The Changing of the Guard - America's Citizen Soldiers At the Crossroads

MCCHORD A.F.B., Wash. — Deep inside a stout tan building, row upon row of soldiers watch radar screens, scanning the skies for any possible threat. Amid unprecedented domestic levels of alert, one of the American military’s most crucial defense tasks in the past half-century is being run by none other than the National Guard. Since Sept 11., the Guard has enjoyed a newfound sense of mission, but with it has come a growing turf battle over who — and what — should define that mission.

NESTLED IN THE lush evergreen woods here, the Western Air Defense Sector (known by the grin-inducing acronym WADS) monitors U.S. and Canadian airspace from central Texas to the Pacific. It is the western outpost of the North American Aerospace Defense (NORAD), responsible for some 63 percent of the land in the contiguous United States.

In 1995, amid major Air Force overhauls, WADS was turned over to the National Guard. A rotating contingent of Guard members staffs terminals every moment of every day, monitoring 80,000 aircraft paths every 24 hours. If something needs scrutiny, they can call upon a broad range of civilian and military agencies — or, if need be, scramble a fighter jet for an intercept.

Since last fall’s terror attacks, their role has proven invaluable to domestic defense.

“We’re at a fairly intense level of ops,” said Col. John E. “Junior” Bonner, the Sector’s director of support. Since the attacks, Bonner said, there have been 300 “things that we’ve looked at.”

Among the soldiers, there is a clear understanding: If another attack comes from the air, it’s their job to stop it.

On any day before Sept. 11, about 5,000 Guard members might have been deployed. Since then, the number on active duty has jumped more than tenfold, hitting levels seen only during the Persian Gulf war. It is what the Washington State Guard’s Col. Rick Patterson calls “an unprecedented time.”

Guard members have key roles in an emerging strategy for protecting the United States against what some in the military call a “loss of sanctuary” — another terror strike on American soil. Working overseas with full-time military and helping keep peace at home, the Guard has made the best of a dual mandate which stretches back to the Revolutionary War.

Yet those twin roles underscore the key challenge in domestic defense: how to accomplish the intricate tango between federal and local priorities.

“It’s a dilemma. Those people cannot be in two places at once,” said retired Army Col. John Brinkerhoff, who oversaw civil defense programs as a senior FEMA official in the 1980s. “If you’re going to maintain forces to respond if there’s an incident [on U.S. soil] ... those people are not going to be available at the same time for their primary federal mission.”

Skills honed by the Guard’s half-million members — anything from refueling jet fighters to handling biohazards or even drug interdiction — have put them high on homeland security resource lists. “By calling citizen soldiers,” said Patterson, “you leave your standing services intact for other contingencies.”

Its modern role stems from the days after the gulf war, when the military’s Bold Shift initiative recrafted Guard ranks as primary reserves for the Army and Air Force. Those efforts bore some fruit — the Pentagon chose the Guard to operate NORAD’s regional commands, such as WADS, to patrol skies over the United States and Canada.

But it also prompted an identity crisis. Even as Guard officials sought a wider domestic role, they had to train and prepare to bolster active U.S. forces. Was there a primary mission? Who should be trained for what?

Guard officials insist they are well-prepared for their dual mission, and they point out their ranks — nearly 500,000 members — are as large as the active ranks of the Army and larger than other active branches of the armed forces. That sort of readiness is neither easy nor cheap. The Pentagon paid over $12 billion in fiscal year 2001 for training, equipment, overhead and much of the Guard’s payroll. States provide billions more.

But Guard observers say strength in the ranks won’t resolve questions about the dual chain of command — members take oaths to both their governor and to the president — or the growing concerns over cooperation between local officials and the Bush administration that existed even before Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge was brought to Washington to coordinate homeland security. As turf battles grow over domestic defense, the Guard is squarely in the middle.

Despite the fray, some Guard units have seized upon their position in the middle to help untangle at least some of these issues.

WADS, for example, keeps direct lines to the Federal Aviation Administration and local civilian agencies, as well as the three other U.S. air defense sectors and NORAD headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colo. Staffers command both civilian and military resources.

Some are full-time Guard members; others were part-timers called up to serve after Sept. 11. Since then, all have worked for the National Command Authority: President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and some top civilian deputies.

But lines of command are rarely so clear, given that any member or unit can be brought into service under one of three options:

Governors can call up their state Guard with sole discretion, in which case they are paid for with state funds. This includes such missions as crowd control or fighting wildfires.

Federal officials can call up the Guard, but leave them under state control, a method known as Title 32 for the federal law which allows for it. Costs are shared, though most are charged to the federal budget. Guard members may be called for full military duty under Title 10 of federal code, which leaves them under control of the president and the Defense Department. They are then considered federal soldiers and are paid solely with federal funds.

