![](media/image1.png){width="0.20833333333333334in"
height="0.15625in"}CQ WEEKLY -- IN FOCUS\
March 27, 2006 -- Page 816

National Guard Struggles With New Role

By Anne Plummer, CQ Staff

When Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey announced in January that the Bush
administration's fiscal 2007 budget would fund 17,000 fewer National
Guard troops, members of Congress and governors snapped to attention.
Within weeks, 75 senators had mobilized to maintain the status quo,
prompting Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to pledge to provide
funding for those soldiers, as long as they could be recruited.

The swift backtracking illustrated anew the impressive political clout
that the Guard has long wielded, both on Capitol Hill and in virtually
every statehouse. Yet the flap --- over cuts accounting for less than 1
percent of a proposed \$111.8 billion Army budget --- did not settle
bigger questions about the Guard's future.

With the Guard worn out by fulfilling its combat duty in the Iraq War
while not losing sight of its many domestic obligations, Congress is
weighing whether the Guard is adequately organized, trained and equipped
for what Pentagon officials now call "the long war" against terrorism.

Some answers are likely to emerge in June, when a recently empaneled
13-member independent commission, which Congress created in 2004, is
expected to release preliminary recommendations for changing the laws
and policies governing both the Guard and the military reserves.

The Guard's supporters hope the panel will provide them the ammunition
they need to bring about a major investment in the Guard before next
year. But defense experts warn that in a time of tight budgets and
deepening deficits, money for sweeping improvements will be scarce.

"I could spend literally all day talking about how the Guard and Reserve
is under stress in this war unlike any other war," said Republican Sen.
Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a colonel in the Air Force Reserve and
chairman of the Armed Services Personnel Subcommittee. "If we don't
increase the size of the active Army and the Marine Corps --- the 'boots
on the ground' forces --- we're going to break the Guard and reserves
because they're filling in at a level that's unsustainable."

**Shifting Missions**

Members of Congress and state officials have long taken a proprietary
interest in the Guard, parts of the Army and Air Force composed mainly
of civilians usually serving one weekend a month and two weeks in the
summer.

In overseas combat missions, guardsmen have generally been relegated to
a role supporting active-duty troops and usually became a repository for
older, used equipment. But the Guard also maintained an unusual degree
of autonomy and control over its units because of its responsibility to
deal with domestic matters such as disaster relief and the quelling of
civil disturbances. The Pentagon was content to maintain the arrangement
in deference to the governors, who are the commanders of the Guard units
in their state unless the president lays claim to them.

The Guard was "kind of like the snake in the corner," said James Jay
Carafano, a defense analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation. "As
long as you left it alone, everyone was happy."

But that arrangement changed when President Bush opened wars in both
Afghanistan and Iraq and soon found himself needing tens of thousands of
guardsmen to augment the active-duty forces. Carafano and other defense
experts say the open-ended nature of the two campaigns has transformed
the Guard into an "operational force" from the "strategic reserve" it
was prior to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

"This is a profound change in the way the Guard is being used," said
retired Maj. Gen. Arnold L. Punaro of the Marines, who is heading the
independent commission.

The insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan also have left Guard troops as
vulnerable to enemy attacks as their active-duty counterparts. "That
paradigm" of giving the Guard cast-off equipment from active duty
"doesn't work anymore," Carafano said. "Now it's a strategic asset
that's really valuable, and we have to grapple with the difficult
questions."

Among those is how much and what type of equipment the Guard needs in
war zones and at home. Many of the Guard's vehicles have been upgraded
with protective armor and better radios for duty in Iraq, but this
equipment is being left behind when units finish their tours and fly
home. According to a report issued in October by the Government
Accountability Office (GAO), "extensive use of the Guard's equipment
overseas has significantly reduced the amount of equipment available to
states for domestic needs."

The open-ended disposition of the Guard's overseas mission further
complicates matters. Although Bush and Rumsfeld marked last week's third
anniversary of the invasion of Iraq by expressing continued optimism
about the ultimate outcome of the "war on terror," they also moved
closer than ever before to statements similar to the conclusion in a
recent Pentagon strategy document: "The United States is a nation
engaged in what will be a long war." An uptick in sectarian violence
recently prompted the military to send additional forces to Iraq, while
a thriving underground opium trade and growing insurgency in Afghanistan
has made it clear that a U.S. presence --- augmented by Guard and
reserve forces --- will be needed for some time.

