WASHINGTON, DC, AUGUST 7, 2007 - In his recent announcement of the replacement of Gen. Peter Pace with Adm. Mike Mullen as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said it was Mullen’s response to a senior military assistant when asked what he was most concerned about that cinched Mullen’s appointment. Gates said “the chief of Naval Operations said the Army.”
And that, Gates told lawmakers, shows Mullen “has a broad view of what the needs and requirements of the services are and of the nation.”
The outgoing military chief, Gen. Pace, had earlier warned Congress that America's ability to deal with another crisis in the world is steadily being eroded. Pace said a classified report determined that there is a “significant” risk that the US will not be able to adequately respond to military conflicts with North Korea, China, Iran … or even Cuba.
Former Secretary of State and JCS Chairman Colin Powell said the active Army is just “about broken.”
Andrew Krepinevich, president of the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said the signs of strain on America's armed forces are equivalent to dead “canaries in the mineshaft” warning of impending death.
The global war on terrorism has vividly revealed the Army is critically short on both manpower and equipment, and has been allowed to steadily deteriorate since the end of the Cold War, despite the need for an effectively staffed Army to combat the many new threats faced by the US and its allies. These problems are especially sharp within the National Guard, whose forces constitute half of the Army’s deployed forces in Iraq alone.
The inability of the Kansas National Guard to immediately get critical resources, supplies and equipment to where Greensburg, Kansas used to stand following the F5 tornado that virtually wiped out the small township on May 4 was emblematic of the larger problems that the Guard, following years of overseas deployments and attendant equipment shortages, will face in the event of a truly cataclysmic-scale, states-side disaster.
The White House bewilderingly tried to deny that Guard shortcomings in Kansas were a problem. And if they were, the administration said, then it must have been the fault of Gov. Kathleen Sebelius. White House spokesman Tony Snow said the administration was “not aware of any prior complaints” from the governor about equipment shortages. But Sebelius had made at least five, separate, documented requests for equipment to the White House beginning in December 2005.
As the war of political rhetoric intensified, the White House implied that it was Sebelius who had been asleep at the wheel, saying she and her family were attending a jazz festival in New Orleans when Greensburg ceased to exist. She was, but it was a planned trip on which she had left before the storm blew in. And once she received news of the disaster, she immediately flew back to supervise the disaster’s response. She couldn’t have gotten to where Greensburg once stood any sooner had she been at the governor’s mansion in Topeka, aides pointed out.
When confronted with the ground truth, the White House’s denials and blame-shifting fell flat. Sympathetic governors from across the nation joined Sebelius in saying: “We’re not prepared!”
"You don't have the equipment that you need to respond, and people are not as safe now as they were prior to Sept. 11 if they had to respond to a natural or manmade disaster," North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley declared. “Years of war in Iraq have cut into the North Carolina National Guard's fleet of trucks, communications equipment and other gear, and the state could come up short in a major hurricane or ‘no-notice’ disaster,” he said.
Meanwhile, Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland sent President Bush a certified letter reminding the president he had yet to respond to the governor’s earlier letter asking for Bush’s personal assurance that the Ohio National Guard is getting adequate training and equipment. The White House did not respond, but the Ohio Republican Party did, which drew criticism from the Akron Beacon Journal. The newspaper criticized the state GOP, “rather than the president,” for responding to Strickland and implying that the “governor's letters are political and designed to embarrass Bush.” Strickland told the AP, “The fact that I have not received a response causes me to wonder whether or not he is willing or able to give such a commitment. I just think the president ought to be willing to answer these rather straightforward, basic questions."
Strickland’s bafflement over the White House’s conspicuous silence on his concerns about the readiness of the Ohio National Guard shouldn’t be surprising. For years before the awkward response of the Kansas National Guard to the localized F5-force tornado that destroyed Greensburg, Guard leaders and governors across the nation had been complaining to the White House, and Congress, that the Guard in their respective states would be hard-pressed to react in any meaningful way to a catastrophic disaster – like an avian flu pandemic – because of the Guard’s extended deployments abroad and dwindling emergency response assets at home.
Last year, all 50 governors signed a letter to President Bush urging him to immediately re-equip Guard units sent overseas. The governors’ demand coincided with a report by the independent Commission on the National Guard and Reserves that stated that 90 percent of Guard units were not ready to go to Iraq. The commission concluded that the readiness of the Guard is “unacceptable” and is at the lowest level it’s been at in 35 years.
