Guard reshuffles force to offset deployment stress.

To continue to meet growing deployment requirements around the world, the U.S. National Guard is changing its force mix, said Lt. Gen. H Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau.

"We do not want to use the same units over and over," Blum told defense writers. "We have great concern that, if we do, we may not be able to sustain those units indefinitely. The guard is an all-volunteer force that has to balance a civilian career, or a civilian education, or a civilian life with military service."

To achieve that balance, Blum said, the Guard is developing a more predictable force structure based on the Air Force Air Expeditionary Force concept, which the Army also is considering. "The [AEF] structures buckers of capabilities against windows of time," he explained. "That's kind of what I want to do with the Army National Guard.

"If you're a member of the Army National Guard, you know, 'Okay, in about '07, if the country needs me, that's probably when I'm going to be mobilized and deployed.'

"I am frankly taking the best that I can extract from the Air Guard model and applying it to the Army Guard situation," Blum said. The two services are experimenting with interchangeable, modular units, which can be mixed and matched, as needed, he said.

"We're kind of making 'plug-and-play' units that will exist in the Army, the Guard and the Army Reserve," Blum explained. "It isn't going to matter which component these components come from, as long as they come with the same capabilities wanted by the combatant commander."

For example, Blum said, the Air Force, the Air Force Reserve and the California and Nevada Air Guards are cooperating to stand up a fully integrated Predator unit at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev.

"This is huge," he said. "They're forming it right now. It's imminent. It's moving very quickly."

The RQ-1A Predator is a long-range, medium-altitude unmanned aerial vehicle designed for surveillance and reconnaissance missions. Blum declined to comment on whether the new Predator unit being formed at Nellis will be equipped with Hellfire missiles.

In October, the Colorado National Guard and the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command, at Peterson Air Force Base, Colo., established the nation's first ground-based Midcourse Defense Brigade. "That's 100 percent Army National Guard," Blum said. "We transitioned from air defense units, that we don't think we'll need in the future, to the kind we absolutely will need."

The brigade has to be operational by October of this year, Blum said. "We are ahead of schedule in filling the positions, training the soldiers and getting the people assigned and ready up there." Whether or not the missiles are ready by then "is outside my purview," he said.

Some Guard units not needed in Iraq and Afghanistan are being retrained in career fields that are in demand, Blum said. For example, the Guard is retraining more than 4,000 troops from artillery and transportation units for duty as military police. Additional MPs are needed to guard detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay and to provide security at U.S. air bases and other military installations around the world, he said.

Those troops "will be available for whatever requirements come up," Blum said. "They will be trained to the point where, if they are needed in Iraq, they could be deployed."

The retrained troops will be very useful in relieving over-deployed units, Blum explained. "If I only have two MP companies, then I almost have to send every other one every other time," he said. "If I can make three or four MP companies, then I can get this rotation down to one in five or one in six years. I can get to something that's reasonable and sustainable.

"We're going to be in a pretty high-stress environment for probably another 18 months, until we get this about right," he said. "Then, we should be able to do this with a little less energy, a little less angst, and not abuse our members quite as much as I think we're doing right now.

At the moment, Blum said, the Guard is preparing to send three brigades--the 81st from Washington state, the 30th from North Carolina and the 39th from Arkansas--to Iraq to relieve units currently deployed there. The Army has made a special effort to make sure that the three brigades have better equipment than the first Guard troops who went to Iraq, he said.

Too often, those troops are going into combat without the weapons and equipment they need to survive, Sen. John Kerry, D.-Mass, told a gathering at the University of California in February. "National Guard helicopters are flying missions in dangerous territory without the best available ground-fire protection systems," he said. "Unarmored Humvees are falling victim to road-side bombs and small-arms fire. And families across America have had to collect funds from their neighbors to buy body armor for their loved ones in uniforms ..."

Blum said that he has visited two of the three brigades, and the situation is improving. "The two that I've visited have better equipment than the soldiers that I saw when I was in Iraq in September," he said.

Gen. Peter Schoomaker, Army chief of staff, "has put his money where his mouth is on this issue," Blum said. This year, "they have moved $1.7 billion--with a B--to ensure that the Army National Guard units that go over to Iraqi Freedom have exactly the same individual uniforms, weapons, radios, protective body armor, the new ballistic helmet. They have them now in training, prior to being deployed."

This is a "huge" change in Army culture, Blum said. "I was present when Gen. Schoomaker gave instruction to his staff that he did not ever want to hear the words 'reserve component' used again when it came to equipping soldiers. They are Army soldiers. They will be equipped as Army soldiers."

Despite this, however, anyone going to Iraq three months from now is likely to find that U.S. forces don't have enough up-armored Humvees, Blum said. "The Army is pressing the industry to produce these faster, and they're reinvesting their money against these kinds of requirements," he said. "But that isn't going to be fixed overnight."

