Since 9-11, we have relied on the reserves, including the Army National Guard combat units, to supplement the active Army and Marines (including the Marine reserve division). Reverend Sensing posts on what the National Guard's role should be: combat reserve, homeland defense, a Governor's disaster response force, or peactime engagement force?
The Guard has roles in all of these missions. But I worry about the combat role. I think the combat mission is absolutely critical. And though the Guard is quite good as a reserve force, it suffers by being compared to American active forces. Really, our Guard rivals just about any other active duty army as far as quality goes. Our enhanced seperate brigades have done well in combat. But we have neglected our Guard divisions. They have been the poor step-sisters as far as resources go since nobody expected that we'd need to use them once the Soviets went away.
But with our enhanced spearate brigades tapped out, we will have to look to our Guard divisions to help in Iraq and Afghanistan if we are not to rely too much on the active units to go back to Iraq yet again. Yet instead there has been talk of sending the enhanced brigades on second tours of duty. This is ridiculous:
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.
We can't assume that all our wars will be fast and victorious, as I noted in the article I wrote for Army magazine in the post linked to above. [Sorry, no link to the article, this was pre-web--just to a synopsis I wrote.] We need the Guard divisions in case wars are tougher than we anticipate or last longer than we think. Our experience in Iraq validates our need for the Guard as a combat reserve force.
We need to figure out how our contract with reservists will be written when mobilization goes beyond rare global war and becomes routine. But we need the reserves as a combat force available to augment the active component forces for war. If we can't do that, then we might as well disband the Guard.