The commission is charged by Congress to recommend any needed changes in law and policy to ensure that the Guard and Reserves are organized, trained, equipped, compensated and supported to best meet the national security requirements of the United States.
“As it currently stands, the Army is incapable of generating and sustaining the required forces to wage the global war on terror and fulfill all other operational requirements without its components – Active, Guard and Reserve – surging together. Fifty-five percent of our Army is in the Reserve components, and while our armed forces have made drastic changes adjusting to the post-9/11 strategic environment, our mobilization policies have not,” then Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker told the commission in December before the Army announced his retirement.
A Pentagon emergency preparedness officer who did not want to be identified for fear that his efforts to budge vigilance “off top dead center” would be dampened by his brutal assessment, couldn’t have been any more colorfully blunt: Goddamnit! We’ve known about the problems with Guard readiness for four … years! Four … years! And what has Congress done? Not a goddamned thing, really. They’ve basically just sat around on their fat asses and wringed their hands.”
Following exposure of the Guard’s problems in responding to Katrina there’d been a blitz of tasty sound bites from suddenly concerned lawmakers who declared that it’s time to reconsider how the Guard is used and equipped.
The response to Katrina indeed should have been a wake-up call to the serious shortcomings in the equipping of Guard units. Four weeks before the hurricane struck, Lt. Col. Pete Schneider of the Louisiana National Guard had complained that, when guard members left for Iraq in October 2003, they took with them a lot of needed equipment. Specifically, they took dozens of high-water vehicles, Humvees, refueling tankers and generators.
A Congressional Research Service report prepared in the wake of the Katrina disaster concluded that the inability to carry out relief operations had as much to do with the unavailability of equipment as it did personnel. The report noted that “National Guard units responding to Katrina did not have adequate numbers of tactical radios or High Mobility Multi-Wheeled Vehicles adapted for high-water operations because this equipment was in Iraq. Another example noted is that of the 101st Air Assault Division, based in Ft. Campbell, Ky. This division, which has the largest number of transport helicopters of any Army unit, was not deployed to Katrina operations because it is in the process of deploying to Iraq.”
Maj. Gen. Roger P. Lempke, adjutant general for Nebraska and President of the Adjutants General Association of the United States, told lawmakers in May that “rotary wing aircraft are [still] at a premium because losses from war and accidents have depleted the CH-47 and UH-60 fleet. Additionally, for the first time, a National Guard aviation brigade deployed to Iraq last year depleted the number available for homeland security needs. The 36th Aviation Brigade will return this fall, and time will be needed to restore its aircraft. In the meantime, a second National Guard aviation brigade is preparing to deploy.”
Despite knowing the root of the problems before and after Katrina, the administration appears to have turned a blind eye to the matter. The Guard’s forced belated response to the decimation of a small town in southwestern Kansas seems to have proved that. But it wasn’t the fault of the citizen-soldiers who double-timed it to get to the destruction to lend a hand - their own hands had been tied.
“And what has this administration done?” the Pentagon’s catastrophic response guru grumbled. “It’s just kept deploying and deploying, using up equipment without restocking – letting stuff rust, basically. God forbid … really hits the fan in this country! We might as well start whittling spears, you know what I mean?”
“Symptoms of the pre-Katrina equipment shortages are already beginning to reappear elsewhere,” said Dr. Larry Korb, a former under secretary of Defense for Manpower, Reserve Affairs, Installations and Logistics (where he administered about 70 percent of DoD’s budget) in an analysis he prepared in May that southern hurricane-prone states are especially vulnerable.
“Efforts to rebuild the tornado-ravaged community of Greensburg, Kansas, have revealed that reconstruction and crisis management have been constrained by a lack of National Guard equipment. … Much of the Guard’s equipment that is normally positioned around Kansas to respond to emergencies and natural disasters is gone,” Korb concluded.
Ironically, Jack Bell, the current Under Secretary of Defense for Logistics and Material Readiness, pretty much concurred with Korb in his May 16 testimony to the Commission on the National Guard and Reserves.
Governors and internal Guard critics say the problems the Guard had in quickly mounting a response to Katrina should have been the granddaddy of wakeup calls. Only the news impaired couldn’t have seen that the Guard’s reaction unquestionably was impaired by the fact that half of Louisiana's Guard and 40 percent of Mississippi's Guard were deployed in Iraq. Sorely needed equipment from Guard stocks in these states were being used to fight terrorism abroad and had to be replaced from Guard supplies in surrounding states.
