 |
| An F-16A (right in photo) from the 148th Fighter Wing, Minnesota ANG, escorts home one of many F-16C models the wing will receive. Seven of the Air Force’s 20 fighter wing equivalents are in the Air National Guard and AIr Force Reserve Command. |
As the United States military prepared late last year for the confrontation
with Iraq, thousands of members of the National Guard and Reserve began a holiday
season routine that had grown familiar with repetition.
Activation orders rippled through the force of 1.3 million reservists in the
largest call-up since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Around the nation, reservists
rushed to get married, informed employers of long absences to come, struggled
to shape up finances and paperwork, and bid tearful good-byes to worried family
members and friends.
More than 10,000 Guardsmen and Reservists were activated during the call-up
in December, joining another 53,000 already on active duty.
More activations took place in January and February, when the number activated
hit more than 100,000. The number could top 200,000, depending on how the face-off
with Iraq plays out. That would rival the Gulf War buildup of 263,000 reservists
12 years ago.
In spite of the obvious hardships, there were no protests from reservists whose
lives were, again, disrupted. There was no outcry from employers left shorthanded
again as employees put on the uniform and left for deployments. There were no
commanders grumbling about being shackled with “weekend warriors.”
“The primary motivator [of the reservists] is to answer the call when
the nation needs them,” said retired Maj. Gen. Richard C. Alexander, president
of the National Guard Association of the United States. “It’s why
they want to be in uniform in the first place, and their families support them
because they feel the same way.”
It’s getting harder, though, continued Alexander.
“What’s changed,” he said, “is that the US military can
no longer predict where it will be fighting next or what kind of host nation
support it might receive. That has put increased pressure on the Guard and Reserve
to step up and respond more rapidly to these unanticipated crises.”
The burden placed on the reserve components has grown dramatically in the past
decade, and it spiked even higher after the 9/11 attacks. During the Cold War’s
four decades, Presidents rarely needed to approve major activations of the Guard
and Reserve. Within the past 12 years, the reserves have been activated for
six major contingencies:
It is not unusual to find reservists who have been called up four or even five
times in the past decade.
The contribution of Guard and Reserve forces to ongoing contingency operations
has grown from an average of roughly one million man-days of duty per year in
the 1980s to 13 million man-days at present.
As a result, the Guard and Reserve have undergone a dramatic transformation
from organizations designed for mass mobilization in the unlikely event of a
major war to active members of a Total Force engaged in constant peacekeeping,
peace enforcement, and combat operations around the world.
 |
| Majs. Mike Lankford and Brian Borg, AFRC A-10 Thunderbolt II pilots, go over flight plans. They were preparing for a close air support mission from Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan, in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. |
Handle With Care
Craig W. Duehring, principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for reserve
affairs, said expanded reliance on the reserve components should be handled
with utmost care.
“Everyone realizes we are no longer using the Guard and Reserves as we
did during the Cold War,” said Duehring. “However, while the Guard
and Reserves have proven conclusively that we can count on them in places like
Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and the Middle East—and the active component
is much more willing to count on them now that they know what to expect from
the Guard and Reserve—we can’t abuse them. These are people who have
outside jobs and careers, and we may be approaching a limit, in terms of how
much we ask of them.”
In recruiting and retention, officials had expected problems. However, the
Guard and Reserve have met or exceeded their goals during the last hectic year
of operations.
Nor have officials encountered the expected spike in complaints from hard-pressed
employers upset at losing their most valued employees. “I’ve been
holding my breath and watching closely for warning signs that we’ve reached
some kind of saturation point in use of the Guard and Reserve,” said Duehring.
“So far I haven’t seen any.”
Bob G. Hollingsworth is executive director of the Pentagon’s National
Committee for Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve. He attributes the national
outpouring of support to the shock and anger caused by the first direct attack
on the United States since Pearl Harbor in 1941.
“I haven’t seen this galvanization of support from employers in my
lifetime,” he said. “The great preponderance of calls I have received
from employers after 9/11 have not concerned what they had to do by law but
rather what employers could do extra for their employees who were reservists.”
Hollingsworth cites the example of a Virginia reservist who was mobilized for
duty in Bosnia. He had a wife and two children and stood to lose about half
of his annual $50,000 income, which he earned driving trucks for the Serta Mattress
Co.