And despite a recent decline in the number of non-active-duty personnel
overseas --- due to reservists fulfilling their 24-month mobilization
duties --- the Guard still represents a substantial portion of the
forces there and the number may "surge" again if conditions in Iraq or
Afghanistan deteriorate or another conflict breaks out. A total of
113,263 Guard and reserve members were on active duty as of the middle
of March.

Rhett Dawson, a former staff director of the Senate Armed Services
Committee and a member of the commission, said the heavy workload in war
zones could take its toll in the form of poor morale, lower recruitment
and retention of Guard members, and shortages of adequate equipment. His
conclusions echo the GAO report, which forecasts potentially dire
consequences without long-term planning.

"In the absence of a plan and funding strategy that addresses the
Guard's equipment needs for all its missions, the DoD and the Congress
currently do not have assurance that the Army National Guard will be
well prepared for future missions at home or abroad, particularly those
that arise on short notice," the report said.

**Short-Term Fixes**

Rumsfeld is using his own restructuring plan to ease some of the strain.
He would reduce the deployment duration of Guard troops by moving some
"high demand" units into the active-duty force and fully manning
existing Guard brigades. Rumsfeld also plans to reduce the number of
Guard combat brigades and to build more engineering and combat support
teams.

Rumsfeld acknowledges that his plan is, to use Carafano's analogy,
indeed like prodding the snake in the corner. "Anytime anything is done
to the Guard, people get concerned. Change is hard for people," Rumsfeld
told reporters last month, but he predicted that the skeptics would be
"happy when it's all over."

Some are not convinced. Graham and Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, the top
Democrat on the Armed Services Personnel panel, have asked the
commission to evaluate Rumsfeld's plan and assess whether it is sound.

"Considering the long and extended deployment and multiple deployments
of the National Guard units at the beginning of the war, and the strain
that that's put on the soldiers, their families, their jobs and their
employers, I'd like to have this commission also carefully analyze this
plan to determine if it's reality-based," Nelson told the commission at
a hearing this month.

The senators say they won't wait for the commission before moving to
ease pressure on the Guard. Graham wants to add money to the Senate's
version of the fiscal 2006 emergency supplemental appropriations bill
that would ensure a National Guard force of 350,000 --- or 17,000 more
than in Bush's fiscal 2007 budget. The House has no similar language in
the version of the measure it passed two weeks ago. The Senate is
expected to debate its version by the end of April.

Meanwhile, John W. Warner of Virginia, the Republican chairman of the
Senate Armed Services Committee, says he intends to include in the
fiscal 2007 defense authorization bill language to require the Pentagon
to fund the 350,000 Army National Guard troops. The measure also would
demand that if those extra soldiers cannot be recruited, any surplus
funds remain in Guard coffers.

And Missouri Republican Christopher S. Bond and Vermont Democrat Patrick
J. Leahy, co-chairmen of the Senate National Guard Caucus, say they are
drafting a much broader proposal that would substantially increase the
Guard's authority. It would give it a four-star commander who would have
guaranteed budget and policy power as a member of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff and would grant the Guard some control over how equipment was
procured. Currently, it takes whatever it is given and often learns of
major policy changes after the fact.

But Carafano questions whether lawmakers will be able to obtain the
money to make major long-term changes. Congress has become impatient
with the cost of the two wars, frustrated not only by the estimated
combined monthly expense of \$5.3 billion but also by the looming cost
of fixing or replacing equipment. Paying for a larger Guard, along with
corresponding increases to military entitlement programs, could prove
impossible in the current budget environment.

"There's going to be enormous pressure to decrease defense spending or
keep it flat," Carafano said. If the administration and Congress don't
resist pressure to cut the Pentagon budget to accommodate the Guard,
"all this other stuff is academic because there just won't be enough
money in the checking account."

*John M. Donnelly contributed to this story.*