Thursday, Sept. 16, 2004 | 9:22 a.m.
As the National Guard continues to shift from its old mission as a strategic reserve to an operational force, the commander of the country's citizen soldiers said he is working to ensure that guardsmen can't be deployed more than once every five years.
"We're rebalancing the forces to create more of the units we need and then we're able to rotate them more efficiently through deployments," Lt. Gen. Steven Blum said after delivering a "State of the National Guard address" to about 2,000 guardsmen at the Las Vegas Convention Center on Wednesday. "We're creating a shelf stock of units so that we can rotate through and not have to call the same soldiers back before five or six years have passed."
Blum opened his speech at the National Guard Association Convention with a moment of silence for the 126 National Guard soldiers who have been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Blum said the National Guard is being stretched due to the war in Iraq, but the soldiers are meeting the requirements placed on them by both the federal government and state governments who have needed the guard to respond to hurricanes, wildfires and other duties.
"We're stretched, but not to the breaking point," Blum said.
He said that the Army National Guard is about 4,000 soldiers short of 350,000, the number currently allotted for the Army Guard. The Air National Guard has about 107,000 airmen, about 1,000 more than what the government allocates for that branch of the military.
"My gut would tell me we're going to have problems keeping the people who come back from being deployed in Iraq, but so far my gut has been wrong," Blum said. "Where we are falling short is in the numbers of enlistments of those who are finishing their commitments to the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines."
Blum sees the current deployment of more than 122,000 guardsmen overseas as a test that they are passing, negating the need for a draft.
Blum said that he finds comments that the guard has been used as a "back door draft" to be ingenuous, because no one has ever been drafted into the guard.
"This country should never go to war without the National Guard," Blum said. "When you call out the Guard you call out the American people. You're taking every church, every school, every community.
"In previous wars the soldiers have been blamed for the faults people have with the war, but by calling up the Guard we've seen a clear differentiation between the war and the warriors."
When asked about the questions surrounding President Bush's service in the National Guard, Blum said he doesn't concern himself with the politics of the election.
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