Senator Feingold and Senator Durbin have called for an increase in funding for the national Guard so that they can meet equipment shortages and be able to respond to disasters as well as fight more effectively in Iraq. As Feingold noted in his September speech about Iraq, the National Guard only has around 34% of the equipment it needs to function effectively.
This is part of the reason why its response to Katrina was so ineffective. All their best men and most of their equipment were in Iraq instead of back home, like they normally are. The painful consequences of the backdoor draft, like John Kerry was talking about in the campaign last year, are being felt.
Senator Durbin’s office has released even more details about the National Guard’s equipment shortages:
Durbin said National Guard units in Illinois often fare even worse than the national average and equipment inventories of Illinois National Guard units have been seriously depleted. For example, the inventory tallies show that Illinois Guard units are assigned only:
# 4 percent of the medium trucks needed to maintain full readiness (6 of 166 medium trucks)
# 8 percent of the heavy trucks needed to maintain full readiness (6 of 79 heavy trucks)
# 47 percent of night vision devices (1503 of 3220 night vision devices)
# 63 percent of ground to air radios (766 of 1218 radios)
While these numbers alone are cause for serious concern, the situation may actually be much worse. Some of this assigned equipment is unavailable for use by the state because it is currently in Iraq or elsewhere.
The Chicago Tribune reported that there were only 32 National Guard helicopters in the area to airlift people out of New Orleans and that they needed to fly in 100 more in after Katrina struck.
In addition, Durbin notes that the Army National Guard has failed to account for about half their equipment in Iraq. This is yet one more piece of evidence, by the way, that the Iraq War is a debacle, that we are losing equipment at a frightening rate, and that the insurgents are able to destroy our equipment at will.
Illinois is not alone; here is the Missouri Guard’s harrowing experience:
Four days after Hurricane Katrina hammered the Gulf Coast, green camouflaged trucks lined up at National Guard armories across Missouri. In Fulton, engines roared at 7:25 a.m. as soldiers with the 175th Military Police Battalion started up 20 trucks, ready to depart for New Orleans.
By 8 a.m., however, Spc. Danny Johnson knew things weren’t going smoothly.
“We had two breakdowns right here before we could even get out of the driveway, which is kind of embarrassing when you’re trying to get somewhere,” he said. “It put us behind.”
Eventually, the convoy got on the road, but the problems continued. It took three days to travel 800 miles as guardsmen coped with bad brakes, reluctant engines and broken speedometers along the way. One soldier fixed a broken fuel line in his truck with a sharpened stick.
The rocky start to the unit’s response to Katrina illustrates the severe equipment shortages among National Guard units across the country. According to Capt. Bruce Becker, the officer in charge of about half the Missouri Guard’s equipment in Louisiana, the war in Iraq has taken away resources that local Guard units need to respond to domestic crises.
And then, the Bush administration has the nerve to propose cutting taxes by another $90 billion or so. The problem is, these things cost money. The Bush administration can’t make their numbers add up, which just goes to show how outdated the notion of trickle-down economics is. In Missouri, the situation is so bad, one soldier had to pay for a new radio out of his own pocketbook.
The Pentagon’s own figures show that almost 20% of our National Guard units are in Iraq, consisting of over half the troops stationed there. Their own figures admit that this hampers the ability of state Governors to use their National Guard units:
The Pentagon says 78,000 of the roughly 440,000 National Guard troops nationwide are deployed overseas, including many from the states hardest hit by Katrina.
The extensive use of Guard equipment overseas has “significantly reduced the amount of equipment available to state governors for domestic needs,” the report said.
Rep. Tom Davis, a Virginia Republican who chairs the House of Representatives Government Reform Committee, said Hurricane Katrina showed that “the National Guard is our nation’s first military responder, and I find it unfathomable that they are approaching equipment bankruptcy.”
This is a massive case of doublethink by the Bush administration. First of all, they say that states should be responsible for their own well-being and that they know best how to allocate their resources. And then, they take away their resources, because, after all, George Bush knows best. And then, after taking away those resources, they blame the states for not responding, because, after all, states are responsible for their own well-being, not the federal government. This is called circular reasoning.
