Guard balancing emerging roles in homeland defense.

The National Guard continues to expand its missions in support of homeland defense, even as it contends with frequent overseas deployments, equipment shortages and low recruiting levels.

In response to the war on terror, the Guard has been forming special units trained for security missions in the homeland, with capabilities ranging from responding to attacks using weapons of mass destruction to gathering intelligence.

"Where the National Guard sees itself going in this whole thing is becoming a full-spectrum force with enhanced joint capabilities to do homeland defense and also support homeland security," said Col. Thomas Hook, chief of the National Guard Bureau's future operations division.

Guard units comprise more than half of the deployed forces in Iraq, with eight brigades on the ground.

"Any additional workload is tough ... when the Guard itself is being overused," said Michael O'Hanlon, senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution. "But frankly, when I look around at what the Guard's role is in homeland security, it's totally doable," because the required number of soldiers for such missions is modest.

One key challenge for the Guard is balancing homeland mission expansions with the needs of the states and the military.

During the National Governors Association annual meeting in Iowa in July, governors met behind closed doors with the National Guard Bureau's chief, Lt. Gen. H Steven Blum, and several other federal officials. The governors questioned authorities about the Guard's structure and role, length of deployments and the availability of troops for state missions.

"There's a great deal of concern amongst a number of governors, out in the western states especially, that when they have a natural disaster, such as a fire, [the state] could have major requirements for the Guard being called up," said Governor Mark R. Warner, D-Va., who chaired the NGA annual meeting.

"General Blum has made a commitment to the governors that they will have, as much as possible, at least 50 percent of their Guard forces available at any given time within their state," said Hook.

But having 50 percent of the Guard forces available in each state is not always possible, he conceded. "Right now, some units are being mobilized on a more frequent basis primarily because of demands of missions overseas," he explained, which leaves some states short of their 50 percent. But, he says, one remedy is to facilitate the movement of Guard forces from one state to another under the emergency management assistance compact, a national disaster-relief agreement that was signed into law in 1996.

"I think states are more than happy to respond to other states in times of need," said Warner. "But if that's going to be the expected procedure, then that ought to be fully laid out."

At a recent military transformation conference in Washington, D.C., Blum displayed another solution: a force generation model for the Guard, based upon a six-year cycle, that ensures each state would have 50 percent of its force at any time.

"There would be a time period, between overseas deployments, where a unit could focus a little bit more on homeland defense missions. So their training would be on skills that would be more suited for homeland defense missions but still support their wartime missions," said Hook.

Under the model, units would rotate into one-to-two-year deployments, with approximately one year to train and prepare for mobilization. During the other three or four years, they would be available to the states and the Defense Department to perform homeland defense missions as necessary. The Guard currently is not on a six-year cycle, said Hook, but is in the process of implementing the system.

As the country's oldest military force, the National Guard has a unique dual mission, with service to the state and to the federal government.

Consisting of volunteers, often called "citizen-soldiers" or "weekend-warriors," who train two days a month, plus 15 annual days, the Guard traditionally has been called upon by governors to provide emergency relief following natural disasters and to maintain public safety during riots. That's in addition to maintaining readiness for activation by the president during times of war and national emergencies.

The Guard has 332,000 members, but it is authorized 350,000, said Blum.

In a prepared statement, Thomas E Hall, assistant secretary of defense for reserve affairs, told the House Armed Services Committee in July that the Guard is at 77 percent of its recruiting goal for fiscal year 2005.

Blum said he was not worried about the recruiting problems in the Guard. "We have fewer people, but more deployable soldiers," he said. "We are going to be all right."

After the September 11 attacks, the Guard took on additional homeland security missions, providing security for airports and other critical infrastructures and expanding its role in protecting U.S. borders through its counterdrug programs. It also flew combat air patrols over U.S. cities. While it no longer has a presence in airports, the Guard has been activated by governors to support local law enforcement, such as providing security for mass-transit facilities in the U.S. following the July bombings in London.

"Clearly the primary focus before 9/11 was on the traditional mission in support of the overseas war fight. So a lot of our efforts are--and continue to be--on training to do that," said Hook. He added that the Guard has not veered from that focus, but instead is using some of those same skills and training for potential domestic missions.

But one of the Guard's new homeland security efforts has already run into trouble. An intelligence unit in the California National Guard is under a state senate investigation for allegedly monitoring a Mother's Day anti-war protest at the state capitol. California State Sen. Joe Dunn, a Democrat who chairs the subcommittee that allocates funds for the Guard, has called for hearings to determine whether the Guard used funds improperly to establish the unit, and whether it is part of a larger network for domestic spying.

"There was never any intent or capability to do any domestic surveillance. Nor did we do any domestic surveillance because that's prohibited by law," said Col. Dave Baldwin, a California Guard spokesperson. "The Mercury News picked up on an e-mail circulated at headquarters that, to an outsider, would give the perception that the director was directing that we monitor a peaceful protest. So they took that perception and turned it into allegations that we're conducting domestic spying."

