The National Guard: Always ready, always there, and sometimes overseas too. Used with permission under Creative Commons license.
WASHINGTON — The National Guard: The state militias that stay on American soil and help us out after natural disasters. Right? Kind of.
According to the Department of Defense, 292,765 National Guardsmen have deployed overseas since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Though the department could not release a year-by-year breakdown, there were a total of 470,000 active guardsmen in 2009.
Guardsmen overseas include both those “physically located within” U.S. operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, or those in combat, and those “directly supporting” those missions, support personnel based outside of the combat zone, the department said.
According to the website iCasualities.org, which tracks the number of fatalities in both wars, 16 National Guard members have died since January: Four in Iraq, all by improvised explosive devices, and 12 in Afghanistan.
Sure the National Guard has done a lot at home over the past ten years: helping with search and rescue at Ground Zero, aiding the people of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and most recently, getting life back to normal for those affected by this summer’s storms — from flooding to tornadoes — all across the country.
But what many Americans don’t realize is though the Guard is doing a lot of important work at home, they’re playing a much larger role in our military efforts overseas.
“The Guard has played a huge role in both Afghanistan and Iraq,” said Ryan Sullivan, an assistant professor at the Defense Resource Management Institute at the Naval Postgraduate School. Sullivan served as an infantry soldier in the U.S. Army National Guard from 1998-2006.
“The National Guard is mainly responsible for combat operations when going to war and the Reserve’s responsibility is mainly for use in administration and support type activities,” he said.
Sullivan says the use of the National Guard for combat fighting is a new phenomenon.
“A soldier joining the guard today is definitely used in a different role than say one that signed up 15 years ago,” he said. “We had quite a few Guard and Reserve units actively participating in past conflicts, but nothing like this. Nicholas Armstrong, a research fellow at the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism at Syracuse University agrees that the National Guard’s role in the U.S.effort overseas has increased since Sept. 11.
“Over the past decade, the National Guard has been used to supplement active duty forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, spanning nearly every major combat and support role on the battlefield from infantry and special forces to medical and logistics support,” Armstrong said.
While some units do deploy to combat zones, some, as noted by the Department of Defense, work to keep those in combat safe, through security force assistance, he said.
Armstrong said the mobilization for National Guard units for service in Iraq and Afghanistan was essential to avoid a draft.
“The need to mobilize additional National Guard units for service in Iraq and Afghanistan was especially great between 2004 and 2008, where the need for additional troops in both operational theaters was great,” he said.
Though an advantage to the Army overseas, Armstrong said the use of Guard units overseas, means less security at home.
“While our National Guard soldiers have served admirably in the Global War on Terror, a significant consequence of their repeated deployments is a decrease in their overall readiness for responding to U.S. domestic crises, like hurricanes and other natural disasters.”
The use of National Guard units overseas has also taken a toll on equipment and money, Armstrong said.
“Sustained operations [in Afghanistan] and in Iraq have taken a significant toll on the Humvees, Blackhawk helicopters, tanks, etc. across the total force,” he said. “Furthermore, because the lion’s share of funding for resources has rested largely on troops deploying overseas, the National Guard’s generally lags behind its active duty counterparts in terms of fielding new equipment, especially at home.”
They have also taken a toll on the Guard members themselves, and their families, but that may change, Sullivan said.
“The higher-ups in the Pentagon have tried to cut back on the number of deployments and are trying to use the rough rule of five years at home and one year deployed for many of the guard and reserve units,’’ he said. “The number of tours has been cut down and it should improve even more since we are drawing down in both Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Certainly we must thank the men and women of the National Guard for their work, but we must also remember that many of them—at times as many as 40 to50 percent—are working not in our homeland, but for our missions overseas.
