[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 60 (Wednesday, May 13, 1998)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E854-E855]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                THE NATIONAL GUARD IN A BRAVE NEW WORLD

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. JIM GIBBONS

                               of nevada

                    in the house of representatives

                        Wednesday, May 13, 1998

  Mr. GIBBONS. Mr. Speaker, I submit the following for the Record.

          [From the Economist Newspaper Limited, May 13, 1998]

                The National Guard in a Brave New World


           Anything useful to do, besides fighting the army?

       It was one of the sweetest victories in the 350-year 
     history of the National Guard. the citizen-soldiers of Nevada 
     left their factories, farms and investment banks for a 
     battlefield in California, where they disguised their 
     American tanks as Russian T-80s and donned the colours of an 
     imaginary country called Krasnovia. Within a few hours they 
     had pierced the defences of the adversary, a mechanised 
     brigade of full-time soldiers from Georgia (the American 
     state, that is). Guardsmen across the nation rejoiced at 
     their Nevadan comrades' success. They had given the Pentagon 
     sceptics a bloody nose--and proved that ``weekend warriors'' 
     are perfectly capable of engaging in full-scale armoured 
     combat whenever Uncle Sam needs them.
       Unfortunately, not every battle in the relentless conflict 
     between the full-time American army and the Army National 
     Guard, a mostly part-time force with strong local roots, has 
     such a rapid and decisive outcome. Most of the time, the two 
     institutions are locked in an inconclusive war of attrition 
     which makes it impossible for Pentagon

[[Page E855]]

