Military Officer - August 2006 - (Page 48)

dozen Army National Guard brigades now being converted into brigade combat teams. Eventually, there will be 28 of them. Independent units Brigade combat teams (BCTs) are intended to become the basic unit in a National Guard restructured to meet the requirement for a military that must deploy more often, more quickly, and to more parts of the world. Unlike the Army Guard’s existing brigades, which rely on the divisions they are assigned to for some essential capabilities, BCTs are designed to operate as essentially independent units. Thus, each BCT will include capabilities such as intelligence, reconnaissance, civil affairs, and military police. Army Guard BCTs are to be “identical in structure and manning” to BCTs being established in the active duty Army, says Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, USA, chief of the National Guard Bureau. Creating mirror images of active duty BCTs “will allow seamless transition between active and reserve forces in combat with minimal time required for train-up,” he says. The idea, clearly, is that Army Guard BCTs are going to be deployed. “This is a different paradigm,” Blum told an audience at the University of Maryland earlier this year. “The National Guard that I joined was a strategic reserve — deliberately under-resourced, deliberately undermanned, and deliberately under-equipped. That was part of our national military strategy.” As long as Guard units were unlikely to deploy, there seemed little reason to fully resource them. But times have changed. In 2005 the Army Guard provided more than half the combat forces on the ground in Iraq, Blum said. In recent months, the percentage of Guard troops in Iraq has declined a bit, but no one expects the Guard to return to its pre-Operation Iraqi Freedom operations tempo. That comes straight from the top: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee this spring, “America has come to rely much more on the Army’s reserve components than before. “In the past, the National Guard served as a strategic reserve, to be called on once in a generation or a lifetime for a major war,” Rumsfeld said. “As a result, [it] received relatively low priority for funding. Many units may have existed on paper, but they were not fully manned and lacked sufﬁcient training and equipment. Today, the Deployed to Iraq, soldiers from the Pennsylvania National Guard’s Company A, 1st Battalion, 111th Infantry Regiment prepare to raid a house in a search for insurgents and weapons. 48 MILITARY OFFICER AUGUST 2006

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Military Officer - August 2006 Contents From the Editor President’s Page Your Views MOAA Directory Rapid Fire Washington Scene Chapter Activities Financial Forum Ask the Doctor Changing of the Guard Four-Star Rating Long Term Care Kryptogram Pages of History Information Exchange MOAA Scholarship Donors Member Books Advertising Index MOAA Calendar Sounding Taps MOAA Member Services Encore

Military Officer - August 2006

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