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home > March/April 2007 issue > article
At the ready
By Sami Lais
Special to Defense Systems
At the National Guard, a call to duty can mean anything from airlifting bales of hay to snowbound cattle to combat on foreign shores
MOST AMERICANS WILL never see the Army, Navy or Air
Force in action. But when disaster strikes at home — from a
hurricane that cripples an entire region to the sudden suspicious
death of 60 birds that shuts down a few city blocks —
millions of people every year welcome the help of the National
Guard.
At home in every state, U.S. territory and the District of
Columbia, the Guard daily responds to emergencies, said Lt.
Gen. Stephen Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau in
Washington. “Every day, an average of 1,100 Guardsmen are
out there responding to some kind of emergency,” he said.
In addition, more than 90,000 members of the Army Guard have served in Iraq, Afghanistan or other countries on the front lines of the war against terrorism.
And in every instance, information technology plays an increasingly
pivotal role. “It’s all IT today,” Blum said. “It’s communications,
it’s weapons, it’s vehicles — everything is computerized.”
Operation Jump Start
Nowhere is that more evident than in the work the Guard is
doing in Operation Jump Start to help strengthen security
along the 1,300-mile U.S.-Mexico border. In this first year of
the operation, 6,000 Guard troops from 44 states are stationed
in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas. The Customs
and Border Protection agency plans to hire 6,000 new Border
Patrol agents by the end of 2008.
As CBP trains the new agents, they will gradually replace
Guard troops. But until then, the Guard is building roads
and fences, handling aircraft and vehicle maintenance,
and deploying, operating and maintaining communications,
networks, sensors, cameras and other IT infrastructure.
Guard members operate surveillance cameras, which are
linked to CBP communications centers, where they monitor
banks of screens and radio information to Border Patrol
agents.
With Guard soldiers acting as eyes and ears, Border Patrol
agents can be deployed more efficiently, said Gustavo
Soto, a Border Patrol agent and public information officer.
This approach has contributed to more than 2,500 apprehensions
in the San Diego sector alone, said Maj. Gen. William Wade, adjutant general of the California National Guard.
Stopping people trying to enter the country illegally is only
one aspect of border duty, however. Of the nearly 140,000
people arrested in fiscal 2005 in the Yuma, Ariz., sector, approximately 10 percent have some sort of criminal history in
the United States or have an active criminal warrant, said
Richard Hays, Border Patrol supervisor at the Yuma Border
Patrol Station, in a 2006 press release. “That’s just one sector
out of 20.”
Because of the IT skills he learned on the job as a police
officer in Tucson, Ariz., Arizona Air National Guard Staff
Sgt. Dominic Flores was assigned to the Nogales Station communications center. Just three days after arriving for Operation
Jump Start, Flores was at the center running criminal
records checks.
Hays attributes some of the 6 percent increase in arrests
and narcotics seizures — 36,000 pounds of marijuana in the
Yuma sector for the year — since the start of Operation Jump
Start to technology. Sensors, cameras and other devices play
a role, but computers also allow agents to get fingerprint checks
in minutes instead of months, he said.
Who do you call?
When civilian authorities suspect that a chemical spill, biological
warfare agent or other hazardous material may be a weapon of mass destruction, their first call is to the Guard’s WMD-Civil Support Team (CST). Fifty-five of these federally funded, trained and evaluated teams, each with 22 full-time National Guard members, are dispersed throughout the United States and its territories.
The teams are equipped with satellite, secure digital and
voice communications, high-end detection, analytical, and
monitoring and protective equipment. They may also carry
high-end detection equipment to detect a greater range of substances, including toxic industrial materials, organic
substances, chemical and biological warfare
agents, and radiological materials.
In January, the Texas 6th CST got a call from
Austin authorities to investigate the unexplained
deaths of more than 60 birds. By 6 a.m., an
hour and 20 minutes after receiving the call, the
6th CST was using state-of-the-art gas chromatograph/
mass spectrometers to examine the
birds for life-threatening agents and analyzing
air samples. By noon, the team confirmed that
the dead birds did not pose a health threat, and
it reopened the area to traffic.
A New Guard
More of that kind of training and equipment is
what Blum wants — but doesn’t have — for the
service.
The Guard’s equipment, from radios to
tanks, has been depleted by its missions in the
wake of Hurricane Katrina and in fighting wildfires
in the West and serving in Iraq and
Afghanistan, officials have said.
“We need combat-ready [command, control,
communications and computer, and other]
equipment,” Blum said at a January hearing
summoned in Washington, D.C., by the
Commission on the National Guard and Reserves.
“At least 88 percent of the force here at
home is 50 percent equipped, less if you take
out the substitute equipment.”
Blum is looking for close to $40 billion for
the Guard — $24.2 billion for the Army National
Guard and $13.8 billion for the Air National
Guard, to bring the service up to 80 percent
equipped. Guard members need gear that
is combat-ready and interoperable civil authorities’
equipment, he said.
The need for IT interoperability was a major
lesson the Guard learned from Hurricane
Katrina, Blum said. It has taken three and a
half years, he said, but every state now has a
Joint Task Force Headquarters. In a disaster,
commanders from federal, state and local
forces could work together from these JTF
headquarters to coordinate their efforts, he
said.
JTF continues to work to ensure that Joint
Continental U.S. Communications Support Environment
communications equipment meets Defense Department, Northern Command and Homeland Security Department interoperability
standards, he said.
The Army has been evaluating aspects of the
problem of equal resources for the Guard, and
lessons learned were applied in creating the
2008 budget, said Marine Corps Gen. Peter
Pace.
But more than resource allocation may soon
change. The commission’s recommendations
on the Leahy-Bond bill introduced in January
were due March 1. The measure, sponsored
by Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Kit Bond
(R-Mo.) would give the Guard more muscle at
the Pentagon by elevating the National Guard
chief to four-star status and giving him a seat at
the Joint Chiefs of Staff table.
Pace said such a proposal is a bad idea. It
would create two Air Forces, two Armies and,
inevitably, a rift in joint cooperation, he told
the commission.
The National Guard chief should, however,
have a formal relationship with the Joint Chiefs
chairman and the Secretary of Defense, Blum
said. And the position should reflect the “scope
and responsibility of the job.”
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