Guard, Reserve groups duel over merger proposal - Air Force News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Air Force Times

Guard, Reserve groups duel over merger proposal

A radical military reform proposal from the chairman of the board of the National Guard Association of the U.S. calls for the Army Reserve and Air Force Reserve to be absorbed into the National Guard as a cost-saving measure.

In an article appearing in the July issue of the National Guard Association magazine, Air Force Maj. Gen. Tod Bunting, adjutant general of the Kansas National Guard, says eliminating the Army Reserve and Air Force Reserve and absorbing their people, equipment and facilities into the Guard should be considered as the Defense Department embarks on an effort to cut $100 billion from the military budget.

“What we really are talking about is the integration of two great teams,” he writes. “In the long run, the new, larger Guard would be more streamlined, with fewer headquarters, headquarters personnel and facilities. That is where we will find even more savings, which will be considerable and is what America needs.”

The first place to start, he said, is consolidating the National Guard Bureau with Army and Air Force Reserve leadership. Current reserve leaders “would become part of the senior leadership teams of the Army and Air Guard,” Bunting said. “Their skills, experience and input would be critical to maximizing the potential of this new organization.”

Bunting’s proposal would require congressional approval and would likely provoke a fight about the future of the military because the services generally think of their reserves as a vital addition to active-duty capabilities while the National Guard has dual roles of serving state and federal missions that can complicate their use and result in divergent priorities.

One group that will fight the consolidation is the Reserve Officers Association, which disagrees with the entire concept, said David Small, ROA’s communications director.

Small said his organization has helped keep the National Guard and Reserve from being merged “several times.”

“There is a periodic cycle with such a merge being suggested almost every decade,” Small said.

One key problem, he said, is that it is more difficult to mobilize National Guard units for federal missions than to use reserve forces, especially when a state doesn’t want to release its Guard forces for federal duty.

However, consolidation would result in the reserve components having access to a bigger combined piece of the budget pie.

The 2008 final report of the Commission on the National Guard and Reserve noted that 66 percent of the Army budget, for example, goes to active forces, 12 percent to the Army Guard, 6 percent to the Army Reserve and the remainder to servicewide programs. In the Air Force, the Air Guard gets 6 percent and the Air Force Reserve gets 3 percent of the total budget.

The Navy and Marine Corps, which do not have National Guard units, would not be affected by the proposed consolidation, but the Navy Reserve receives just 2 percent and the Marine Corps Reserve just 1 percent of the total Navy budget, according to the commission report.

The commission looked at organizational issues involving the reserve components and did not recommend consolidating the National Guard with the Army Reserve and Air Force Reserve, which Small said is good reason to reject the idea.

Bunting expects resistance from Reserve officials but still insists there are advantages to merging. “The Air Guard and the Air Force Reserve are almost carbon copies of each other,” he said. “They would go together like a hand in a glove.”

He said such an arrangement would give states even more assets for domestic airlift, rescue, security and medical missions.

The Army Reserve, he said, has medical, engineer, transportation, water purification and civil affairs capabilities that also “sound like perfect fits for our domestic mission.”

Consolidation could mean the elimination of some jobs, which would be one of the primary means of cost-savings. Bunting says a consolidated personnel system would also save money, and that an advantage for Army and Air Force reservists would be that they could rise to the rank of four-star general in the National Guard. The top rank in the reserves is a three-star position.

But Small said savings “would be minimal at best” unless there were reductions in forces. “The only difference would be limited overhead, which would be very limited and might actually increase state costs for those with large reserve populations,” Small said.