“The financial burden eventually became such a problem,” said Hollingsworth,
“that he called us, and we made a visit to Serta to explain the situation.
The company not only made up the salary differential while he was on active
duty but also extended his health insurance.”
Hollingsworth added that there are “hundreds” of companies doing
the same thing.
 |
| Above, a Commando Solo aircraft on the ramp. The 193rd SOW has a particularly high deployment rate. |
Sense of Honor
The same sense of patriotism is evident in the reservists who call the National
Committee for Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve. Many from infrequently
activated units inquired how to volunteer for active duty. Hollingsworth cites
the case of Sgt. Layne Morris, a member of a Special Forces unit in the Army
National Guard from Salt Lake City. Morris was wounded in a firefight in Afghanistan,
losing an eye. Moreover, one of his friends was killed. Now, said Hollingsworth,
Morris wants to go back to Afghanistan to complete “unfinished business”
there.
Hollingsworth says he is “ecstatic” about the response of reservists
and employers.
Today, the spotlight is on actual deployments, but the Pentagon has been studying
ways to further transform the Guard and Reserve components to make them more
relevant to an era of short-notice contingencies and new missions such as homeland
defense and regular peacekeeping rotations.
As part of an ongoing Reserve Component Comprehensive Review, Secretary of
Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld asked the services and reserve components to consider
changes in the entire active–reserve relationship. His goal: smoother cooperation
in peacetime and times of crisis.
Along the way, Rumsfeld and his top aides have made some controversial proposals.
One calls for giving back to the active force a number of missions now performed
by reservists. Rumsfeld was annoyed when he learned that he couldn’t swiftly
execute some missions because they required reserve activation.
However, any major change in that situation would strike at the heart of the
Total Force concept. Any actual proposal to move missions from the Guard and
Reserve on a wholesale basis is sure to cause consternation and anger in the
reserve ranks.
“Certainly, Secretary Rumsfeld’s suggestion that it might make sense
to move certain missions back to the active component got our attention,”
said Army Maj. Gen. Raymond F. Rees, acting chief of the National Guard Bureau.
Rees went on to say, however, “We think he just wants to make sure we
use the Guard in wise and prudent ways. Certainly if we need to make adjustments
we’ll respond, just as we’ve responded to the current vision. Our
strong feeling, however, is that citizen soldiers should be fully involved in
all aspects of the Total Force, and what we hear Rumsfeld saying doesn’t
contradict that idea.”
The Total Force was born in 1973 and was directly tied in principle to the
all-volunteer force created the same year in the backwash of Vietnam. President
Johnson had resisted a major reserve call-up throughout the Vietnam years so
as not to disturb his Great Society legislative effort.
US military leaders have never forgotten that the Johnson Administration, for
reasons of political expediency, refused to put the nation on a war footing,
leaving the uniformed services to fight the Vietnam War on their own, with little
up-front public support.
 |
| An EC-130 crew from the 193rd Special Operations Wing, Pennsylvania ANG, monitors a radio broadcast. |
Done for a Reason
In the wake of Vietnam, postwar military leaders, led by Army Chief of Staff
Gen. Creighton W. Abrams Jr., decided to make a wholesale transfer of combat
support functions to the reserves. The result was a military force structure
purposely configured to require a Presidential reserve call-up in the event
of a major mobilization.
In the Air Force, reserve component forces account for 64 percent of tactical
airlift, 55 percent of aerial refueling and strategic tankers, 38 percent of
tactical air support, and 27 percent of strategic airlift. Seven of the Air
Force’s 20 fighter wing equivalents (the term used to describe combat fighter
aircraft force structure) are in the Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve
Command. The AFRC forces also fly B-52 bombers.
In the Army, 70 percent of combat service support resides in the reserve component.
The reserves are also home to 97 percent of the Army’s civil affairs forces,
and 82 percent of its public affairs officers. Likewise, 81 percent of Army
public affairs forces are in the reserves; 81 percent of psychological operations
forces; 85 percent of medical brigades; and 66 percent of military police battalions.
The Department of Defense has discovered—or relearned—this pivotal
fact: The President needs to call up the reserves even for such small-scale
contingencies as Bosnia, Kosovo, and the Gulf no-fly zone operations.