That was almost two years ago. “By 2007, the National Guard Bureau reported that, on average, Army National Guard units in the states now had less than 40 percent of their authorized equipment on hand,” Brig. Gen. (Ret.) Stephen M. Koper, president of the National Guard Association of the United States, told the House Committee on Homeland Security in late May.
Lt. Gen. Stephen Blum, chief, National Guard Bureau, agreed, and then explained to lawmakers that, “when equipment is needed but not on-hand at a particular location, it is necessary to bring in equipment from farther away, either from other units within a state, or from other states ...”
In March, Blum stated Guard units have only about 40 percent of the equipment they need and that equipment shortages are widespread throughout the Guard.
“The ability for the National Guard to respond to natural disasters and to perhaps terrorist weapons-of-mass-destruction events … is at risk because we are significantly under equipped,” Blum told reporters.
Koper said, “This critical situation is not due to action in Iraq and Afghanistan alone, but can also be traced to under-funding and equipping by the Army. Much of the equipment shortage [in the Guard] has evolved over the years as risk assessment by the Army led them to make decisions forced upon them by constrained budgets.”
Koper pointed out, however, that in 2005, “over 55 percent of the troops fighting the war on terrorism were National Guardsmen,” and that “this new dependence upon the Guard as an operational force has had an impact on the missions at home. Prior to Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom, the Army Guard had, on average, 70 percent of its authorized equipment on hand at home station.”
As Army Guard “units began heading overseas in combat roles, they deployed with their mission equipment sets. Units brought trucks, HMMWVs, helicopters, combat and engineering vehicles. Because of the high operating tempo and equipment attrition in Iraq, more of these vehicles were needed than expected, causing the Army to require units returning home to leave their equipment for follow-on units.”
“The loss of National Guard equipment to fighting terrorism overseas has caused two” problems, Lempke told the committee. “First, the equipment most valued for disaster response has been that most often not returned from overseas ... Secondly, equipment shortages have become uniform and widespread.”
“The Iraq war has crippled Florida’s ability to respond to hurricanes,” Korb bluntly assessed in his study, adding, “the Iraq war’s drain on personnel and equipment is forcing the Guard to work overtime to stay prepared. The Florida National Guard began the year with only about 25 percent of the authorized equipment it should have on hand, down by half from before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.”
Korb warned that two other hurricane states, South Carolina and Louisiana, face similar shortages.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) had already warned Congress that Army and Air National Guard efforts to reshape their forces to meet post-9/11 requirements “degraded the readiness of nondeployed units, particularly in the Army National Guard.”
GAO national security and military readiness experts told lawmakers that, “To deploy ready units for overseas missions, the Army National Guard [had] had to transfer equipment and personnel from nondeploying units. Between September 11, 2001, and July 2004, the Army National Guard had performed over 74,000 personnel transfers.
As early as May 2004, the Army National Guard had transferred over 35,000 equipment items to prepare deploying units, leaving nondeployed Army National Guard units short one-third of the critical equipment they need for war. Because the Pentagon has had to rely largely on Guard and Reservists to stabilize Iraq and fight terrorism abroad, equipment shortages in the field have followed suit, resulting in nondeployed units stateside being stripped of equipment to keep deployed units abroad up and running. Yet, despite this, there’s been no paucity of reports about Guard and Reserve units still having to cannibalize equipment to beef up their forces in Iraq, which represents the biggest mobilization of the Guard and Reserves in half a century.
“While most adjutant generals believe they have sufficient equipment to deal with single disasters common to their states, they fear insufficient quantities to deal with multiple disasters in their states or having to send equipment to support a regional disaster such as Katrina,” Lempke warned.
For seasoned observers of the Guard’s problems, the slow response by the Kansas National Guard to the twister there that claimed 11 lives and destroyed nearly 2,000 homes and businesses was illustrative of the larger problems that will be faced in the event of a truly cataclysmic-scale disaster.
“The Guard’s not ready … but we’re not ready in general,” said Tim Stephens, principal associate of Washington, DC-based Rescobie Associates, a firm that specializes in public health, management and preparedness and the public health advisor to the National Sheriffs Association.