Ivo Daalder of TPM points out that Bush is guilty of a lot of doubletalk:
In the days after the disastrously slow response to Katrina, Bush went out of his way to argue that the delay in deploying National Guard and other troops had nothing to do with Iraq. “It is preposterous to claim that the engagement in Iraq meant there wasn’t enough troops here, just pure and simple,” Bush said on September 6. “We’ve got plenty of troops to do both.”
He may have been right about the troops — but now we learn they didn’t have the equipment necessary to do the job.
In other words, this is a classic case of Bush covering up his own incompetence and his own refusal to pay attention to detail.
And what Bush said was a lie. He implied with that statement that the National Guard had the resources to fight in Iraq and respond to disasters back home. I suggest that Bush go back to his Bible and read the Ten Commandments, because there is no distinction between telling a bald-faced lie and creating a false impression in the minds of viewers. It says, “Thou shalt not bear false witness.”
Either that, or he didn’t want to know, because of his known habit of not wanting to know bad news.
The Associated Press reports that governors of both parties are angry at the shortages and at the Federal Government’s failure to replace lost equipment in a timely manner. Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell:
Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, whose state has 3,200 National Guard troops in Iraq – the highest per capita in the nation – said Pennsylvania troops have had to leave behind a variety of equipment, ranging from seven helicopters in Afghanistan to 59 tractors and 118 trailers in Iraq.
Replacement of the equipment has been slow, and items sent in their place are not the same quality or quantity, Rendell said.
This is a “huge problem when it comes to the integrity of the National Guards and their ability to carry out their missions,” he said.
Idaho Governor Dick Kempthorne:
Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne said his state’s Guard will soon leave 400 vehicles in Iraq – many of them Humvees uparmored to provide protection against insurgents, and he understands why. But he said he worries the state will not be protected in a disaster or terrorist attack.
“We need a commitment from the federal government that the equipment that is left in Iraq will be replaced in quick order,” said Kempthorne, a Republican.
Other items from the AP article:
–David Melcher, a deputy chief of staff at the army, admits it will take five years to replace the equipment. The cost? $20 billion. This is unconscionable that the government can throw away billions of dollars down the black hole of Halliburton and billions of dollars to line the pockets of corrupt Iraqi officials and can’t spare $20 billion for the National Guard to help them replace their equipment.
It’s not because the Bush administration can’t afford it, it is because they don’t want to. $20 billion is pocket change for the Federal Government. Instead, they would rather give out more and more tax cuts and balance the budget on the backs of the poor.
–Congressman Davis, mentioned above, calls this travesty “Robbing Peter to pay Paul.”
–The GAO reports that the National Guard is working on an outdated business model, leaving them with only around 70% of then men they need to carry out fighting a war.
Lt. General Steven Blum of the National Guard admits the problem is massive:
Much of the Guard’s equipment is in Iraq, and the war there has battered the helicopters and Humvees of every service, wearing them out five times faster than normal, by some estimates. The Pentagon says it will take at least two years to return the force to full strength after the war.
In the meantime, though, the Guard is left to do its homeland mission with what is left over. It has long been at the bottom of the military food chain, receiving fewer Army hand-me-downs than it needs because it has typically been a reserve – the last to fight. Yet now, with the Guard being used as a front-line force in Iraq, and with President Bush pushing for a larger military role in disaster relief at home, the Guard’s lack of materiel is a primary matter of American security.
“I don’t have all the equipment I need for 300,000 soldiers,” says General Blum. “Equipment is my challenge now.”
The problem is so bad, according to the article, that even torture apologist Kit Bond has spoken out about the problem:
Congress, too, is aware of the Guard’s changing mission. Sens. Christopher Bond (R) of Missouri and Patrick Leahy (D) of Vermont asked the president last week to press for $1.3 billion in spending on new National Guard equipment. “The National Guard has deployed many of its resources overseas, consequently there are insufficient reserves of equipment available to respond to future disasters,” they wrote.
The letter is just a hint of what could come. Across the armed forces, the war in Iraq is straining equipment. Part of that is the nature of the war. The Pentagon had not originally expected such a prolonged insurgency, so soldiers have used vehicles like Humvees in ways they hadn’t expected – weighing them down with makeshift armor, for example, which puts excess wear on other parts.
This is a direct result of what happens when a government that favors ideology, PR, and spin comes into power. They could care less about the details of actually governing. It is pretty pathetic when I could have told them that we would not be well-recieved by the Iraqi people and that they could expect a long insurgency.