The war against terrorism, with its blurring of national boundaries, has left the Guard with many roles to fill and no end of questions about how to pay for their efforts. For managerial — and legal — reasons, officials try to keep some separation between foreign and domestic needs.

“We are resourced and funded for the war fight,” Col. Jeff Mathis, chief of homeland security for the National Guard Bureau, said. “However, we are prepared to serve in Title 32 status to prepare for, deter, and if it happens, respond to an act of terrorism.”

Guard patrols at commercial airports fell under that status. Such duties are nothing new: For over a decade, Guard members have been called under Title 32 to help in counterdrug operations and other assistance with Customs work at U.S. borders.

But since Sept. 11, the administration has shown a preference for Title 10, which gives control directly to the federal executive. WADS, for example, was moved completely under Title 10 — a status usually reserved for overseas missions. Indeed, before Sept. 11, Title 10 deployments within U.S. borders were used for only for the most dire civil disturbances, such as the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

Yet Title 10 has been used in the past seven months to call up as many as 1,700 Guard members to help patrol U.S. borders. Many governors and federal lawmakers — and some Guard officials — have decried its use for purely domestic roles.

“Is America ready for federal troops on the border? There’s something that kind of cuts against our culture,” said John Goheen, director of communications for the National Guard Association of the United States. “Why are we ignoring 365 years of history?”

The border mission also raises a legal issue: a possible violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits federal troops from law enforcement within the United States.

In past years, the Guard has been called on for such paramilitary roles precisely because it can serve under state command. But Title 10 strips Guard members of some rights. Those on border duty, for example, have been sent without weapons — unlike the Guard members on airport duty, who visibly carried service pistols and machine guns.

That decision prompted harsh words from 58 senators, who told President Bush in a March letter: “We simply want Guard forces who might be in harm’s way to have the ability to protect themselves.”

Moreover, governors insist Title 10 cuts them out of the loop, and say they have the right to weigh in on Guard duties — “whether they augment airports, the nuclear power plants, the border, whatever,” said Nolan Jones, director of the human resources committee at the National Governors Association.

That growing tension is, observers say, indicative of a growing trend since Sept. 11 by the Bush administration to centralize domestic security, even though much of the work is ultimately done on the local level.

“There are people in Washington who’d like to federalize everything, including this,” said Dr. Bernard Rostker, who served as undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness in the Clinton administration and as undersecretary of the Army. “There are people in the Pentagon who are eager to have the Army in charge.”

By contrast, Rotsker argues, New York’s handling of the days after the attack on the World Trade Center stands as an excellent example of how to manage that delicate balance of political wills.

“You didn’t see a general show up in New York, you saw the governor and the mayor — and five days later the president showed up,” said Rotsker, now a senior fellow at the Rand Corporation. “That seems about right.”

The Guard’s long-term mission will likely be clarified by a national security strategy document expected this July by Ridge’s office, and many units will presumably be integrated into the Pentagon’s newly announced homeland defense command.

But strategic decisions have thus far been shaped with little input from those outside senior administration circles. “It’s very tight-lipped,” one federal official who works with the military told MSNBC.com. “Things are just being very much constricted to the highest levels.”

Guard officials remain optimistic they can navigate a successful path through all this.

They pride themselves as being “Civilian in Peace, Soldier in War,” but the current fight is one that upends the very definitions of those words.

To that end, some suggest the Guard, with its costly overhead and full military training, should stick to its role as a reserve force and be augmented with state defense forces conducting local security. Brinkerhoff, who saw up close how domestic security worked during the Cold War, even argued in an article in the Journal of Homeland Defense that state militias — local groups often geared to retired soldiers and ceremonial duties — be retasked to handle local defense

“The issue isn’t what the Guard could do, the issue is what the Guard ought to do,” Brinkerhoff said. “Can the Guard be used in those instances? Yes. But can we do that on a permanent basis? The answer may be no.”

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Keeping vigilant eyes on the skies

Guard maintains security across U.S. airspace

By Jon Bonné
MSNBC

MCCHORD A.F.B., Wash. — For Staff Sgt. Nathaniel Porter, defending his country means a lot of hours watching a lot of tiny blips on computer screens, each blip representing an aircraft in the skies of the western United States. “When you consider that little dot you’re looking at could be a 747,” Porter said, “I’d say that’s a lot of responsibility.” Porter and his colleagues each watch up to 60 little dots at a time — some 80,000 every day.

HE IS ONE of dozens of tracking technicians, as they are known, at the Western Air Defense Sector (WADS), the military’s center for tracking every aircraft from West Texas to the Pacific coast. Reporting to the North American Aerospace Defense, the soldiers at WADS must work with an alphabet soup of military and civilian agencies, sorting out the identity of anything in their skies. If they don’t know who someone is, they find out — even if it means sending up a fighter jet to take a peek.