Under the pressures of real-world operations during the past decade, the reserve
components have learned a new flexibility.
A real-world example came late last year. The Air Force badly wanted to send
home thousands of Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve Command troops. They
had been on security duty at US and overseas bases for more than a year, and
they legally could have been held on active duty for another 12 months.
However, the Air Force did not have sufficient personnel to replace them. In
the end, the Army National Guard stepped in, activating and retraining 9,000
combat troops for security duty and offering them as replacements.
“I think the Army Guard’s willingness to mobilize 9,000 of their
troops to fill that shortfall was a monumental event,” said Duehring. “It
showed the willingness of the reserves after 9/11 to relax some of these entrenched
philosophies and territorial jealousies.”
There is widespread wariness, however, that the reserve review could make it
easier to deploy military forces without a call-up of reserves, and that would
undermine a fundamental principle of the Total Force.
“I understand that the Secretary of Defense is trying to [move] missions
from the reserve into the active-duty component in order to shrink the amount
of time it takes them to respond to a contingency, but I fear making it possible
to deploy our military without the reserve component,” said Alexander.
“That makes it more likely that a particular Administration will take us
to war, rather than the United States going to war as a whole nation. ... I
also believe the Guard and Reserve would become less relevant.”
The reserve components aren’t averse to change. In fact, officials say
they are experimenting with new ways to make the reserves more flexible and
responsive—and reserve duty less onerous once a unit or individual is activated.
For many Army officials, the best model is the Air National Guard. “I’ve
said for years that the Air Guard model makes a lot of sense for the new operational
environment we’re confronting,” said Rees of the National Guard Bureau.
Rees went on, “Just look at Air Guard units, attached to the 1st Air Force,
that are ready to fly air defense missions over the United States with only
minutes of warning. The Air Guard has proven for a long time that the Guard
can support rapid-reaction missions. You just have to make the appropriate investment
in resources and training.”
 |
| SrA. Charles Schilling, a crew chief from the 159th Fighter Wing, New Orleans ANG, directs an F-15 out to the taxiway. Members of the 159th were at Incirlik AB, Turkey, for Operation Northern Watch. |
The Rainbow Effect
In a concept called “rainbowing,” Air Guard units meet the requirements
of a three-month Northern Watch or Southern Watch deployment by bringing in
fresh units every two weeks. The units fall in on forward deployed equipment.
This avoids burdening a single unit with an entire 90-day deployment, as is
customary for the active duty Air Force.
All of this is part and parcel of USAF’s 10 Air and Space Expeditionary
Forces, or AEFs.
“The AEF construct is clear evidence that the Air Force and Air Guard
have tried to come to grips with the expeditionary requirements and the types
of deployment issues we’re increasingly confronting,” said Rees. “We’re
not at that level of sophistication yet with the Army Guard.”
There are other lessons from the Air National Guard model, say officials. They
note many Air Guardsmen are pilots or aircraft maintainers in civilian life,
and, as a result, they can often transition to their military roles more quickly
and with less training. The lesson is that all service reserve components should
take care to match civilian careers with reserve force occupations.
The Air Guard also defies the old one-weekend-a-month, two-weeks-a-year scheme
of reserve duty. Because some Air Guard units are known to have high deployment
rates and operations tempo—the Air Guard’s Commando Solo 193rd Special
Operations Wing in Pennsylvania is a noted example—they tend to attract
reservists with flexible careers and a thirst for adventure.
“People realize when they join those units that they have a high rate
of tasking, and if that doesn’t fit the realities of their civilian careers
or family situations, they better look to join another unit,” said Duehring.
“Frequently, Air Guard pilots are on reserve duty for much longer than
the traditional two weeks each summer, but their jobs allow for that.”
In applying that concept across the board, the Office of Reserve Affairs is
looking to adjust the old model. If an Army Guard armor unit takes a week to
deploy its equipment to the field for training and a week to return it, for
instance, it may need to train for a full three weeks while dropping the requirement
to show up one weekend per month.
The point is that the threats to US security and national interests around
the world are changing more rapidly than any time in memory, Guard and Reserve
officials say, and their forces are ready to adapt to the new challenges.
As Duehring puts it, “The idea is to be flexible.”