FEATURE ARTICLE

December 2006

Guardsmen shift roles to align more with Air Force

By Harold Kennedy

The Air National Guard is reorganizing –- shedding some traditional missions and taking on new ones –- in order to play a larger national-security role as its active-duty partner, the Air Force, shrinks in size.

The changes are controversial, but necessary, officials said.

The Air Force reduced its numbers by 40 percent at the end of the Cold War, leaving it with approximately 352,000 personnel currently, but that’s still too many, said Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley. So the service plans to get rid of another 40,000, or about 12 percent, over the next five years.

The reason? Like the other services, the Air Force is seeing much of its funding eaten up by combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a result, it is having trouble paying for new aircraft, such as the F-22A Raptor, F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and a next-generation tanker.

“To stay within our allocated budgets and to increase our investment accounts, the reality is we have to draw the force down,” Moseley said.

Officials also considered cutting as many as 16 percent of the Air Guard’s 108,000 troops. But they ultimately rejected the idea. “We did not think that was the best way to do it,” said Lt. Gen. H Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, which runs both the Army and Air Guard.

“You have to remember: If they’re going to come down 40,000, we’re their off-ramp for a surge capability,” he told a recent gathering of defense writers in Washington, D.C. “There will be no dramatic reduction in manpower in the Air National Guard in the near term.”

The Air Guard, however, is making “some significant adjustments of the skill sets and the capabilities that we deliver with the force,” Blum said.

That process already has begun, explained Air Guard Brig. Gen. Allison A. Hickey, director of total force integration. The Air Guard is reorganizing many of its units across the country and retraining their personnel, she told National Defense. The goal is to make those forces more fully interoperable with active-duty Air Force and Reserve organizations.

“We’ve asked ourselves, ‘What are all of the mission sets that we don’t do now, but need to do?’ We’ve identified 300 or more,” Hickey said. “Now we’re trying to figure out which ones will give us the biggest bang for our buck.”

Making those decisions is complicated by the Guard’s dual mission role, she said. Unlike the active-duty Air Force and reserves, the Air Guard has both state and federal missions.

Usually, especially during peacetime, its units report to the governors of their respective states or territories to protect lives and property during natural disasters, public disorder or terrorist attacks.

During wartime and other national emergencies, however, Guardsmen often are federalized. In years past, the Guard served basically as a strategic reserve, to be called into federal service only during major national crises, such as World Wars I and II, Korea and Vietnam.

These days, however, with a smaller active-duty force, Guardsmen play important roles in everyday military operations. They provide almost half of the Air Force’s tactical airlift support, combat communications, aero-medical evacuations and aerial refueling. The Air Guard also has total responsibility for the aerial defense of the entire United States.

Now, in the midst of an ongoing war, the Pentagon is making a concerted effort to make better, more efficient use of the Air Guard.

In 2005, as part of the latest round of base realignments and closures, or BRAC, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recommended shutting down 33 major active-duty, Reserve and Guard installations and realigning 29 more.

The proposed changes targeted dozens of Air Guard facilities. The plan was to relocate Guard aircraft, previously scattered in small units across the country, to larger, more efficient, centralized locations.

One part of this scenario called for some Guard organizations to receive an infusion of more modern aircraft. In October, for example, the Air force announced plans to establish an operational squadron of its newest platform, the F-35, at McEntire Air National Guard Base, S.C.

In some cases, Guardsmen are being reassigned to new — and distant — bases to work with more advanced aircraft. In Virginia, for example, members of the 192nd Air National Guard Wing, stationed just outside Richmond, are being integrated with the Air Force’s 1st Fighter Wing to form a single associate wing. The emerging wing, to be based at Langley Air Force Base, is transitioning from the F-16 Fighting Falcon to the F-22.

Members of Missouri’s 131st Fighter Wing, located at Lambert Air National Guard Base, near St. Louis, are being reassigned across the state to provide maintenance and support to B-2 stealth bombers flown by the 509th Bomb Wing, at Whiteman Air Force Base.

In other cases, Guardsmen are moving into very different missions. In North Dakota, the 119th Fighter Wing, based in Fargo, is giving up its F-16 fighters and switching to C-21 Lear Jets and Predator unmanned aerial vehicles. In California, the 163rd Air Refueling Wing, at March Air Reserve Base, is surrendering its KC-135 Stratotankers for Predators.

The Guard sees the UAV as a big part of its future. “I’m pushing very hard to get the National Guard into UAVs as fast as I can,” Blum said. “I think they will be immensely valuable to us, not only in the war fight overseas, but I think they will be immensely valuable to us for domestic use after something like Hurricane Katrina.”

Particularly attractive to the Guard is the ability of pilots and crews to operate their UAVs remotely, without ever leaving their home bases.

“They can fly their missions over Iraq or Afghanistan, even hit the bad guys with a Hellfire missile, and then go home to coach their kids’ soccer game that night,” said Hickey.