(For an in-depth report on the nation’s emergency medical shortcomings for responding to a major medical crisis, see, “Seeking to Surge,” in the July HSToday)
In the event of a pandemic, the Guard will be bursting at the seams. And authorities tell HSToday.us the regular military isn’t likely to be able to offer much relief, given its overseas operating tempo. Indeed, the federal government has stated clearly that, for a time, the states will be on their own in the event of a pandemic. And with the states’ Guard short-handed and their resources depleted, governors aren’t likely to allow them to assist neighboring states.
“All told, more than 417,000 National Guard and Reservists, or about 80 percent of the members of the Guard and Reserve, have been deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, with an average of 18 months per mobilization. Of these, more than 84,200, or 20 percent, have been deployed more than once,” Korb said.
Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley said what was revealed in Kansas is a horrifying snapshot of a national malaise. He said the loss of Guard resources due to deployment in Iraq has left states “more vulnerable instead of more safe” when it comes to homeland security and disaster response.
Indeed, an audit of the preparedness of Maryland’s National Guard found “serious potential deficiencies in an array of basic, multipurpose items whose utility is clear for responding to incidents ranging from hurricanes to acts of terrorism.”
In March, New Mexico’s Adjutant General, Brig. Gen. Kenny Montoya, said his Guard units were at the bottom of the barrel in equipment readiness and that equipment issues have long plagued America’s homeland protection forces.
Former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura complained at the time that Guard deployments are “jeopardizing homeland security” by leaving state governors “woefully short-handed.” And, he pointed out, the men and women who join the Guard have a higher tendency to be law enforcers, fire fighters and emergency medical providers, and that their deployment abroad has seriously weakened first responder capabilities on the home front.
Indeed. In Massachusetts, officials say communities are having to do without a growing number of their "first responders." According to the state’s Executive Office of Public Safety, of the 190 members who will be gone for a year or more, at least 30 work in law enforcement or other emergency services.
Meanwhile, an estimated six percent of the 1.1 million members of the National Guard and Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and Coast Guard reserves are self-employed – deployment is jeopardizing their businesses.
The dangerous strain on Guard preparedness was beginning to be seen more than two years ago. In November 2004, HSToday.us reported that “Guard and Reserve forces necessary to [respond to major national disasters] are dwindling due to their deployment to Iraq, while nondeployed Guard and Reserve units have had their manpower and resources denuded to supply deployed units fighting the war on terror abroad.”
GAO warned lawmakers in October 2005 that “heavy deployments of Army National Guard forces and their equipment, much of which has been left overseas for follow-on forces, have raised questions about whether the Army National Guard has the types and quantities of equipment it will need to continue supporting ongoing operations and future missions.”
“The cumulative effect of these personnel and equipment transfers is that the readiness of nondeployed forces [domestically] has declined, challenging the Army to continue to provide ready Guard forces for future missions,” GAO stated, emphasizing that, “while the Army and the Air National Guard have supported the nation’s homeland security needs by providing personnel and equipment for unanticipated missions [abroad], the Guard’s preparedness to perform the homeland defense and civil support missions that may be needed in the future is unknown.”
Ninety-seven percent of all military civil affairs personnel are in the Reserves.
The GAO’s findings revealed US policymakers are poorly positioned "to manage the risks to the nation's homeland security," GAO said.
GAO further disclosed that “state officials have expressed concern about the Guard’s preparedness to undertake state missions, including supporting homeland security missions, given the increase in overseas deployments and the shortages of personnel and equipment among the remaining Guard units.”
In September 2006, Janet A. St. Laurent, director, Defense Capabilities and Management at GAO, told the Commission on the National Guard and Reserves that “the Army National Guard’s and Army Reserve’s shift to more of an operational role in response to the new security environment has led to a situation in which the Army’s traditional resourcing strategies for managing personnel and equipment may no longer be in balance with how the reserves are being used.”
St. Laurent testified that, “to provide deployable units for Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army National Guard and the Army Reserve have transferred large numbers of uniformed personnel and equipment from nondeployed units to deploying units. This approach has resulted in growing shortages among nondeployed units. Equipment shortages have been further compounded because DoD has required reserve units to leave large amounts of equipment overseas for use by other forces, and much of this equipment has not been replaced.”
