The National Guard has been forced to go hat in hand before Congress as overseas deployments have taken a hit on equipment stocks.
The Army National Guard has lost so much critical equipment in Iraq and Afghanistan that its ability to respond to a national emergency could be severely hampered, says a government report released Thursday.
Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, told the House Government Reform Committee that the Guard needs $1.3 billion to replace or upgrade radios, helicopters, tactical vehicles, heavy engineering equipment, chemical detection gear and night-vision goggles, which are essential to responding to national emergencies such as the recent Gulf Coast hurricanes and terrorist attacks.
Blum’s testimony, along with that of other top National Guard and military officials and the governors of Idaho and Pennsylvania, coincided with the release of a new Government Accountability Office report, which says the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have left many Army National Guard units dangerously short of critical equipment. The shortages threaten the National Guard’s ability to prepare its forces for future missions at home and overseas, the auditors found.
“The bottom line is that our inventory is now at 34 percent” of what it should be, Blum said.
The article cites three key reasons for the equipment shortcomings, which may have an impact on the Guard’s ability to fulfill stateside emergency responsibilites.
- The largest reliance upon Guard forces since World War II
- Stocking of Guard equipment at 70 percent of actual allocation under the assumption that, if activated and deployed overseas, “they would have time to obtain the rest before deployment”
- Unprecedented demands for key items by current deployment stresses
On the bright side, there are signals of relief coming from Capitol Hill.
Government Reform Committee Chairman Tom Davis, R-Va., said he and Sen. Christopher Bond, R-Mo., are working to ensure that the National Guard gets the $1.3 billion it needs in the next supplemental spending bill.
“Quite simply, we are robbing the nondeployed Peter to pay the deployed Paul,” he said. “I understand the need to prioritize, but this shouldn’t have to be a zero-sum game.”
That is good to hear. Whatever one’s views on the current overseas military efforts, the idea that those operations should be allowed to affect the Guard’s stateside responsibilities is, in my view, indefensible.