Thrown into a fast-paced new era of fighting insurgents abroad and protecting neighbors from terrorists at home, the Army National Guard is hanging on by its fingertips.
It provides half of the Army's combat power and is the United States' primary terrorism response team. But its battalions are struggling to scrape up enough soldiers and hand-me-down equipment to meet overseas deployment orders. Recruiting has fallen behind, and seasoned soldiers are quitting in frustration.
Internal Guard documents tell the story: All 10 of its special forces units, all 147 military police units, 97 of 101 infantry units and 73 of 75 armor units cannot, because of past or current mobilizations, deploy again to a war zone without reinforcements. The Guard needs a staggering $20 billion worth of equipment to sustain its operations, a bill Washington may balk at paying.
Any new crisis -- a bloody escalation overseas or a series of domestic terrorist attacks -- could find the Guard unable to respond and could put the United States at risk.
The Guard is losing soldiers and cannot attract enough recruits to replace them. And the normally dependable flow of soldiers moving from active duty into the National Guard has slowed dramatically.
"One can conclude," said Brig. Gen. Bill Libby, commander of the Maine National Guard, "that we're going to run out of soldiers."
Although the Pentagon puts a positive face on these realities, the nation's senior military commanders are worried.
"My concern is that the National Guard will not be a ready force next time it's needed, whether here at home or abroad," Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, the National Guard's top-ranking officer, said in an interview in his Pentagon office.
Although Oregon has no major active duty military bases, its Guard units have seen heavy action overseas. About 2,400 soldiers from the state have conducted street patrols, built schools and protected voters in Iraq. Twelve Oregon Guard soldiers have been killed and dozens more injured since U.S. forces invaded in March 2003.
From interviews nationwide with dozens of Guard soldiers and families, Pentagon officials, congressmen, governors, recruiters, military analysts and other experts, a picture of the Army National Guard emerges as one of hard work and honorable service.
But the crushing personal and family demands of overseas deployments threaten a citizen-soldier tradition enshrined in the Constitution and rooted in more than 350 years of American history.
Despite the expectations of some, the Guard has fought well in Iraq and Afghanistan and has moved smartly to meet terrorist threats at home. Those successes are due largely to soldiers such as Jay Medved, 35, a Pennsylvania National Guard sergeant who volunteered for an 18-month tour that will take him to Iraq although he had already done enough overseas time to stay home.
"My squad is going. I am their squad leader. How could I not go?" asked Medved, who in civilian life is an accountant from Glassport, Pa.
But that esprit is a perishable resource. Senior Guard officers fear an exodus of experienced soldiers this summer as deployments in Iraq end and new ones begin.
Small wonder Blum recently told the Pentagon brass, "It's gonna get worse, guys."
Cascading problems
Many Guard families, fed up with long, unanticipated combat tours, are opting out. Employers are pressed to hold jobs for deployed guardsmen, as the law requires. Governors are demanding that their Guard units remain home. And recruiters are coming up against a new impediment: Parents who once encouraged their children to join the supposedly safe National Guard are growling at recruiters to stay away.
Some Guard families feel strongly that "their" Guard units should not be sent to fight unpopular foreign wars.
The Guard "has become the primary force in a war of choice -- and that's wrong," said Kent Frigaard of Wilsonville, who nonetheless supports his son Martin, a soldier in the California National Guard.
The Army National Guard's 331,019 soldiers -- the most recent count -- are full-time civilians who serve part time in uniform. For many, the Guard was historically a comfortable, sleepy backwater, famous as a dodge from the more dangerous, go-to-war, active duty military.
Guard units typically met one weekend a month and two weeks in the summer, using worn-out gear, such as field telephones from the Korean War, that the Army no longer wanted. Their wartime mission, as reinforcements for a large-scale conflict, seemed remote.
"My first drill (weekend), when I was 18, at lunch they brought out the kegs. People ate, drank beer and then went home," recalled Capt. Al Smith, a staff officer with the Pennsylvania National Guard.
But the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks sent the Guard into a frenzied pace that has yet to let up. Guardsmen were on New York streets within hours of the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. Three days later, President Bush began mobilizing Guard units for the allowed maximum of 24 months of federal service. They fanned out to guard airports and nuclear power plants, then were sent into combat in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The cost has been high.
To fully equip units in Iraq, the Pentagon has stripped local Guard units of about 24,000 pieces of equipment, including helicopters, Humvees, radios, heavy trucks, night vision goggles and weapons.
