The National Guard as a Strategic Hedge

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This article suggests alternatives to proposed organizational reductions and balance between the Active force and the National Guard. It examines specifics of the cost, use, and effectiveness arguments on both sides of this contentious issue. Finally, this article serves as a catalyst to renew the broader public discussion regarding the proper roles of the regulars and the militia--the National Guard--as integral parts of the nation's defense and security architecture. ********** As the year 2014 approaches, the nation anticipates the close of what has widely been described as the longest war in our country's history. With the assumed ending of that war, many citizens and political leaders anticipate our regular military will be required to do what it has historically always done at the end of a war--shrink. Despite the fact the war in Afghanistan is not the nation's longest, and our involvement there will likely not entirely end in 2014, the broad expectation or even demand that the military's size and budget be reduced is both normal and necessary. (1) This expectation of significant post-war regular military reductions reflects long, deep-rooted, and traditional national practice. Indeed, following most of our country's earliest wars there was a significant national movement to eliminate the regular army altogether, and return to our traditional reliance on the citizen-soldiers of the militia for the country's defense. After the Revolutionary War the Continental was, in fact, effectively disbanded, with less than one hundred soldiers retained to guard stores. (2) After the War of 1812, the War with Mexico, the Civil War, and the War with Spain, the regular army was drastically reduced, and in spite of continuous fighting on the Western frontier, the nineteenth-century regular army never exceeded a peacetime strength of approximately 30,000. (3) In contrast, the organized militia strength remained at well over 100,000 during this period. (4) The first half of the twentieth century was little different, with the regular army (including the nascent Air Force) reaching a strength of only 125,000 on the eve of the Second World War in 1936. (5) That same year the strength of the National Guard was roughly 400,000. (6) The post-conflict reductions of the and the Air Force after the Second World War, the Korean War, and the War in Vietnam were not as drastic as after previous wars, due to the ongoing Cold War with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), but there were reductions nonetheless. Finally, in the 1990s following the first Gulf War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the active military once again was reduced in hopes of a peace dividend. Certainly these reductions were not as great as those of many previous major post-war periods, but they were significant and perceived by the nation and its leadership as both normal and necessary. At the same time, the combined strength of the National Guard, both and Air, remained close to its historic norm, approximately 450,000 soldiers and airmen. One constant has existed through all these wartime expansions and post-war contractions of the regular military. That constant has been the relatively steady size of, and national reliance on, the nation's militia (since 1903 the National Guard) as a strategic hedge to allow for rapid expansion of the country's military capacity in time of emergency. The militia (and later the National Guard) has provided the expansible Army function first advocated by Secretary of War John C. Calhoun in the 1820s, and has always been federalized (or has provided state volunteer units) to augment regulars during emergencies. As a result, much of American military history is really the history of the activated militia or National Guard; there were virtually no regular units at Gettysburg, for example, and the second American division to deploy to France in 1917 was the 26th Yankee Division, composed solely of National Guard units from the New England states. …