The state's adjutant general formulated the anti-terrorism unit, called Information Synchronization, Knowledge Management and Intelligence Fusion Center, in June 2004, as part of a new Civil Support Division. Its purpose, according to Baldwin, was to facilitate information sharing amongst state and local law enforcement agencies.

"The goal of the entire civil support division was to help transform the National Guard headquarters ... to better respond to homeland security missions and homeland defense missions and to better integrate with homeland issues that were appearing on the civilian sector," said Baldwin.

The intelligence unit, he said, was never implemented. However, the California Guard does have a traditional J-2 section that will handle very similar information-sharing issues, including "a big mission in conducting intelligence oversight."

Meanwhile, "we're going to continue to cooperate with Sen. Dunn's investigations and hearings," said Baldwin. "And we look forward to the opportunity to show that we did nothing wrong, that we intended to do nothing wrong. And we look forward to clearing up any misunderstandings that might be out there."

Such an investigation raises questions about the Guard's capabilities to handle homeland missions that fall outside its traditional purview, but some argue that the Guard is well suited for these challenges.

"I do not see a reason to believe that intelligence activities are beyond the talents of the National Guard," said O'Hanlon, of the Brookings Institution. "I would actually tend to think the Guard is going to be on balance," as long as leaders ensure that the unit commanders are competent. "Intelligence requires the small units doing their specialized tasks well, and that's what plays to the Guard's strengths."

In its new "Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support," released June 30, the Defense Department recommends utilizing the Guard in five specific areas: air and missile defense, maritime security, land defense, weapons of mass destruction response and critical infrastructure protection.

"It lays out what we've been prepared to do anyway," said Hook. "It's a recognition that the National Guard is in a unique position. First of all, because we are dispersed throughout the communities across the country, it makes it much easier for the Guard to respond quickly. It's also a recognition that the Guard, in state status or state active duty, or what we refer to as Title 32 status, can provide assistance to the law enforcement agencies and do that without violating the Posse Comitatus restrictions that the Title 10 forces may run into."

"I think the new strategy is right on," said Jack Spencer, senior policy analyst for defense and national security at the Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based, public policy research institute. The nation had been lacking organization for its homeland defense, he said, most crucially in delegating responsibilities to specific forces. The strategy provides that first step, he said. However, it still lacks clarity in a number of areas pertaining to the military, he said.

Still, the Guard is moving forward, fielding teams to deal with its evolving homeland security and defense missions.

Among the newer organizations are CERFPs (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear or High Yield Explosive Enhanced Response Force Packages), which have been assembled to assist first responders in the event of a mass casualty terrorist attack. Guardsmen on these teams can locate and extract civilians from wreckage and provide medical triage and mass decontamination.

During the past year, the Guard has created 12 such teams, each to be manned by 100 to 120 Guardsmen. The CERFPs are stationed across the country in 12 states--California, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Missouri, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington and West Virginia--that cover the 10 Federal Emergency Management Agency regions.

In Florida, the state's adjutant general certified the CERFP team's medical and decontamination components last year.

"This year, we're attempting to get the certification on the search and extraction so we'll have a full 100-percent capable team," said Col. Jack Paschal, commander of the 202nd Red Horse Squadron. Twenty-five Guardsmen from his engineering squadron comprise the search and extraction unit of Florida's CERFP.

"Since we're engineers, we're more uniquely set up to do that kind of a mission," he said. Those engineering skills particularly are applicable to performing search and extraction missions in a CERFP, he said.

The CERFPs will complement the Weapons of Mass Destruction-Civil Support Teams, or WMD-CSTs, that began forming in 1998. There are 32 operational CST teams in place. The Defense Department in November announced activation of 11 additional teams that will train for certification during the next 18 months. There will be a total of 55 teams, one in each of the country's states and territories, with two stationed in California.

Each CST team consists of 22 full-time Guard members trained to identify the agents used in a WMD attack and to facilitate interactions between first responders and the CERFP teams.

By contrast, the CERFP teams are manned by a combination of part-time and full-time Guardsmen. In Florida, however, the CERFP team is totally manned by part-time personnel, said Paschal.

"That is one of the bigger challenges, taking on a new mission with no additional time, other than people being able to take off from their civilian employers to devote to the planned training time," he said. So far, he noted, it seems to be working out.

Another challenge is balancing the CERFP mission with other responsibilities.

"We have members on several teams at one time, so if we have to do too many missions at once, we say, 'Hey, we're out of folks. De-obligate us from one of these missions so we can do this other mission, if that's your priority,'" said Paschal.

Last year, Congress created a commission to assess the roles and missions of the National Guard and Reserves. At press time, eight of the 13 members had been appointed.

The Guard remains confident that its mission expansions, in light of the Defense Department's strategy, are headed in the right direction, officials said.

"As long as we recognize that it's going to be kind of a dual mission for the Guard, that we're prepared to fight overseas in support of the rest of the Department of Defense, but we're also prepared, equipped and trained to use those same capabilities domestically, absolutely, that's the right thing to do," said Hook.