program that often brought reservists close to retirement into National Guard offices on a temporary basis, said Col. Richard Patterson, spokesman for Lowenberg.

Currently, the liaison offices appear during contingency planning, but do not have a permanent home in Guard headquarters. If the liaison officer idea is adopted, each service would have a slot in each state’s headquarters.

In similar fashion, reservists would find permanent positions as regional emergency preparedness liaison officers at Federal Emergency Management Agency regional headquarters. Details and Pentagon approval of this plan won’t arrive until 2005, Patterson said.

The Guard is pursuing these restructuring plans during one of its most stressful moments in history, with a large percentage of units deployed overseas and engaged in homeland security missions.

“If we continue at this level of missions, in 18 to 24 months we’re going to be hurting very badly,” said Maj. Gen. Martin Umbarger, adjutant general of Indiana. “Things could break.”

He noted that the situation has generated collaborations across state lines. “The caveat to all this is we have multi-state agreements,” Umbarger said. “There are workarounds, but everyone wants their own people in their own backyard.”

The drain of overseas operations and domestic restructuring has led to a lack of preparedness in equipment and medical certification. “We don’t have the ability to get them ready to go prior to deployment as we should,” Umbarger said during congressional testimony, a theme shared by many other state Guard chiefs and state legislators.

A recent Government Accountability Office report quantifies this concern. Units deployed in support of Iraq operations needed about 22,000 pieces of equipment, including machine guns, night vision goggles and radios, to meet deployment requirements. By the start of 2004, non-deployed Army Guard units were suffering from a 33 percent shortfall of critical equipment, according to the GAO report.

The Air Guard, tasked with flights over American cities and overseas tours, is straining the abilities of its aging fleet. As an example, the GAO cited an airlift wing in Georgia that since 2003, had to replace 11 turbine engines and 20 propellers to keep eight C-130 transports operational.

Personnel shortages also have plagued the Guard and made it necessary to remove people from non-deployed units. Since September 2001, the Army Guard initiated more than 71,000 transfers to fill shortages of specially trained personnel.

The GAO report concluded that changes in funding, as well as force structure, were needed to sustain the National Guard.

Some retired senior staff from the Army agreed, citing their experiences from recent war deployments as proof that the system is in need of reform.

“Despite the fact we knew we were going to war in Iraq for seven or eight months, we gave [Guard and reservists] on average about a week,” said retired Gen. Jack Keane, former Army vice chief of staff. “We were not able to prepare their employers properly, not able to prepare their families properly and we were rushing their equipment to the fort—and not in the kind of configuration we would have liked.”

Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, former commandant of the U.S. Army War College, told the House Armed Services Committee that a smaller organization might be more realistic.

“A more practical approach might be to organize around smaller organizations that can be inserted and integrated with active components,” he said, citing helicopter pilots as one example of interchangeable personnel. “The model for all of this needs to be re-looked.”

The crisis within the National Guard has been brewing for more than a decade. During the 1990s, Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton both reduced the number of divisions in the active service without a corresponding increase in the Guard and Reserve, noted Richard Stark, a former Army battalion executive officer currently working on a study of the Guard for the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“We ensured the operational tempo was going to be higher,” he told National Defense. “I don’t think anyone realized how much higher.” As a result, he said, an appraisal and adjustment of the Guard’s roles and funding is valid, if not overdue.

“I give the secretary of defense high marks for transformation,” Stark said. “It’s like Gen. [Eric] Shinseki once said: If you think making changes is hard, wait until you see what irrelevance looks like.” Shinseki is a former Army chief of staff.

Stark said that the transformation should be approached in a way that preserves the cohesiveness of long-serving units and increases the readiness of guardsmen on reactive civil authority support missions, where lead-time for deployment is small.

Political leaders at the state level have expressed concern that the new structure will decrease readiness for homeland missions. In public appearances Blum makes sure to mollify those concerns by promising that between 50 and 75 percent of the National Guard will be available on a “no-notice, immediate basis.”

Blum recently told the National Governors’ Association that the model will be based on a goal of no more than one “substantial” deployment every five or six years for Army Guard soldiers and one deployment every 15 months for members of the Air Guard.

Recognizing these reorganization efforts, GAO said that “funding and force adjustments needed to implement those changes for the Guard have not been identified, and will require close coordination between the National Guard, Defense Department, the states and Congress.”

Blum is not shy about expressing his high expectations for a revitalized Guard. “We’ll have what the Army has, period,” he said. “For the first time ever … there’ll be no daylight between us. You want to know why? They need us.”

Blum added that, within two years, 80 percent of guard members will be combat veterans. “Since September 11, the Army and Air Force see the National Guard a whole lot differently.”

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