Sizing the National Guard in the
Post-Cold War Era
Like other elements of the U.S. armed
forces, the National Guard is undergoing a reduction in
strength reflecting the easing of global tensions after the
dissolution of the Soviet bloc. Sized to meet federal
mission responsibilities with a force of roughly 570,000 in
1989, the National Guard is shrinking by about 15 percent to
a planned force level of 480,000 in 1999. But the
National Guard is not just a federal resource. Its use by
the states in a recent series of domestic disasters and other
emergencies, coupled with the explicit acknowledgment of such
missions in the Secretary of Defense's Bottom-Up Review, has
led some state governors to question the wisdom of decreasing
the Guard's size. These concerns and the assignment of
several new domestic initiatives to the Guard have led other
observers to wonder whether an organization with both federal
and state missions should be sized to meet the federal
mission only.
Concerned that a smaller National Guard
could be insufficient to serve both missions, Congress
required the Secretary of Defense to provide for a study of
that and related issues. The study was carried out by a team
of researchers headed by Roger Allen Brown at RAND's National
Defense Research Institute. Brown and his colleagues examined
pertinent statutes, reviewed all recent uses of the Guard,
studied heavy-use situations intensively, analyzed force
structure and requirements, and surveyed Guard commanders in
all jurisdictions. Their core findings are as follows:
- The current and planned 1999 National Guard structures
are adequate for both federal and state missions, including
the unlikely possibility of simultaneous peak federal and
state demands.
- There is no compelling reason for the
National Guard structure to be based, even partly, on state
emergency response requirements.
- State concerns over
the adequacy of federal support in emergencies might be
allayed by giving the President access to the federal
military reserves for such a purpose, by encouraging the
formation of interstate compacts to share Guard resources,
and by establishing contingency stocks.
Federal
Mission Demands
The researchers concluded that the
planned 1999 National Guard force structure would not be
fully employed even in the most demanding of federal
missions--i.e., in response to the occurrence of two nearly
simultaneous major regional conflicts. As much as half of
the Army National Guard and a smaller portion of the Air
National Guard would be available to perform state missions.
Other federal missions include provision of a strategic
reserve and a hedge against evolving threats, international
peace and humanitarian relief operations, and domestic
disaster relief and emergency operations under federal
control. All of these tasks can be achieved with even
smaller portions of the full Guard force structure.
State Mission Demands
State laws generally require
that the National Guard provide military support to civil
authorities for defense against disorder, for emergency and
disaster relief, for humanitarian assistance such as
aeromedical evacuation, and for certain community activities.
Guard support to state and local authorities is funded by
the state (although federal reimbursement is possible).
Another set of state-controlled missions is required by
federal law and funded by the federal government. Examples
are the drill periods, exercises, and annual training of
Guardsmen and Guard participation in several recent domestic
initiatives relating to the war against drugs and the
provision of youth opportunities and medical service in
disadvantaged communities. Guard responses to disaster
and disorder are the most stressing of these state missions.
The NDRI researchers established that such responses do not
involve the employment of large numbers of Guardsmen on state
active duty for any lengthy period. For example, in 1993,
when the Midwest floods contributed to the highest level of
domestic National Guard activity in more than a decade, only
6 percent of the nation's Guardsmen were called up, for an
average period of 14 days each. There are three reasons for
this low level of Guard employment: (1) the Guard usually
supplements law enforcement and other state agency resources,
(2) only a portion of the Guard can be used at once if
members are to be rotated and their civilian jobs preserved,
and (3) states cannot afford anything more extensive.
On
a nationwide basis, then, state demands are very modest. Of
course, state active duty tends to be concentrated in states
experiencing emergencies. In the days and weeks following an
emergency, substantial portions of a state's National Guard
force structure may be employed--over 45 percent, for
example, in Florida following Hurricane Andrew.
Implications for Sizing the Guard
The research team
thus established that the most demanding federal mission
would leave much of the National Guard force structure
undeployed and that Guard support for state and local
authorities involved only 6 percent of the total force in a
heavy-use year. Thus, the planned nationwide force structure
appeared adequate, even if the peak federal mission occurred
in a year of heavy use at the state level. In an
individual state, the demand for Guard support could exceed
the supply in the highly unlikely event that a disaster of
unusual magnitude occurred at the same time as two nearly
simultaneous major regional conflicts. The RAND researchers
were reluctant to recommend sizing force structure based on
such an unpredictable coincidence. Demand could also exceed
supply if a major disaster occurred in a small state. But
big state or small, emergencies that have required employing
large parts of a state's Guard have also entailed an early
realization that state resources would be insufficient,
followed by invocation of the Federal Emergency Management
Agency's response system. Clearly, incremental changes in
the planned Guard structure would be unlikely to change that
sequence of events.
As for state-authorized, federally
funded missions, activities such as drills and training can
be preempted by disaster relief or overseas contingency
response and should thus not be considered in sizing the
Guard. Participation in drug-related and other domestic
initiatives is largely voluntary and, again, subordinate in
priority to other missions.
In sum, then, the NDRI team
concluded that it would be sufficient to continue sizing the
National Guard on the basis of its federal missions without
taking into account the demands of state missions.
Mitigating Unusual State Requirements
Brown
and his colleagues nonetheless recommended that several
actions be taken to address the concerns of governors worried
about meeting emergency demands at the time of a
Guard-supported overseas conflict: - Congress should
clarify and extend the President's authority under existing
federal law to call on the federal reserves of the four
military services for timely response to domestic
emergencies. In the Florida case, federal law restricted
access to an Army Reserve engineer battalion that was
stationed closer to the affected area than were equivalent
National Guard and active-component units that eventually
arrived on the scene.
- States should join in a
nationwide mutual-support compact to provide greater access
to various state emergency response resources, including the
National Guard. A nationwide compact is more likely to
assure broader response and more equitable sourcing than a
set of regional compacts.
- Congress and the
Department of Defense should establish federal-level
contingency stocks of common and special-purpose items for
National Guard use during domestic emergencies. They should
also remove regulatory impediments and funding constraints
hindering Guard participation in federal-state emergency
response plan exercises.
RAND research briefs
summarize research that has been more fully documented
elsewhere. This research brief describes work done for the
National Defense Research Institute and documented in Roger
Allen Brown, William Fedorochko, Jr., and John Schank,
Assessing the State and Federal Missions of the National
Guard,
MR-557-OSD, 1995, 152 pp., ISBN: 0-8330-1618-0. Abstracts
of all RAND documents are available for review on the World
Wide Web (). RAND publications are
distributed to the trade by National Book Network. RAND is a
nonprofit institution that seeks to improve public policy
through research and analysis. RAND's publications do not
necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of its research
sponsors.
RB-7506