Few fighter pilots are thrilled about moving to UAVs, Blum conceded. “But the people who are responsible for delivering capabilities are excited about it, because it really does expand our capability in a much more effective manner,” he said. “It can achieve the same outcome for a lot less expense and a lot less risk.”

The Guard also wants to get into information warfare. Air Force leaders met in November to discuss setting up a new “cyber command,” focused on attacking and defending information systems. Such a command would present a major opportunity for the Guard, Blum said.

“The whole cyber world is moving so much faster than a big defense apparatus like the Pentagon can move,” he said. Military services cannot afford to keep the best-trained cyber experts in uniform on a fulltime basis, he said. “But I think these people are patriotic enough to serve their nation on a part-time basis when we need them.”

In August, the Air Guard established its largest intelligence-processing center at McConnell Air Force Base, Kan. The facility, known as a distributed common ground system, is the new home for the 161st Intelligence Squadron, Hickey explained. “They used to fly F-16s, then B-1s, then KC-135s. Now they’re processing data gathered on the battlefield.

Some in the squadron may have been disappointed initially in their new mission, she conceded. Then, she said, “a lot of them realized that this is relevant to the world we live in — this is cool.”

However, the state adjutants general, who run the Guard’s non-federal operations across the country, were not pleased with the loss of so many aircraft.

As originally proposed, the BRAC plan would have removed all of the aircraft from 28 Guard units –- one third of the total — said retired Brig. Gen. Stephen M. Koper, president of the National Guard Association of the United States. Six states would be left without a single flying unit.

“This may signal the end of these units and the military service of people in them, Koper told the Senate appropriations defense subcommittee. “The recommendations do call for some support personnel to remain,” he said. “But without aircraft to support, many will follow the aircrews and just leave the military. Many have deep roots in their community. They simply can’t commute, in some cases, hundreds of miles to drill.”

Leaders in four states –- Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Tennessee –- felt so strongly about their looming loss of aircraft that they sued in federal court.

All the complaints got the attention of the BRAC Commission, which was established by Congress to review the Pentagon’s proposals and make an objective recommendation to the president about which changes to make and which to reject.

Of the 33 proposed major closure recommendations, the panel approved only 21. The commission withdrew the proposal for Connecticut’s aircraft; it required the Air Force to maintain aircraft facilities in Pennsylvania, and it dropped plans to transfer all of the C-130 transports from West Virginia’s 130th Airlift Wing to Pope Air Force Base, N.C.

Despite these concessions, advocates for the National Guard argue that it has gotten short shrift in the 2005 BRAC and defense planning in general, because the Guard doesn’t play its proper role in the process.

“Current Defense Department processes do not sufficiently incorporate National Guard Bureau and state inputs when determining how to structure, equip, man, train and provide resources to the National Guard,” said Maj. Gen Francis D. Vavala, vice president of the Adjutants General Association of the United States. The military services each have three-star staff officers to seek resources for every discipline –- personnel, intelligence, operations and so on –- Vavala told the House Armed Services Committee. In contrast, he said, the National Guard Bureau, which speaks for the Army and Air National Guard, is headed by one three-star general.

“Compare the National Guard, which supports two services with more than 450,000 soldiers and airmen, with the Coast Guard,” Vavala said. “The Coast Guard, with less than 50,000 service members, has a four-star commandant, two three-star headquarters general officers and two three-star field commanders.”

To correct this situation, Senators Kit Bond, R-Mo., and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., this year introduced so-called National Guard empowerment legislation that would:

• Elevate the chief of the National Guard Bureau from lieutenant general to full general.

• Place him on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with a separate budget authority similar to the other services.

• Make him the principal adviser to the defense secretary and the chairman of the joint chiefs.

• Make the National Guard Bureau a joint activity of the Defense Department, rather than a joint bureau of the Army and Air Force.

• Mandate that the deputy commander of the U.S. Northern Command, which is charged with homeland defense, be a three-star officer, chosen from the National Guard.

Such steps, however, are opposed by many senior active-duty leaders, who don’t want to see their authority diluted. One of them is Gen. James Jones, currently supreme allied commander in Europe, and previously Marine commandant and a member of the joint chiefs.

“I think that the Reserve elements of the four services are best used within those services, and I don’t see the absolute need for another four star and another member of the joint chiefs on that issue,” he told an October hearing of the congressionally chartered National Commission on the National Guard and Reserves.

The 2007 Defense Authorization Act, signed by President Bush in October, referred the senators’ proposals to the commission, requiring a report by March 1.

For its part, the Air Force said it is making an effort to include the Air Guard, Air Force Reserve and state adjutants general in its integration planning. “This is a mixed office,” Hickey said. “I have active duty, Reserves and Guardsmen on my staff.”

A top priority, she said, is establishing a closer relationship with state adjutants general. Hickey’s office includes three of them on temporary duty, and they bring with them “a good understanding of state needs and requirements,” she said.

As a result, the active-duty Air Force, Reserves and Air Guard are no longer isolated organizations, she said. “We are becoming totally integrated. But that doesn’t mean that each organization loses what it brings with us.”

Please email your comments to HKennedy@ndia.org

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