On January 31st the independent Commission on the National Guard and Reserves will assert in its final report that the Pentagon will continue its heavy reliance on America's citizen soldiers for both homeland defense duty and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. To add emphasis to their point, contingents of Oklahoma's 45th Infantry Brigade Combat Team will arrive in Kuwait that day as the vanguard of more than 12 National Guard Brigades that will deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan in 2008, bringing the total number of Guardsmen and women set to be called to Federal Duty this year to some 56,000 soldiers - the highest tally since 2005, when about half the combat troops in Iraq were comprised of part timers. Indeed, many of the troops deploying this year are returning for their second and third tours.
The National Guard Brigades headed to Iraq and Kuwait in 2008 are full of soldiers who have been there, who know how to train their soldiers, who know how to lead under fire. War funding measures and changes in policy has already assured our citizen soldiers have been issued the latest equipment and have been funded for additional training. They are, perhaps, the most trained soldiers and units that the National Guard has ever sent to war.
To sustain this state of readiness, the Commission will recommend that Congress and the Department of Defense make major changes in laws, rules, regulations, personnel and funding in order to establish the Guard and Reserve as an operational reserve in the years to come. The Secretary of Defense has already endorsed earlier recommendations by the Commission, but if these recommendations are not ultimately implemented by elected leadership, it is not hard to foresee a time when these proficient and effective National Guard units will revert to their pre-war state of readiness, an often horrible condition that is worth reviewing.
Though endowed with an unquestionably urban character, the New York Army National Guard's 69th Infantry Regiment - "the Fighting 69th" made famous in a James Cagney film of the same name, was typical of many Reserve Component units on the eve of 9/11. Most of its soldiers were immigrant kids and New Yoricans from the lower economic classes of inner-city New York. Most had no prior military experience and no intention of serving their country any longer than it took to get a pay check or college credit or job training. Most of the sergeants were non-commissioned officers in name only. They wore stripes on their sleeves, but many of them had never led soldiers anywhere beyond the non-commissioned officer club. Most had no active duty experience. Only a couple had been to combat, Vietnam usually. And while the veterans' wisdom was solid, their knees, their backs and their stomachs were not. The officers, the few that were there, were rarely better. While many of them aspired to a career in the National Guard, they might have fared better leading a Boy Scout troop than an infantry company. Relief for cause was not an uncommon event for many company commanders in the unit then.
If the men were sketchy, their equipment was downright derelict. Machine guns were missing parts. Rust-laden trucks sprouted flower beds and served as make-shift shelters for the homeless. Soldiers talked on radios that were so old they didn't communicate with anybody else in the Army. In many cases, they couldn't even talk to themselves. They fired the earliest version of the M-16 assault rifle whenever they shot, which was supposed to be once a year, but not always that often.
"A Russian tank regiment would have to be crossing the George Washington Bridge before the Fighting 69th got the call, and then only maybe!" was how a veteran Guard officer put it to me when I joined the unit in 2000. The logic made sense. In the Persian Gulf War the only assignment for the Fighting 69th was to pass out hot dogs to the heroic regular Army troops marching in the welcome home ticker tape parade in Manhattan.
The planners and policy makers at the Pentagon designed the modern National Guard as a strategic reserve for the regular Army. Despite lots of talk about the "total force concept," the combat arm of the National Guard was never meant to mobilize and deploy on short notice for a small regional conflict like Desert Storm or a peacekeeping mission like Bosnia. Rather it was designed solely to be called up in the event of World War III - use once for the big one and then throw away. Guardsmen and women were the very last line of defense for the nation and funded, trained, equipped and manned appropriately. By design, there was little money for facilities and training. Equipment consisted of hand-me-downs from the active component. And units were never staffed to full strength.
Yet as Donald Rumsfeld so accurately stated in December 2004 to a formation of Tennessee Guard soldiers in Kuwait, "you go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you want." When terrorists attacked the World Trade Center, the Army had units like the Fighting 69th. The rag tag unit rushed like Minutemen to Ground Zero and went on to protect vital interests here in the homeland for the next year, missions that even the least prepared Guard units could managed. But as the Pentagon settled in for long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, they needed to call heavily on the Guard's combat forces. The generals invited the citizen soldiers to sit at the grown-up table (though not necessarily on the same side). Ready or not, units like the Fighting 69th were headed into the fray, from service at Ground Zero into the heart of Baghdad.
The learning curve was steep for many of these units. The Fighting 69th alone was thrust into the fight before it had worked out all its kinks, and the battalion suffered heavily casualties in its first few months of fighting in Iraq in 2004 and 2005. Several officers and senior sergeants were sacked or reassigned for competency reasons. Some soldiers had to pick up where others had let down. While the enemy had a vote in the fate of the Fighting 69th, the legacy of the old strategic reserve made the first few months of the war especially difficult.
At the core of many of the Fighting 69th's struggles was an acute lack of resources. Dollars for full-time manning, effective field training, military education and new equipment were tight. Without a core group of full time soldiers to support the unit, administrative actions including pay and promotions were often haphazard. Without effective and compelling field training, soldiers often quit the National Guard for more compelling interests. Without the full spectrum of professional military education, many soldiers failed to learn key aspects of their wartime jobs. And without new equipment, the Fighting 69th was forced to spend valuable training time reading manuals instead of aggressively preparing for combat. For units like the Fighting 69th, success in Iraq came from on the job training where the costs for making errors could be lethal.
But in its poor readiness, the Fighting 69th of 2001 had a lot in common with its ancestors on the eve of every major war in the history of the nation. The National Guard has habitually been unprepared for war, many units forced to fight with a lot more moxie than practice. Fortunately, soldiers at all grades have found a way to make it work from the Civil War through Iraq. In Baghdad in 2005, the Fighting 69th was ultimately reassigned to secure the infamous Airport Road, a violent and dangerous highway that had become a black mark on U.S. forces in Iraq. Using its own street smarts and audacity, the unit quelled the violence on the road, making it one of the safest roads in Iraq.
The National Guard and Reserves are the ultimate come from behind victory story. But must it always be set up for a long struggle? Must our citizen soldiers have to re-learn to fight every time the nation goes to war? The Reserve forces of the United States are arguably the best they have ever been. But when this war ends, history has shown that the Guard and Reserves will slip back to a state of disrepair. In the age of global terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, it is not a risk worth taking. Policy experts and lawmakers must consider seriously the final recommendations of the Commission on the National Guard and Reserves. They must make long-term and substantive changes for our Citizen Soldiers. Anything less will be a commitment to mediocrity that could result in unnecessary casualties when the alarm goes off again.