“As a result,” St. Laurent stated, “the Army National Guard reports that units have less than one-third of their required equipment, and the Army Reserve currently reports that its units have about half of the modern equipment they would need to deploy. In addition to creating potential risk to the nation’s ability to respond to unforeseen events overseas, Army National Guard and Army Reserve equipment shortages could also adversely affect reserve units’ ability to perform homeland defense missions and provide support to civil authorities in the event of natural disasters or terrorist events.”
Marine Corps Commandant, Gen. Michael Hagee, more recently stated that “the demand on the force has increased exponentially.” In mid-November 2004, the Army and Air Force announced an increase in the number of reservists on active duty in support of partial mobilization. The total National Guard and Reserve personnel who had been mobilized by that time was 182,478, including both units and individual augmentees.
The 9/11 attacks and the global war on terror triggered the largest activation of Guard forces since World War II. By June 2004, over half of the Guard’s 457,000 personnel had been activated for overseas warfighting or domestic homeland security missions in federal and state active duty roles.
The Vermont and Tennessee Army National Guard saw their largest deployment ever, while deployment of the Minnesota and Texas Army and Air National Guard is the largest since WWII. Oregon’s Army National Guard also has experienced its longest overseas mission since World War II. The Wisconsin and Oklahoma National Guard saw combat for the first time in 60 years.
“We couldn't do what we have done without the Reserves and Guard,” said retired Lt. Col. James Carafano, a military analyst with the Heritage Foundation.
Unbelievably, GAO warned Congress nearly 20 years ago that Guard and Reserve “forces have manpower problems that would seriously limit their ability to perform if needed quickly in wartime.”
By 1997, however, GAO found war planners, DoD and the Army believed many Guard combat units simply were not needed to meet the national security strategy of fighting and winning two nearly simultaneous regional conflicts.
Today, though, the Guard and Reserves are doing pretty much just that, which has resulted in their reduced ability to meet their homeland security missions.
But with the end of the Cold War and the crumbling of the Soviet Union, and a global war on terrorism not even a blip on the radar screen, the Reserve components of today barely resemble those of 1970, when the Army was twice as large. Over the next decade-and-a-half, the Army reduced its total strength by over half-a-million soldiers. During the 1990s – after having had difficulty meeting the deployment of Operation Desert Storm and having begun to see the broad outlines of a global Islamist jihadist threat - the total Army force drew down another half-million soldiers.
Today, the active Army is less than 40 percent of its size 35 years ago, “and the sustained high operational demand for volunteer soldiers is unprecedented,” said Schoomaker, the father of modern day Special Operations Forces. He added: “Frankly, we entered this war flatfooted.”
Schoomaker explained that “investment accounts were under-funded by approximately $100 billion, resulting in nearly $56 billion in equipment shortages across the Army. To make Reserve component units combat ready, we had to pool personnel and equipment from across the force. We also cascaded older equipment to the Reserve components.”
But the poo-pooers of the problems within America’s National Guard forces point to recent figures showing the Guard has reached its congressionally authorized end strength for the first time since 1999 and is enjoying better than normal retention – thus all the ballyhooing about shortages is just so much hysterical partisan hype.
In early June, however, the Army National Guard and Air National Guard said they fell far short of their recruiting goal for May. The Army National Guard met only 88 percent of its goal and the Air National Guard met 77 percent of its goal.
Governors and other authorities say the naysayers’ claim that end-strength is un-problematic conveniently sidesteps the documented impact the siphoning of citizen-soldiers and assets to Iraq has had on preparedness at home, which includes units having had to leave their mission sets abroad.
Furthermore, the situation has been worsened by the administration’s “surge” of tens of thousands of additional troops into Iraq, which includes the already overstretched Guard.
Four more Guard brigades –more than 13,000 troops – will be headed to Iraq within the next year, shortening their time between deployments to meet the demands of the administration. As National Guard Bureau chief Blum said, the Guard is “in an even more dire situation than the active Army [which fell short of its recruiting goal in June for the second straight month], but both have the same symptoms; I just have a higher fever.”
Lieutenant General Russel Honore, the Army general in charge of training Guard and Reserve soldiers for duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, just said he sees no immediate change in how many troops will be needed. He said roughly 40,000 Guard and Reservists will be trained this year and he thinks that will continue for several years.
A Pentagon survey of Army Reservists indicated that they have increasing doubts about their units' war readiness and less enthusiasm for re-upping. Indeed. The survey showed the desire of National Guard and Reservists to stay in is diminishing. About 59 percent of Army Reservists and 62 percent of Army National Guard soldiers said they intended to stay in the military, down ten percent from an earlier survey. And the Army Research Institute projects that only 27 percent of Guard and Reserve soldiers intend to re-enlist, which would be an all-time low.
