Tight budgets pit Guard against active-duty

National Guard leaders are making their case to expand their force while the rest of the Defense Department is tightening the purse strings, causing a rift between active-duty and reserve leaders.

Negotiations over shrinking resources have grown tense as Guard leaders — especially those in the Air Force — worry that active-duty leaders have unjustifiably targeted Guard accounts.

The frustrations led to a tense closed-door session in November at the National Guard Joint Senior Leadership Conference in Maryland. A question-and-answer session between Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz and Guard general officers became confrontational, according to numerous Army and Air Force officials in attendance.

“The place was ready to throw tomatoes,” one general officer said.

Guard officials questioned the findings of an active-duty-led analysis that recommended the removal of Air Guard missions, the officials said. Tensions rose when a Guard general officer asked if it could have a representative on the study panel.

Forthcoming defense budget cuts ranging from $450 billion to $1 trillion over the next decade have required each service to re-examine its balance of forces in the active-duty, Guard and reserve branches.

“We are pushing to identify which capabilities and missions should be moved from the active component to the reserve, and just as importantly, those capabilities that we’ve learned are not sufficiently resident in the active force that should be migrated from the reserve,” Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said in November.

Guard leaders worry cuts will reverse progress made over the past 10 years, in which Guard and reserve units have completed multiple deployments and filled their depots and hangars with equipment their units had lacked before 2001.

In November, Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress that the National Guard chief should not get a seat on the JCS. Dempsey argued that service chiefs should be the ones to represent their services, and noted that the Guard chief does not have a budget.

Dempsey had warned the Guard that the blow was coming; three days before his testimony, he broke the news at the leadership conference.

“I wanted you to know this is nothing about my esteem, my affection, for the National Guard. It’s what I believe about the force and what makes us who we are. And we, you know, we are truly one force today in a way that we weren’t in the ’90s, but I wanted you to hear that from me today and not to hear it on CNN,” he said.

Guard leaders said that without a JCS seat, they will have a weak voice when it comes time to cut the budget.

Moreover, the Pentagon’s stance threatens to reopen old cultural wounds.

“Active-duty has seen the Guard as quitters, the guys who couldn’t hack it,” said an Air Force major who asked not to be named. “That started to go away recently, but you can see how it’s starting to creep back now with these budget talks.”

Air Force adjutant generals said there is a larger rift growing within the Air Force than within the Army.

“The Army’s active-duty and Guard is a collaborative effort that is moving forward. The Air Force and Air National Guard’s [relationship], I think, got a little bit strained,” said Air Force Maj. Gen. H. Michael Edwards, Colorado’s adjutant general, who oversees his state’s Army and Air Force reserve components. “I believe that it is coming back a little bit closer together, but some of the things that have been talked about possible cuts of Air National Guard, we believe, are too deep and a little bit too much.”

In particular, Vermont’s adjutant general, Air Force Maj. Gen. Michael Dubie, said the breakdown has occurred over the potential reduction of aircraft flown in the Air National Guard.

“The Air Force and Air National Guard are somewhat at odds over the future number of airplanes in the Air National Guard. Resource allocation decisions and those differences in opinion are making the relationship not as collaborative as it has been in the past,” Dubie said.

Schwartz said no feud is brewing. He said he plans to make any cuts to the Air Force in a “collaborative fashion.”

“If we gut them, we gut our Air Force,” the chief said during a Dec. 8 taping of “This Week in Defense News,” an Air Force Times partner. “The truth is that the Air Force is going to get smaller and we’re all going to get smaller together. We’re going to do this intelligently, in a way that balances tempo, that keeps the right mix of assets — modern and less modern — in each component, and we’re doing this in a collaborative fashion.”

Among the recent moves that upset Guard leaders was the active-duty Air Force decision in a draft of its 2013 budget to end C-27J production. Officials expected the new twin-engine turboprops to rejuvenate wings that had lost flying missions in recent years. Guard leaders are upset about it, and so are lawmakers from states that host or would have hosted C-27J squadrons.

Force-structure questions that remain open include a debate over how to distribute F-35s among Guard and active-duty units. Currently, the Vermont National Guard is the only nonactive-duty unit slated to get the new jets.