     strategists to use either of them effectively. Like everybody 
     else who is competing for slices of the Pentagon's shrunken 
     pie, each side in this argument dismisses its opponents as 
     superannuated, cold-war relics.
       The swift, high-tech wars of tomorrow may have little place 
     for the dentist or school-teacher who likes to drive tanks or 
     fly helicopters as a hobby, according to the full-time army--
     whose strength has been slashed by about 40%, to 495,000, 
     since the Soviet collapse. Nonsense, retorts the National 
     Guard, which has lost only 20% of its cold-war strength and 
     numbers around 370,000. As the guard sees things, the huge 
     regular army that was built to fight the Soviet Union and its 
     allies was an aberration in American history. Now that the 
     cold war is over, America should revert to reliance on the 
     citizen-soldier, a concept which dates back to colonial 
     times. ``Americans have always been suspicious of standing 
     armies, ever since we fought the British redcoats,'' says a 
     spokesman for the National Guard Association, one of the more 
     formidable lobbies on Capitol Hill. To settle the matter, 
     guardsmen point out that their position is safeguarded by the 
     American constitution, which calls for the raising of 
     militias ``to execute the laws of the Union, suppress 
     insurrections, and repel invasions.''
       But full-time army commanders remain sceptical. The guard's 
     eight combat divisions, its pride and joy, have been 
     steadfastly excluded from any significant role in the army's 
     plans to fight two regional wars (presumably in the Gulf and 
     the Korean peninsula) simultaneously--the worst-case scenario 
     on which much Pentagon thinking is based. In the guard's 
     view, this exclusion is based on a self-serving calculation: 
     the army would not be able to justify retaining ten combat 
     divisions of its own if it admitted that the guard could also 
     play an important role.
       As the army sees things, the Gulf war of 1991 proved its 
     point: modern conflicts are too quick and deadly to have much 
     place for troops that require 90 days or more to reach the 
     proper state of readiness. The guardsmen allege, with real 
     bitterness, that their combat brigades were kept out of the 
     war even when they were well prepared.
       The deadlock is so intractable, and the mistrust so deep, 
     that the entire process of adapting the military to a 
     changing world is at risk of paralysis. The latest round of 
     peace talks, convened in April by John Hamre, the deputy 
     defence secretary, persuaded the guard that the Pentagon's 
     civilian bosses do want a solution. But the part-timers 
     remain intensely suspicious of the army. They insist that 
     they are ready for painful changes, such as converting some 
     of their heavy-armour divisions into lighter ones, but only 
     if the army does the same. ``We are willing to change if the 
     army is willing to change, but we cannot take them at their 
     word,'' says Major-General Edward Philbin, director of the 
     National Guard Association.
       Tensions increased a lot last year when the Pentagon 
     published a quadrennial defence review that called for a cut 
     of 40,000 in the guard's strength. Guardsmen muttered that 
     the army had conspired against them; the army retorted that 
     it was about time the guard bore its share of defence cuts 
     like everybody else. Eventually the guard offered to accept a 
     cut of 15,000 over three years, but only if the army 
     recognised the guard's importance by signing up to 11 
     principles. Otherwise, all deals were off the table.
       The reason why the guardsmen feel able to take such a firm 
     line is that they have extraordinary political clout. Because 
     guardsmen are based in every part of the country, no lawmaker 
     can afford to ignore them. They also have a natural 
     constituency in the state governors, who rely on them to cope 
     with riots, explosions and (especially in recent months) 
     natural disasters. At least in peaceful times, the $5.5 
     billion which the Pentagon spends every year on 
     maintaining the guard is a sort of transfer from 
     Washington to the governors, who are gaining influence on 
     several other fronts and are highly protective of their 
     local troops.
       The net result is a stalemate--and intense frustration for 
     the defence planners, who long to save money on army 
     personnel (whether full- or part-time) and use it to buy 
     high-tech weapons. The Pentagon says annual procurement 
     spending must rise by about $20 billion, to $60 billion per 
     year, by 2001 if America is to retain its military edge 
     against all comers. But with every legislator determined to 
     protect bases and guard units in his or her home district, it 
     looks harder and harder to see how money can be freed for 
     this shopping spree.
       In recent months, a new factor has emerged which could have 
     a large, unpredictable effect on the stand-off between the 
     army and the guard, and on the broader balance of power in 
     the Pentagon. It is the belief among defence thinkers--
     especially those not wedded to any particular bureaucratic 
     interest--that domestic security risks may be rising at a 
     time when the United States looks virtually unchallengeable 
     overseas. In military jargon, this is the theory of 
     ``asymmetrical threats''. It goes like this: no adversary in 
     his right mind would try to match America's vast arsenal of 
     tanks, ships or nuclear weapons. It makes far better sense 
     for the enemy--be it a terrorist group, a rogue state, or a 
     combination of both--to wage chemical, biological or even 
     cyber-warfare against American society, exploiting its 
     openness.
       There was, initially at least, much rejoicing among the 
     guardsmen last year when the national defence panel, a group 
     of experts with a mandate to review the country's military 
     priorities, called for greater emphasis on countering poison 
     gas or germ warfare attacks at home. The panel suggested that 
     a Homeland Defence Command could be organised around the 
     National Guard.
       But, on second thoughts, the guardsmen feel more cautious 
     about the new defence thinking. Dealing with the ghastly 
     consequences of a chemical or biological attack has always 
     been part of their job, they point out. Governors would need 
     them badly during the few crucial hours when the emergency 
     was too serious for local police and fire services to cope 
     and the federal authorities had not yet arrived. But the 
     guard will strongly resist any changes to its structure that 
     would compromise its ability to join the regular army on 
     overseas combat missions. Since ``the army would love to turn 
     us into a constabulary'' with purely local duties, the guard 
     is bracing itself for a fresh bureaucratic fight, says 
     General Philbin.
       In fact, the advent of ``asymmetrical threats'' may not 
     suit the institutional interests of any of the Pentagon's 
     quarrelsome soldiers. Consider how the lines of authority 
     would shift in the event of a chemical or biological attack 
     on Anytown, America. Once the emergency became too serious 
     for the state government, responsibility for ``crisis 
     management''--identifying the culprit and stopping further 
     attacks--would shift to the FBI. The appalling human 
     consequences of the crisis would be dealt with by a shadowy 
     organisation called the Federal Emergency Management Agency 
     (FEMA), originally designed to keep government functioning in 
     secret in a nuclear war, but better known for mismanaging the 
     aftermath of hurricanes. The mainstream defence establishment 
     would hardly enter the picture. If the attack was clearly 
     launched by a foreign state, the generals might get busy 
     retaliating. But what if the culprits were home-grown 
     terrorists?
       In practice, nobody knows who would do what if American 
     city-dwellers faced a lethal cloud of anthrax or nerve gas. 
     An exercise in March, designed to test the authorities' 
     response to a genetically engineered virus spread by 
     terrorists on the Mexican-American border, led to better 
     squabbling among rival agencies. ``There is no clear 
     demarcation line between the FBI and FEMA, and knowledge 
     about disease and hazardous materials is spread over a broad 
     array of institutions,'' says Zachary Selden, a germ-warfare 
     boffin. ``Somebody is needed to sit on top of these 
     operations.''
       But as America waits for the barbarians, its soldiers and 
     guardsmen may at last have found something in common. Both 
     have an interest in keeping the Pentagon's mind concentrated 
     on hypothetical overseas wars, as opposed to deadly attacks 
     on the homeland which look all to possible.

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