The reason, critics and observers say, is simple: Doctors, lawyers, policemen, teachers, businessmen and accountants were supposed to be part-time soldiers. But the Pentagon has come to rely on them for nearly half of its full-time military force abroad to fight a full-time war. And too many are on their fourth and fifth deployment.
Increasingly, deployments of up to 15 months is resulting in an increasing number of Guard and Reservists who own small businesses returning home to find their businesses in financial trouble. An estimated six percent of the 1.1 million members of the National Guard and Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and Coast Guard reserves are self-employed.
Additionally, a new DoD report that found soldiers who have had at least one war zone deployment are experiencing serious psychological problems.
Indeed. Troops returning from combat suffer "daunting and growing" psychological problems, a Pentagon task force reported in June. Nearly 40 percent of soldiers, a third of Marines and half of the National Guard are reporting symptoms, yet the military's response to their mental health needs is "woefully inadequate,” the task force found. “Not since Vietnam have we seen this level of combat," said Vice Adm. Donald Arthur, co-chairman of the Department of Defense Mental Health Task Force.
Further compounding morale problems, soldiers returning home are finding bills from the Pentagon for assigned equipment damaged during their tour. A government report conducted last year more than 1,000 soldiers had been billed a total of $1.5 million for damaged equipment.
Meanwhile, the White House opposes a military pay raise in January of 3.5 percent - versus the three percent endorsed by the administration –and lowering the age-60 start of reserve retirement annuities for reserve members by the length of their future mobilizations.
“We cannot keep going on like this,” said a Republican congressional staffer familiar with the problems in the Guard and Reserves. “Every day we’re one day closer to a pandemic. Hurricane season is upon is. Terrorists are plotting to attack us with WMDs. We’ve got to do something now.”
The staffer noted, though, that the problems of the Guard and Reserves are not problems that have been created by the members of the Guard and Reserves. “These men and women are doing the best they can with what they’ve got, and it just isn’t enough, I’m afraid. They deserve a helluva lot better than what we’re giving them for what we’re calling on them to do for us.”
On May 16, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced he agrees with the 23 recommendations of the Commission on the National Guard and Reserves delivered to Congress on March 1. Conceding that Guard equipment levels are the lowest they’ve been since 9/11, Gates said he accepts 20 of the report’s 23 recommendations in whole or substantially in part and that he would modify the remaining three based on comments made by DoD.
“The fact that the secretary’s review and approval of our recommendations were accomplished so quickly is a clear reflection of the secretary’s decisive leadership and support for the needed reforms,” said Arnold L. Punaro, chairman of the commission. Punaro added: “Congress is now reviewing all of our recommendations, and Secretary Gates is moving ahead to implement many of them through policy.”
All 50 governors will be watching very carefully to see what Congress does and how well Gates implements policy.
The Defense Department budget request now before Congress includes $22 billion for Army National Guard equipment over the next five years. If provided, these funds would give the Guard roughly 76 percent of the equipment they need for their stated home front missions. According to Blum, however, the total cost of the Guard’s equipment shortfall is about $36 billion – a difference of $14 billion.
One thing is for certain: Something has to be done to at least partially replenish the Guard’s assets and to retain and encourage enlistment, because they will be the nation’s backbone when real trouble erupts here at home.
“We cannot sustain the [National Guard and Reserves] on the course we’re on.” Punaro stated in March.
Schoomaker added: “At this pace, without recurrent access to the Reserve Components, through remobilization, we will break the active component … in my view, we are on a dangerous path that dictates we must increase our strategic depth, increase readiness and reduce our strategic risk. It is ill-advised for us to undertake additional strategic risks by assuming a future of significantly reduced demand. Our history is replete with examples where we have guessed wrong: 1941, 1950 and 2001, to name a few …”
The Democrat-controlled Senate Armed Services Committee though has cut $12 billion from the administration’s $142 billion defense bill to fund things like an increase in the size of the Army and the Marine Corps. Democrats have signaled a reluctance to fund increasing the size of the armed forces out of concern the White House will use the enlargement to expand either the war on terror in Iraq, which the Democrats want the US extricated from, or for other military expeditions abroad – all the while groaning about the need for adequate readiness at home.
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