THE “BUZZ BRIEFING”

Guard leaders worry that service leaders have discounted research that shows certain roles and missions could be performed by the Air Guard more cheaply than by active-duty squadrons.

A study known as the “Buzz briefing,” written this year by Air Force Maj. Joe “Buzz” Walter, is circulating in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill. Adjutant generals, including Air Force Maj. Gen. John Nichols of Texas, said the briefing makes the Guard’s case with facts, not emotion.

The Guard F-16 pilot lays out in detail exactly where the Guard can save the Air Force money. He said Guard units have less personnel turnover and more cost-effective basing, and consume less in pay and benefits.

In particular, the briefing makes a case that Guard units should get more of the Air Force’s F-35s and F-22 fighter jets. His main argument — an old one getting new life as budgets come down — is that the need to retrain active-duty pilots rotating in from non-flying jobs makes Guard units less expensive.

Walter also said the idea of closing smaller Guard bases to save money doesn’t make sense when those bases require less infrastructure and investment than the active-duty bases. Guard units pay to fly from many civilian airports on an annual basis, meaning the service didn’t need to build a base from the ground up.

“There are certainly cases when the larger bases make sense, but right now it doesn’t make sense, the discussion about closing Guard bases,” Walter said.

An active-duty Air Force official said it’s not that simple. For example, Guard units spend five months at home for every month on deployment; for active-duty units, the ratio is 1-to-2. If the Guard got more fighters, the Air Force itself would have to buy more so it could meet wartime needs, the official said.

Another part of the equation that Walter doesn’t account for is how much the service depends on active-duty pilots and their flying experience in filling staff jobs to run the Air Force, the Air Force official said. The official asked not to be named because the negotiations over force structure are still ongoing.

“If the Guard guys went out and did staff jobs and the Guard guys did military planning things deployed as planners and filled those roles overseas, then great. It would be cheaper,” he said. “But they don’t do that. They sit in their state and they fly their jets, which is great and we need that, but the Air Force, the nation, needs to project that power and we need that subject-matter expertise across the staff.”

The service is already struggling to fill staff jobs with the right officers. For example, at Air Combat Command, an H-60 pilot is doing A-10 strafe guidance, a job typically filled by an A-10 pilot. ACC filled the slot with a helicopter pilot because so many A-10 pilots are deployed.

Active-duty leadership understands the Guard is frustrated about potentially losing fighter jets, but deployments and budget restrictions have tied their hands, the official said. The situation has forced “tough decisions.”

“Our fighter force has shrunk so small, we’re going to have to put a bunch of active-duty guys against the Guard jets in order to maintain our number of people we need to run the Air Force,” the official said.

Dempsey said accessibility to Guard units and the speed in which they can mobilize must also be considered.

“We’ve got to be really, really honest with each other about what we can generate over those discrete periods of time because there have been times when, frankly, in my view, we’ve kind of overpromised and underdelivered,” Dempsey said in November.

Pentagon leaders want to know what forces it can mobilize in 72 hours, 30 days and six months, Dempsey said. He has faith the Guard can deliver and meet mission contingencies, but he said he wants realistic estimates of how fast it can be.

The debate over accessibility frustrates Guard officials. They said a decade of war has proved the Guard will mobilize in time, if given the right resources.

“The Guard has never failed to meet a mission to meet a wartime contingency. I get a little frustrated about that,” Edwards said.

ARMY’S RELATIONSHIP

The active-reserve relationship appears to be a bit more harmonious in the Army.

Over the past 10 years, the Army has pushed some combat support and service support missions into the Guard and Reserve, even as active-duty end strength grew. Today, officials estimate, the Reserve accounts for 83 percent of the Army’s transportation capability, 75 percent of engineering capability and 70 percent of medical capabilities.

Dempsey suggested more heavy brigade combat teams, and their tanks, could find their way into Army Guard units. The chairman has emphasized building plans now for the Army of 2020. He said Army Guard leaders should propose a plan to add more heavy BCTs.

In October, Army Reserve Chief Lt. Gen. Jack Stultz told Congress, “It’s not a matter of: ‘Do we want to make the Reserve an operational force?’ We have to. We have to make it part of the operational force because we know the end strength of the Army is going to come down.”