Military Officer - August 2006 - (Page 49)

“ The National Guard … was a strategic reserve — deliberately under-resourced, deliberately undermanned, and deliberately under-equipped.” — National Guard Bureau Chief Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, USA Army National Guard is shifting to an operational reserve, to be able to play a key role in homeland security as well as in support of the global war on terror,” he said. Rumsfeld called for “fully funded, fully manned, and fully equipped Guard brigades,” which, he said, “is a development that state and local ofﬁcials should welcome.” Big shift Turning the Army Guard into an operational reserve will affect 73 percent of the Army Guard’s units and constitute the largest shift in Army Guard force structure since the end of World War II, Blum says. Three types of BCTs are at the center of the change — 21 infantry, six armored, and one Stryker. Each BCT is designed to deploy quickly and operate for a sustained period without outside help. “The idea is to be able to plug in, as you are, to any division,” says Army Guard Maj. Bill Richards, who is overseeing much of the conversion of North Carolina’s 30th Brigade into a BCT. Through 2004, the Old Hickory Brigade was one of the Army Guard’s 15 “enhanced readiness brigades.” As such, it was a high-priority unit for personnel, equipment, and training and was one of the Guard’s most ready and deployable units. To turn the 30th Brigade into a BCT, “we added additional slices,” Richards says. “We picked up a signal company that didn’t exist in the state.” The brigade also includes air defense artillery and “some enhanced military intelligence assets — I don’t want to go into too much detail about that,” he says. In the past, the 30th Brigade tapped a hodgepodge of units for those capabilities. For its 2004 deployment to Iraq, for example, the brigade hooked up with a signal unit from Alabama. It’s better to deploy with a unit from home, Richards says. They will have trained with the rest of the brigade, and “they know what you need, and you know what they can do,” he says. PHOTO: SPEC. ISMAIL TURAY JR., USA Another change for the Old Hickory Brigade involved reorganizing support battalions. “We went back to an older concept. We pulled forward-support companies out of their battalions and put them directly into the maneuver units,” Richards says. In the past, support battalions were organized to support the brigade in general and seldom trained with the speciﬁc maneuver units they were intended to support. “Now we have a much closer relationship with the guys we are going to war with,” he says. The tank truck drivers who deliver fuel and the maintenance troops who keep equipment running will have trained with the armored units they will be supporting. “We could roll across the border right now and the support companies would be with us, not back there somewhere, or temporarily attached,” Richards says. Smoother operating and better coordinated, the 30th BCT is being turned into a force that will “ﬁt in anywhere for any mission,” he says. “Basically, I can plug this brigade into any division in the world.” “Plug and play,” the Army calls it. Each BCT is intended to be a rapidly deployable, self-sustaining, more or less interchangeable module. It’s the modern equivalent of a division with a fraction of a division’s bulk. BCTs of 3,800 or 4,000 soldiers are to be “the basic nucleus” of an expeditionary Army Guard, says Col. Rodney Dixon, chief of the Army Guard’s Force Management Division. “You won’t need a whole 18K division to go do something. “Capabilities that before you would have to go to other organizations to get, now are already resident” in the BCT, Dixon says. But if more capabilities are needed for a particular mission, it will be easy to borrow them from another BCT or from other brigades. And because the borrowed units will more or less match those already in the BCT, the receiving BCT “will know how to absorb them and use their capabilities,” he says. The Army Guard plans to maintain a variety of supporting units to augment BCTs: AUGUST 2006 MILITARY OFFICER 49

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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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