As Porter puts it, “We’re the eyes, catching everything first.”

For 54 years, NORAD and its outposts from Florida to Alaska have kept a constant watch on U.S. and Canadian skies. During the Cold War, missiles and long-range Soviet bombers were the prime concerns, but its mission after the fall of the Soviet Union grew ever less apparent. In 1997, its regional operations were turned over to the Air National Guard, managed by the First Air Force near Panama City, Fla.

Though its vigilance never wavered, its mission was increasingly questioned — until Sept. 11, when the prized sovereignty of U.S. skies was punctured in an unprecedented way.

At WADS, a sense of mission became immediately clear.

“Before, I had a line. I assumed that all the people who would cause us ill will, like the Timothy McVeighs, would be truck bombers and would be the FBI’s problem,” said Col. John E. “Junior” Bonner, director of support for WADS. “Now I have population centers, critical resources ... Instead of looking at a coastline now, or a border, I’m looking at a lot of different things.”

BROAD RANGE OF DUTIES

WADS is staffed by several hundred members of the Washington State National Guard — both full-time officers and part-timers called up to serve. Yet they are just a tiny portion of the state’s 8,000-strong Guard ranks, which have been deployed in almost every aspect of the U.S. counterterrorism strategy.

Some 700 are currently deployed, but officials could still call up 10 times that amount in an emergency. About 200 were assigned to the Guard’s seven-month deployment at airports; another 300 work at WADS; 70 have been sent north to the Canadian border. Some 200 troops were even sent to help with Olympics security in Salt Lake City — where Bonner ran the military end of air security.

Overseas, some two dozen Army Guardsmen from the state have been deployed since last September — about 10 specialists in information warfare and another 15 with language skills and other intelligence specialties suited to the current war on terrorism. They joined nearly 500 Air Guardsmen from the state on regular overseas duties, including security at airbases, air traffic control and refueling.

There are other duties as well. Another 22 Guard members are assigned to full-time WMD Civil Support Teams, or RAID teams, ready for rapid deployment to the site of a nuclear, biological or chemical terror incident. The third of 17 such state teams commissioned by Congress, team members based at Camp Murray outside Tacoma are trained to assess and handle hazardous materials, do medical decontamination and set up communications with local and federal officials. Team members are trained to provide seamless coordination between civilian authorities and the military.

CIVILIAN TIES

That bridge between civilian and military worlds has become a trademark of the Guard’s domestic duties.

WADS is operated by a broad patchwork: full-time officers, part-timers who keep their day jobs, representatives from the Federal Aviation Administraion and other civilian agencies, even members of the Canadian armed forces. Though WADS is a state unit, it operates on this Air Force base outside Tacoma in the same NORAD facility once used by the Air Force to cover the sector. The Guard staffs the facility, but it reports up through Air Force ranks — and ultimately, it likely will report to the new Northern Command for homeland security.

In the facility’s nerve center, a large, crowded, low-ceilinged room, technicians and supervisors hunch over screens and flat-panel displays showing parts of U.S. airspace. It resembles nothing so much as a modern air-traffic control facility, though the men and women seated at terminals wear military uniforms and jumpsuits.

Each member on duty takes charge of a slice of the sky and ensures every aircraft is paired with a known identity and flight plan.

“We’re tied into a wealth of law enforcement agencies, military agencies, the FAA,” said Lt. Col. Dave Harmon, who helps run the sector’s operations center. “And working with a wide variety of folks, they help us to identify all the airborne objects that are out there in our area of responsibility.”

A CLEAR DUTY

If other agencies can’t explain an aircraft’s flight route, WADS must find it out.

Before Sept. 11, only seven locations near U.S. borders had fighters ready to scramble. Now there are dozens spread throughout the country. Some operational details remain classified, but WADS has at its disposal some 100 F-15 and F-16 fighter jets at 30 locations throughout Western states. Regular jet patrols have been assigned two- to four-hour sorties, poised to act as ordered; more can quickly be in the sky if a potential threat arises.

“We understand the reality of it that anything can happen. Everybody’s ready for whatever happens,” said Staff. Sgt. Steven Peery, a tracking technician and trainer for new WADS recruits.

On the morning of Sept. 11, Peery said, “I was definitely thinking about here. I knew what was going on in peoples’ minds here.” Soon after, he was called up from his full-time job for an electrical company near Tacoma.

That was part of the Guard’s appeal for Peery, who previously worked full-time at WADS. He could take a civilian job, go back to school and remain close to home while fulfilling what he felt was a crucial post.

As for Porter, a full-time Guard job came after a 12-year stint in the Marines. “Not quite as much equipment as I was used to wearing as a Marine,” he said, plugging in a bulky headset. “No helmets or flak jackets.”

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