That has left Guard units at home, already seriously short of gear, without equipment critical to state missions. The problem is especially acute in some Western states that cannot control forest fires without the National Guard.
To cover the shortages, the Guard is swapping out units and equipment at a dizzying pace. A Connecticut Guard unit was sent to Afghanistan with CH-47 helicopters it shares with the Pennsylvania Guard; when it rotated home a year later, it was ordered to leave the choppers in Afghanistan for the next incoming unit. Some CH-47s were sent north from the Georgia Guard to cover the two states' loss on a temporary basis. Now Georgia is short of choppers.
Soldier shortage
The Guard's more fundamental shortage is people.
To fill demands for troops, the National Guard keeps tabs on a pool of soldiers -- those who are not involved in training, filling staff jobs or already deployed -- who are available for assignment.
The Guard pours newly trained recruits into this pool. Draining out of it is a stream of soldiers who are retiring or quitting. From this pool, the Guard is constantly drawing soldiers for Iraq and Afghanistan.
Fewer recruits are coming in, more soldiers are leaving the Army, and more troops are being drawn out. But the pool is shrinking.
Internal National Guard documents show that in December, 86,455 soldiers were available for duty. As of April 30, the number had shrunk to 74,519 soldiers available for global deployment. The current need for National Guard soldiers in Iraq alone is 32,000, and tens of thousands of others are required for missions in 83 countries worldwide.
Two reasons for the squeeze: a shortfall in recruiting and a dramatic drop in the number of active duty soldiers switching to the Guard. In October and November, the Guard missed its monthly recruiting goals by big margins, gaining only two-thirds of the enlistees needed.
During the winter, the Guard boosted its recruiting force to 5,100 by adding 1,400 recruiters. It launched a new ad campaign, authorized bonuses of up to $10,000 and offered other enticements, such as free college tuition in some states.
Still, by the end of last month, the Guard had signed up 9,705 fewer recruits than its goal. On average each month, the Guard is enlisting three of four recruits it needs.
"By far, this is the hardest I've ever seen it," said Sgt. 1st Class Brian Ritchie, 34, a recruiter for the Wisconsin National Guard who has signed 15 of the 25 enlistees he needs by Sept. 30.
One day this spring, he asked Seymour Community High School, deep in Wisconsin farm country, to put out a sign-up sheet for students interested in the National Guard. Two weeks later, he stopped back. A secretary shook her head. The sign-up sheet was empty.
Disappointment etched Ritchie's face as he headed back to his car. He suspects the problem is parents. Often, a student may want to enlist but the parents say, "No."
"You can't fault them," said Ritchie, who has a 3-month-old daughter. "As a parent, I can totally understand."
Less bleak is the Guard's ability to keep the soldiers it has. At least for now, the Guard is meeting its re-enlistment goals.
But a once-dependable source of experienced troops -- those moving from active duty into the Guard -- seems to be drying up. In the past, the stay-at-home Guard was a welcome refuge for active duty soldiers and their families tired of overseas deployments. But it's a refuge no more.
In the first five months of this fiscal year, 974 active duty soldiers switched to the Guard. "Normally, we're at 7,000" during the same period, said Col. Mike Jones, a National Guard manpower planner.
One deterrent, guardsmen say, is that once mobilized, they are often treated like second-class citizen-soldiers.
The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, has documented hundreds of cases in which Guard soldiers received paychecks late or not at all or were erroneously assessed debts by the Pentagon. The GAO also found cases of wounded Guard soldiers who lost pay and benefits when they were removed from active duty rosters.
"I hope that it is not the administration's intent to wear us down, but it sure seems that way," Sgt. 1st Class John Allen, a New Jersey police officer who serves as a special forces weapons specialist in the Guard, told a rapt congressional committee this spring.
Allen was wounded in Afghanistan three years ago. During his struggle to recover, clerks moved him back to reserve status, shutting off his pay, denying him access to Fort Bragg, N.C., where he was to have received treatment, and ending medical coverage for his family. It took him until recently to overcome the series of bureaucratic hurdles.
Still other complaints come from returning Guard soldiers having trouble reclaiming their civilian jobs. The Pentagon investigates about 500 cases a month and is able to resolve most of them by pointing out the law: A returning guardsman must be restored to a job of equal status to the one he held before being deployed.
