Army leaders are considering seeking a change in Pentagon policy that would allow for longer and more frequent call-ups of some reservists to meet the demands of conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, a senior Army official said yesterday.
Reservists are being used heavily to fill key military support jobs, particularly in specialty areas, but Army authorities are having increasing difficulty limiting the active-duty time of some normally part-time soldiers to a set maximum of two years, the official said. He described the National Guard's 15 main combat units as close to being "tapped out."
The fifteen main combat units referred to here are the 15 enhanced separate brigades of the Guard. They are intended to be mobilized and used with 90 days of training. They have the best resources of all the Guard combat units. The three-month timeframe is a bit optimitic for whole brigades but battalions were called up and used successfully in the large-scale combat operations phase of the war. Fifteen battalions were used in this part of the war. The rest are getting used for rotations to suppress the Baathists and their jihadi friends.
But how is this tapping out the Guard? The Army National Guard also has eight combat divisions in its ranks. It is disturbing that we haven't figured a way to use these units in war (the synopsis is from a 1999 article of mine from Army Magazine). Even with lower readiness, we've been at war for three years now. We have had time to train and provide resources to these 24 brigades of troops plus divisional combat support and service units. [NOTE: Actually, I think the divisions have 19 brigades, now.] Why can't we call up the brigades even if the divisions can't be called up as entire units? Heck, we actually have 12 active-duty division headquarters. While ten command active units, two are so-called integrated divisions where active divisonal headquarters command National Guard enhanced brigades. Use these divisional headquarters to command Guard brigades from the divisions.
There is no excuse for having a unit crunch or calling up enhanced brigades again. The enhanced brigades aren't the entire Guard and we've had enough time to bring up select divisions to mobilization standards. If we haven't, heads should roll. These are our reserves, people, we should use them.
