WASHINGTON - The National Guard is stretched so thin by simultaneous assignments in Iraq and the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast that leaders in statehouses and Congress say it is time to reconsider how the force is used.
Republicans and Democrats alike worry about the service's ability to balance its federal and state missions of fighting wars and responding to domestic crises.
"We need to look at what is going to be the long-term future of our Guard when states need to rely on these soldiers for emergencies and the nation continues to rely on them for overseas deployment," said Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, a Democrat.
About 41,000 Guard members are scattered across Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, along with 17,000 active-duty troops. About 30,000 Guard members are serving in Iraq, with smaller numbers in Afghanistan, Kosovo and elsewhere overseas.
Since the storm devastated the deep South, Republicans and Democrats have praised the Guard for what may be the most massive U.S. military response to a domestic natural disaster.
But lawmakers also have questioned whether poor coordination between the federal government and the states — and the overseas deployments — kept the Guard from getting where it was needed quickly after the hurricane.
Sen. John Warner (news, bio, voting record), R-Va., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, intends to review the Guard's hurricane relief performance this fall.
The head of the National Guard Bureau said Friday the assignment of thousands of Guard troops from Mississippi and Louisiana to Iraq delayed those states' initial hurricane response by about a day.
"Had that brigade been at home and not in Iraq, their expertise and capabilities could have been brought to bear," said Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, the bureau's chief.
However, Blum said that overall, the Iraq assignment is not limiting the military's ability to continue the rescue and recovery operations.
What was really needed was not a lot of specialists but people to secure evacuation routes and maintain order. Blanco still had over 10,000 guardsmen to do that. She only sent a few hundred.
Brown lied on his resume at least twice. That alone is reason enough for me to can him. You can't have someone in an operations center who lies. ever.
Well, if the National Guard is only for use stateside, then why is the federal government picking up the tab? If they are primary state use, then the states should pay the whole thing.
That's no longer a "news story", it's an editorial.
I am convinced that there are no patriotic Americans in the political left. There are very few in the MSM. AP proves my assumption.
Katrina - a category 4 hurricane that hit New Orleans on the mouth of the Mississippi seems to be an afterthought in all this reporting. You don't just shake off the effects of an unprecidented, devastating hurricane like that and pretend everything is gonna go well immediately afterwards. That's the real spin I see.
BTW, pay no attention to spamalot who's been hijacking threads for days in an effort to skew perceptions of the Dim's complicity in the carnage.
FGS
Nail them....
Good catch.
The sooner these dinosaurs of the dying socialist "mainstream" newsrooms die completely dead, the sooner America can recover from the decadence and mediocrity that forty years of Democrat liberalism brought.
BS. Approximately 70 % of the Louisiana NG is still in the states!