If soldiers aren't wearing the body armor, Blum said, "its because they chose not to wear them, and they should be disciplined by their chain of command."

On the homeland security front, Blum said the Guard needs more civil support teams, which are trained to assist local authorities in dealing with mass-emergencies, particularly terrorist attacks involving weapons of mass destruction.

"Right now, we have 34 [such teams] that are certified and trained," he said. In March, the Defense Department announced plans to field the next 12.

Congress has mandated a total of 55--one for each state and territory. "You could argue that California could use two, because of its geography and demographics."

Each team includes 22 members of the Guard, trained and equipped to detect chemical, biological, nuclear and explosive agents in a suspected terrorist attack. They stay busy, Blum said.

"There is not a single day that a CST is not deployed," he noted. "Every single day, my BlackBerry [handheld computer] comes on, and a CST goers out to check some strange substance somewhere in the United States.

"They can go there and say, 'This is not anthrax, or this is not ricin, or this is not something hazardous,'" Blum said. "This has kept somebody--pranksters, terrorists, criminals, whoever put this stuff there, somebody with an evil bent--from disrupting the economy and terrorizing people in our nation."

The CSTs "have been highly, highly valuable," Blum said. Yet, they could be reorganized, he noted. "It's no secret, I don't think, that the Department of Defense sees their rightful place in the Department of Homeland Security." That decision, Blum said, "is not mine to make," but if they stay with the Guard, Blum would like to make them a pair of the new joint standing headquarters in each state and territory. "To me," he said, "that would make some sense."

The current conflict is the first real test of the all-volunteer military force in its 30-year history, Blum said.

U.S. military services--including the Army and Air National Guards--have been dependent upon volunteers to fill their ranks since the demise of the draft in 1973, at the end of the Vietnam War. The question now is whether men and women will continue to volunteer, when facing the possibility of long deployments and bloodshed, Blum said.

"This is the acid test," he said. The war on terror is putting the all-volunteer force "through the crucible," he said. "Can it sustain the pressures of a war, where we're [experiencing] casualties on a continuous basis over a long period of time?

"So far, the indications are that the volunteer force ... is a reliable force, and that it is resilient enough to take the pressures that it's being put under right now, which are pretty extraordinary. So, so far, it looks like it is working."

Blum, however, did voice some concern about attrition rates. About 460,000 men and women serve in Army and Air National Guard units, he said. Of that number, nearly 120,000 members are on active duty. Some serving in Iraq were deployed previously in Afghanistan, Kosovo and elsewhere.

A recent Guard survey of 5,000 volunteers from 15 states indicated that long deployments could increase the percentage of those planning to leave the service from 16 percent in 2003 to 20 to 22 percent in 2004.

The survey indicated, "as we expected, that as many as one in four of our soldiers is not exactly, totally thrilled about what is going on," Blum said. "Yes, I am concerned, but the sky is not falling."

Despite the survey results, "our loss rate actually is improving over the last several months," Blum said. "So we're doing better now in keeping our trained human resources--our soldiers and airmen--than we were prior to 9/11."

Before the terrorist attacks, Blum said, people joined the Guard for a variety of reasons--for military training, adventure, job skills, educational subsidies, part-time work. "Since 9/11, anybody who has joined knows they're joining a different National Guard than existed for the previous 365 years of the Guard's history. I would say that the youth of this nation are answering the call to arms, and patriotism is transcending any of the minor gripes that they have with their own situation."

The men and women in the Guard are "very highly trained and motivated people, and they came in to do a job," Blum said. "Now, the job is there. Combat has a way of stripping away all of the peacetime ambiguities, and people are able to focus on the mission."

Over the past year, Blum said, the Guard has been reorganizing its structure to "make it a more ready, relevant, reliable and accessible force in today's world." The goal, he said, was for the Guard to be able "to operate both at home and abroad in a joint context," in other words with other military services.

In October 2003, Blum noted, the Guard merged 162 headquarters in 50 states and four territories into a single joint unit for every state and territory, eliminating 108 organizations. "That gives the [U.S.] Northern and Pacific Commands--the two combatant commands which have responsibility for the defense of our homeland--an organization that looks like them."

The change strengthens the military resources available for use in an emergency in every state and territory, Blum said. If the country needs to send military forces into a state or territory, an apparatus will be already in place to receive, help stage and work with the incoming units, he said.

Meanwhile, he said, the Guard is "restructuring and re-balancing the force so that we, in fact, are more relevant and more ready in a sooner period of time."

For homeland defense, "there is no allowable time for mobilization," Blum said. "We have to respond truly in minutes and hours. Days and weeks are late."

Historically, mobilization time has been "painfully long," Blum said. The reason for that is, traditionally, Guard units have been equipped and trained after mobilization. Doing those things before mobilization "could have reduced that time dramatically," he said. "That's what we are moving to do right now."