Plugging holes
The manpower shortage includes not only individual soldiers, but units. The Guard is faced with a 24-month cap on the time a guardsman can be mobilized into federal service.
Many Guard soldiers, such as Sgt. Medved, have used up some of that time; he and others from the Pennsylvania Guard were sent last year to secure U.S. air bases in Europe for eight months.
So the Guard was in a quandary when Medved's outfit, the 1st Battalion, 110th Mechanized Infantry Regiment of the Pennsylvania National Guard, was alerted last fall for an 18-month rotation that will include 12 months in Iraq. Medved and hundreds of others were too short of time to be sent.
The Guard scavenged for volunteers.
"I went looking," said 1st Battalion Sgt. Maj. Jimmy Stewart of the Pennsylvania Guard, a gruff, barrel-chested soldier. "I'd go meet guys. I'd say, 'Look, we have a deployment coming up, I need you to come.' "
Dozens who could have stayed home volunteered. It wasn't enough. When the battalion left Pennsylvania to begin its training, it counted 483 soldiers, 121 short.
Similar shortfalls created gaping holes in the 2nd Brigade of Pennsylvania's 28th Mechanized Infantry Division. To fill the gaps, hundreds of soldiers were mobilized from other states. Whole units, including artillerymen from Utah, intelligence specialists from Kentucky, engineers from Illinois and Rhode Island, infantrymen from Vermont and cavalrymen from Nebraska, were patched into the brigade this spring.
In extreme cases, the Pentagon can deploy Guard soldiers with less than 18 months of service remaining. When the clock runs out, they are kept on active duty on "stop-loss" orders. Currently, 27,495 Army National Guard soldiers are being involuntarily kept on active duty, a status that can last months.
Inevitably, this takes its toll: Guardsmen are fed up and quitting.
One is Spc. Jesse Gendron, 27, who returned in August from Iraq with the National Guard's 46th Military Police Company of Kingsford, Mich. Sent to guard truck convoys around Baghdad, the soldiers' 12-month tour was extended 90 days. Of the 50 who deployed, a handful say they plan to re-enlist. Gendron isn't one of them.
"I don't regret anything I did over there," said Gendron, a senior at Northern Michigan University who joined the Guard six years ago after serving in the regular Army. But the constant deployments, he said, are "just getting out of hand. I just can't seem to get anything else done in my life."
Staff Sgt. Scott MacGlashin, also of the 46th MPs, said he won't re-enlist even though he has only five years more to qualify for retirement pay.
"It's pretty much guaranteed you're going to get deployed again, maybe not Iraq, but to the next hot spot," said MacGlashin, who has two children and another on the way. "That was the gamble I was looking at. I didn't want to roll the dice."
As it absorbs the losses, the Guard is heading into its toughest recruiting months, with higher enlistment goals to meet and college and jobs luring away potential recruits. More bad news may lay ahead.
With large numbers of Guard units due to return from Iraq and Afghanistan this summer, Pentagon officials are bracing for a mass exodus.
These troops "are going to leave in higher percentages than we currently have experienced," Lt. Gen. Roger Schultz, recently retired director of the Army National Guard, told a congressional committee this spring.
National concerns
These difficulties feed a growing national concern about whether the Guard can meet its responsibilities at home.
Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski said heavy use of Guard troops in the Middle East has left the state more vulnerable to wildfires and other natural disasters.
The Pentagon is "using the National Guard to avoid the tough calls on the size of the active Army," Kulongoski said. "This isn't the proper use that we should be making of the Guard."
The Vermont Legislature called for a special commission to study the use of its Guard troops after voters complained in a series of town meetings about Vermont Guardsmen being sent to Iraq.
"This is bottom-up democracy," said Ellen Kaye, an activist who helped organize the town meetings. "States ought to be able to stand up and say, 'No, not with our Guard.' "
In Virginia, Republican Rep. Tom Davis faulted the Pentagon for what he thinks was a failure to adequately staff and equip the Guard for its new role in combat. Now that bill is coming due, he said.
"We brought these folks into a war, and we were not logistically prepared to do it," Davis said.
That situation may become more pointed in the months ahead. Demands for military manpower for the global war on terrorism will remain high or even increase, Pentagon officials say. There will be no respite for the Guard.
"We are going to have to ask them to do more than we have in the past," said Thomas Hall, assistant defense secretary for reserve affairs.
David Wood is based in Washington, D.C., and covers national security for Newhouse News Service.