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Officials ponder reserve components' future

  • Published
  • By Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke
  • National Guard Bureau
WASHINGTON --  Defense Department officials said a report released earlier this week will help them implement recommendations made by the Commission on the National Guard and Reserve two years ago.

"There is a very strong commitment to implement most of recommendations of (the commission)," said Dennis M. McCarthy, the assistant secretary of defense for reserve affairs, at a roundtable discussion held here Sept. 23. "This (report) is going to help us sustain and maintain the momentum of that process."

The Center for a New American Security report, which argues for a number of actions that will strengthen the Guard and Reserves, combined with the 12 other studies being conducted by the DOD will also help to inform defense leaders as they plan for the future of the reserve components, said Gen. Craig R. McKinley, the chief of the National Guard Bureau.

"This century obviously has been hugely challenging for all of us," he said. "We are emerging into the second decade of this century and trying to figure out what are the proper sweet spots for the reserve components."

General McKinley said Sept. 24 about 64,000 National Guard men and women are serving overseas in support of the Army and Air Force, but equally important is their
around-the-clock support to the governors.

"Because we don't know when the next crisis will hit, that requirement to be ready all the time ... is very important for us to understand," he said. "At any moment, we can be challenged with a disaster of natural or manmade proportions ... (and) we have to be ready to meet those challenges."

General McKinley credited the Army and Air Force for "position(ing) our force for the time that we live in."

General McCarthy said the Guard and its DOD partners have made "tremendous" progress in its support to civil authorities.

"We are definitely, in my opinion, moving in the right direction," he said adding that the Guard's weapons of mass destruction and civil-support teams didn't exist a few years ago.

The CNAS report states the Army and Air Guard, and other reserve branches, lack about 25 percent of their required equipment.

"I simply don't think that we ought to knee-jerk into the idea that every company and every battalion needs to have 100 percent of its table of equipment parked out on the back lot," General McCarthy said. "If that is the standard we use for measure, I think we are never going to get there. Or we we're going to get there with old and outmoded equipment.

He said new approaches are needed, including the use of simulation.

"We need to get beyond that and do some things that are perhaps a little more creative and a little more useful," General McCarthy said. "Making the Reserve component an integral and indispensible part of the operational force will take a whole range of actions that ... the department is committed to take."