Endangering the National Guard

The real scandal about Bush and the National Guard is not what he did—or avoided doing—during Vietnam; it is the damage Bush is doing to the National Guard today through his utter mismanagement of the war in Iraq, thereby risking the security of Americans at home. So declared former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura at a recent event focused on transforming the reserve component of the U.S. military. Last week's presidential debate made it clear that John Kerry agrees. Kerry told our ill-equipped, overstretched, and over-deployed military reserves that "Help is on the way." Ventura’s ire—and Kerry's pledge to the troops and their families—bring into focus an important policy question, which underpinned the conference where Ventura spoke: Is the purpose of the Guard and Reserve to defend the American homeland or to augment the active-duty military wherever in the world it is engaged?

Speaker after speaker at the conference sponsored by the Association of the United States Army, the Center for American Progress and the Center for Peace and Security Studies described the current situation in the Guard and Reserve. The news was not good. In what John Kerry has called a "back-door draft," thousands of Guard and Reserve soldiers are being barred from leaving the supposedly "all volunteer" force when their voluntary service periods are over. Men and women who joined understanding they would be part-time warriors are deploying to combat as much as or more than their active-duty counterparts. A host of elected leaders, senior military officers, government officials and defense policy experts mostly painted a dismal picture of military reserves pushed to the breaking point because of the war in Iraq, and because of the Bush administration’s stubborn refusal to increase the size of the active-duty force.

Relieved to be able to “speak out” now that he is no longer the commander-in-chief of the Minnesota National Guard, Ventura said reservists weren't correcly outfitted for war. “We don’t equip them as frontline combat units,” he said, yet they are being sent into frontline combat with only the equipment supplied by the people of Minnesota. He also lamented the fact that, since Guard and Reserve soldiers tend to be older, they're more likely to have families, and those families often are left behind without the comprehensive support services available on bases to the families of active-duty soldiers.

When Guard or Reserve soldiers are called up and sent overseas to fight, they have no choice but to drop everything—school, career, family—and go to war. With civilian jobs on hold, many families are forced to get by on severely reduced incomes, since family breadwinners often earn better pay and benefits in civilian life than they earn in the military. In many cases, families even have to suffer the indignity of losing their employer-based health insurance. If they are lucky, their civilian jobs will be waiting for them when they return from overseas, which is what the law requires. However, those laws were written when Guard and Reserve troops deployed for a few months here and there over the course of a couple of decades. Because of the war in Iraq, these men and women may be gone for a year or two, come home for a few months, and be called up for war again for who knows how long. Thanks to these excessive deployments and a strained economy, many employers are simply incapable of holding positions open. Add to the family separation and loss of income and benefits the constant fear that your loved one will be killed, and it is easy to understand why many families of Guard and Reserve troops find the pressure unbearable.

Thanks to this new reality, the Army National Guard missed its fiscal year recruiting goal by 5,000 people. Guard and Reserve units are being retrained in crash programs to fill active-duty shortfalls, sometimes by inexperienced trainers, since regular training units have been sent overseas. Morale and cohesion, which are the lifeblood of military units on the battlefield, are starting to erode, and we are on the cusp of a serious problem with the voluntary retention of experienced soldiers. The Army Research Institute projects that only 27 percent of Guard and Reserve soldiers intend to re-enlist—an all-time low.