At the ready?


Author: Colonel Kenneth Allard (US Army, ret.)

Date Published: 2008-02-08


At the ready?

Col. Ken Allard (US Army, ret.)

The Minuteman is one of our most enduring symbols because, before there was an America, there had to be an American Army. But lately this symbol has fallen upon hard times, although that wasn't the sort of issue separating winners from losers on Super Tuesday. Not surprisingly, media icons like Oprah or Bill Maher didn't even notice. But last week a congressionally chartered Commission on the National Guard and Reserves made headlines with its findings on the beleaguered state of the American Minuteman.

The bipartisan commission's chairman, Arnold Punaro, pointed, in a Washington Post interview, to "an appalling gap in readiness for homeland defense" — even compromising the Guard's ability to perform such basic missions as responding to a nuclear attack on American soil. The reason for the appalling gap is appallingly simple. The Guard and Reserves have been used up by seven years of warfare that began on 9-11, military commitments from Kandahar to Kirkuk, while also responding to disasters from Eagle Pass to the New Orleans Ninth Ward.

As they have throughout our history, the Guard stepped up to every challenge and bore every burden, pulling their belt a little tighter every time we mobilized them to pitch in and accomplish some late-breaking mission, usually involving far-distant neighbors. Meanwhile, the rest of us watched TV, read the headlines and got on with our lives.

During the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Gen. Russ Honoré took a morning off from his duties commanding the rescue and cleanup efforts to meet a flight arriving at one of the few regional airports spared by the storm. On board was a battalion of Louisiana Guardsmen returning from a particularly tough year in Iraq. The contingent included the general's son, serving as a sergeant, but all returned from combat to an even more uncertain future because many of their homes and civilian jobs had literally been blown away.

Think things are better now? That we can solve every manpower issue simply by abandoning Iraq? Try telling that to the Texas Army National Guard, which just enlisted its 19,000th member, a female non-commissioned officer who transferred in after completing a hitch in the active force. Last year, the Texas Guard logged some 72,000 man-hours supporting "civilian authority," everything from range fires to Hill Country flooding, tornado response to hurricane contingencies. Sixteen hundred other Guardsmen were called to active duty in places like Afghanistan. Still others took on the job of helping to guard the Texas-Mexico border, but maybe we could just withdraw from there, too.

Punaro is not only the commission's chairman but also a friend of long standing and a retired major general in the Marine Corps reserve. In a phone conversation on Tuesday, he candidly acknowledged the Guard's serious problems, its equipment consumed by over-deployment, its people exhausted by over-commitment. The only real question now is how we rebuild it, reconstructing a force often thrown together piecemeal. In contrast, the commission recommends comprehensive reforms, tightening the sometimes ambiguous links between the Defense and Homeland Security departments. Equally important: a more coherent system for training, promoting and compensating Guardsmen and reservists not just for 20 years "but for a lifetime of service to the nation."

The commission suggests reorganizing the nation's reserves into operational and strategic forces for better management of the global support and homeland defense missions as well as a "strategic standby reserve" that could even include retired service members. (A huge improvement over my current retired category of "18K," meaning that they recall me only if al-Qaida seriously threatens 18th & K streets in downtown Washington.)

Know what's really happening here? The first, tentative steps toward a future system of tiered military service. Want to energize the presidential debates? Then let's start arguing about requiring a year of national service from every 18-year-old. And start thinking creatively about meaningful civilian service, a broadened array of voluntary military options (active and reserve) as well as a sliding scale of educational benefits tied to those choices.

 

Because we're supposed to be a nation of Minutemen, not just couch potatoes.

Retired Col. Ken Allard is an executive-in-residence at UTSA. E-mail him at Warheads6@aol.com.

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FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Colonel Kenneth Allard (U.S. Army, ret.) is an executive-in-residence at UTSA and the author of "Warheads: Cable News and the Fog of War." and San Antonio Express-News. Email: Warheads6@aol.com

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