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Natl Guard Seeks Joint Chiefs Membership
HAIRY
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National Guard demands more say
Seeks Joint Chiefs membership
By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff | May 11, 2006
WASHINGTON -- National Guard leaders yesterday demanded a greater voice in military decisions, contending that the nation's part-time soldiers are playing too crucial a role in Iraq, Afghanistan, and domestic emergencies to be relegated to their long-occupied backseat in Pentagon deliberations.
More than two dozen Guard adjutants general from around the country, including Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont, traveled to Capitol Hill yesterday to support a bipartisan proposal now pending in Congress to elevate the head of the National Guard to a four-star general and make him a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the top military advisory body to President Bush.
''We need to have a voice at the table," said Air Force Major General Michael D. Dubie, head of the Vermont National Guard.
Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Guard has found itself stretched thin, handling missions at home as well as in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other hot spots around the world. Along with stress on its personnel, the Guard must also deal with the problem of equipment shortages; commanders have complained that the Pentagon is slow to replace trucks, weapons, and aircraft that are damaged or destroyed in combat.
But lawmakers say Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld doesn't want the Guard's status raised any higher. The Pentagon boss has made clear in private meetings that he believes the Guard is already in the loop when it comes to major military decisions. Spokesmen for Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs chairman General Peter Pace declined yesterday to speak about the proposal, attached to a defense bill, because it is pending legislation.
Still, the Guard has what could be an influential ally: Melvin Laird, the Nixon administration's secretary of defense who integrated the operations of the full-time and part-time forces when he ran the Pentagon during the Vietnam War. Laird said yesterday he will meet with Rumsfeld today to discuss the proposal.
And a growing number of Republicans and Democrats say the National Guard -- which has provided almost half of the troops deployed to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq and suffered about 20 percent of all US military deaths in Iraq -- should have a say in Pentagon war councils.
''In New England we have seen a huge number called up for Iraq and Afghanistan," Senator Patrick Leahy, a Democrat of Vermont and a primary sponsor of new legislation, told the Globe yesterday. ''We are burning up a huge amount of the Guard's equipment overseas, and it's not being replaced. This is not like the old days."
The National Guard has been around longer than the active-duty forces, with its roots in the state militia that filled the ranks of the Continental Army in the American Revolution. When a full-time professional military was established, the Guard's primary mission became responding to local emergencies under the command of state governors. Its secondary role was as a reserve force in the event of war.
Each state's Army and Air National Guard remain under the control of the governor unless activated by the president for federal duty. Yet the 54 state and territorial militia have been heavily deployed overseas in recent years, and play central, front-line roles in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But the National Guard isn't represented on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which consists of active- duty, four-star generals representing each of the military branches. The panel makes recommendations to the president and defense secretary on a range of issues, including personnel, budgets, weapons, and military operations.
The chief of the National Guard Bureau, Lieutenant General Steven Blum, is the militia's main advocate at the Pentagon. But even though he's a three-star general, he's outranked by all six representatives of the Joint Chiefs, including the chairman, vice chairman, and chiefs of the four military branches.
''This problem has existed since the founding of the Republic," retired Brigadier General Steve Koper, president of the National Guard Association of the United States, an advocacy group, said yesterday. ''The defense of this country can no longer suffer this dysfunction."
At yesterday's event, lawmakers vowed to see that the Guard is placed on an equal footing at the Pentagon.
They cited a litany of recent Pentagon decisions they said were made without the Guard's input, including a force-reduction proposal to cut both the Army National Guard and Air National Guard by a combined 31,000 troops. Lawmakers noted how governors and Guard leaders complained bitterly that the Pentagon all but ignored them when it decided which Guard facilities to shutter last year, including the doomed 102d Fighter Wing on Cape Cod.
Bond, who said Senate majority leader Bill Frist, Republican of Tennessee, supports elevating the Guard's status, called the current setup ''institutional bias" though the force has done much of the heavy lifting in Iraq and Afghanistan while fulfilling its disaster- relief responsibilities after Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast last year.
The Guard, which makes up about 430,000 of the 1.4 million US troops, must ''be in the huddle if they are going to execute the plays," he added.
Representative Tom Davis, a Virginia Republican who is pushing the proposal in the House, said a ''disconnect" between the National Guard and Pentagon leaders was a contributing factor in the government's flat-footed response to the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe. Davis said that military leaders were not familiar enough with state emergency response plans, which depended on them to deploy National Guard troops to aid stranded citizens and ferry supplies.
Under the proposed legislation, the National Guard would get a seat at Joint Chiefs of Staff meetings and would hold the deputy commander's post at the United States Northern Command in Colorado that was established after the Sept. 11 attacks to oversee the military's homeland defense responsibilities.
Laird, the Vietnam-era defense chief, said some in the Guard believe that because the head of the National Guard Bureau comes from the Army National Guard, the Air National Guard would be left out of any decision-making if the proposal happens. But he said he'll try to convince Rumsfeld that things have to change.
''Those [Guard] units that have come back from Iraq have left a lot of their equipment over there and have not been reequipped," Laird said in an interview yesterday. ''They are getting screwed a little bit."
Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.
c Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.
Seeks Joint Chiefs membership
By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff | May 11, 2006
WASHINGTON -- National Guard leaders yesterday demanded a greater voice in military decisions, contending that the nation's part-time soldiers are playing too crucial a role in Iraq, Afghanistan, and domestic emergencies to be relegated to their long-occupied backseat in Pentagon deliberations.
More than two dozen Guard adjutants general from around the country, including Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont, traveled to Capitol Hill yesterday to support a bipartisan proposal now pending in Congress to elevate the head of the National Guard to a four-star general and make him a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the top military advisory body to President Bush.
''We need to have a voice at the table," said Air Force Major General Michael D. Dubie, head of the Vermont National Guard.
Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Guard has found itself stretched thin, handling missions at home as well as in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other hot spots around the world. Along with stress on its personnel, the Guard must also deal with the problem of equipment shortages; commanders have complained that the Pentagon is slow to replace trucks, weapons, and aircraft that are damaged or destroyed in combat.
But lawmakers say Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld doesn't want the Guard's status raised any higher. The Pentagon boss has made clear in private meetings that he believes the Guard is already in the loop when it comes to major military decisions. Spokesmen for Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs chairman General Peter Pace declined yesterday to speak about the proposal, attached to a defense bill, because it is pending legislation.
Still, the Guard has what could be an influential ally: Melvin Laird, the Nixon administration's secretary of defense who integrated the operations of the full-time and part-time forces when he ran the Pentagon during the Vietnam War. Laird said yesterday he will meet with Rumsfeld today to discuss the proposal.
And a growing number of Republicans and Democrats say the National Guard -- which has provided almost half of the troops deployed to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq and suffered about 20 percent of all US military deaths in Iraq -- should have a say in Pentagon war councils.
''In New England we have seen a huge number called up for Iraq and Afghanistan," Senator Patrick Leahy, a Democrat of Vermont and a primary sponsor of new legislation, told the Globe yesterday. ''We are burning up a huge amount of the Guard's equipment overseas, and it's not being replaced. This is not like the old days."
The National Guard has been around longer than the active-duty forces, with its roots in the state militia that filled the ranks of the Continental Army in the American Revolution. When a full-time professional military was established, the Guard's primary mission became responding to local emergencies under the command of state governors. Its secondary role was as a reserve force in the event of war.
Each state's Army and Air National Guard remain under the control of the governor unless activated by the president for federal duty. Yet the 54 state and territorial militia have been heavily deployed overseas in recent years, and play central, front-line roles in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But the National Guard isn't represented on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which consists of active- duty, four-star generals representing each of the military branches. The panel makes recommendations to the president and defense secretary on a range of issues, including personnel, budgets, weapons, and military operations.
The chief of the National Guard Bureau, Lieutenant General Steven Blum, is the militia's main advocate at the Pentagon. But even though he's a three-star general, he's outranked by all six representatives of the Joint Chiefs, including the chairman, vice chairman, and chiefs of the four military branches.
''This problem has existed since the founding of the Republic," retired Brigadier General Steve Koper, president of the National Guard Association of the United States, an advocacy group, said yesterday. ''The defense of this country can no longer suffer this dysfunction."
At yesterday's event, lawmakers vowed to see that the Guard is placed on an equal footing at the Pentagon.
They cited a litany of recent Pentagon decisions they said were made without the Guard's input, including a force-reduction proposal to cut both the Army National Guard and Air National Guard by a combined 31,000 troops. Lawmakers noted how governors and Guard leaders complained bitterly that the Pentagon all but ignored them when it decided which Guard facilities to shutter last year, including the doomed 102d Fighter Wing on Cape Cod.
Bond, who said Senate majority leader Bill Frist, Republican of Tennessee, supports elevating the Guard's status, called the current setup ''institutional bias" though the force has done much of the heavy lifting in Iraq and Afghanistan while fulfilling its disaster- relief responsibilities after Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast last year.
The Guard, which makes up about 430,000 of the 1.4 million US troops, must ''be in the huddle if they are going to execute the plays," he added.
Representative Tom Davis, a Virginia Republican who is pushing the proposal in the House, said a ''disconnect" between the National Guard and Pentagon leaders was a contributing factor in the government's flat-footed response to the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe. Davis said that military leaders were not familiar enough with state emergency response plans, which depended on them to deploy National Guard troops to aid stranded citizens and ferry supplies.
Under the proposed legislation, the National Guard would get a seat at Joint Chiefs of Staff meetings and would hold the deputy commander's post at the United States Northern Command in Colorado that was established after the Sept. 11 attacks to oversee the military's homeland defense responsibilities.
Laird, the Vietnam-era defense chief, said some in the Guard believe that because the head of the National Guard Bureau comes from the Army National Guard, the Air National Guard would be left out of any decision-making if the proposal happens. But he said he'll try to convince Rumsfeld that things have to change.
''Those [Guard] units that have come back from Iraq have left a lot of their equipment over there and have not been reequipped," Laird said in an interview yesterday. ''They are getting screwed a little bit."
Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.
c Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.
Comments
I wonder what's going through Rumsfeld's mind about the Guard.