I claim no special abilities for my part. I was fortunate enough to meet with people who had been there during the sactions and the First Gulf War. They told me that as much as the Iraqi people did not like Saddam, they disliked out government just as much. That is because as a result of the massive bombings we undertook and the massive starvation that happened after the war, people were forced to accept a much lower standard of living than they had before the Gulf War. The situation was so bad there at one point that I saw videos of five-year-old boys who I thought were 18 months old, until the person there told me differently.
So, the causal chain of events is clear — the Bush administration failed to consider what could go wrong in Iraq if they invaded. They failed to consider what the attitudes of the Iraqi people might be; after all, they were the ones who would be affected by our presence there. They also failed to account for the National Guard’s equipment, resulting directly in the loss of life of as many as 10,000 people in New Orleans. Had there been adequate planning for the Iraq War, many lives would have been saved in Louisiana and elsewhere.
Louisiana and Mississippi were two of the states most heavily affected by deployment to Iraq:
”In the four years since 9/11 that we have been at war, equipment has been beaten up, blown up, or simply left behind,” said John Goheen of the National Guard Association of the United States. ”States have had to borrow equipment and make do with a lot less equipment. We are short literally thousands of Humvees.”
Meanwhile, in Louisiana and Mississippi, the states hit hardest by the hurricane, up to 40 percent of their National Guard troops are on active duty in Iraq. As a result, Guard commanders responding to the storm’s havoc have been forced to look further afield for military police and other National Guard units and equipment from states as far away as Maryland, stealing precious time from the relief efforts.
The Guard tried to point out in the Globe article that they had enough men and manpower, even with the deployments to Iraq. But the problem is, manpower won’t do any good unless you have a way to get thousands of men from point A to point B.
Even before Katrina struck, the Democratic National Commitee points out that the shortage of equipment for our National Guard was well-documented. First of all, contrary to the Guard’s spin right after Katrina, our units were overextended and short of manpower:
Reservists Make Up Growing Percentage of Active-Duty Troops. In the first year of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Reservists and National Guardsmen made up about 25 percent of troops in Iraq. Currently, Reserve and National Guard members make up an estimated 35 percent of the troops in Iraq. [Dallas Morning News, 7/31/05; San Francisco Chronicle, 5/9/04; AP, 5/12/04; AP, 5/17/04]
Commander Said Increasing Reliance On National Guard And Reserve Cannot Be Sustained Much Longer. Acknowledging a harsh reality, retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Hugh Shelton, said that the military is becoming heavily reliant on reservists and national guardsmen to maintain commitment abroad. He said “I don’t think we can sustain that much longer.” [Lincoln Journal Star, 4/24/05]
General Said Army Reserve Becoming ‘Broken Force.’ In December 2004, the head of the Army Reserve sent a sharply worded memo to other military leaders expressing “deepening concern” about the continued readiness of his troops and warning that his branch of 200,000 soldiers “is rapidly degenerating into a ‘broken’ force.” Lt. Gen. James Helmly lashed out at what he said were outdated and “dysfunctional” policies on mobilizing and managing the force. Helmly complained that his repeated requests to adjust the policies to current realities have been rebuffed by Pentagon authorities. [Washington Post, 6/6/05]
Former Bush Campaign Official Declines to Support Bush Due to His Treatment of Veterans, Reservists, And National Guard. “When the Bush campaign asked James McKinnon to co-chair its veterans steering committee in New Hampshire – a job he held in 2000 – the 56-year-old Vietnam veteran respectfully, but firmly, said no. ‘I basically told them I was disappointed in his support of veterans,’ said McKinnon, who served two tours in Vietnam with the Coast Guard. “He’s killing the active-duty military. … Look at the Reserves call-ups for Iraq, the hardships. The National Guard – the state militia – is being used improperly. I took the president at his word on Iraq, and now you can’t find a single report to back up or substantiate weapons of mass destruction.'” [Knight Ridder, 3/14/04]
This all goes back to a theme I have been dwelling on recently — a strong leader is one who can inspire people to make sacrifices. Howard Dean inspired many people to make sacrifices out of their daily lives to get involved in politics. FDR inspired millions of Americans to give up five years of their lives to free the world from the threat of Nazi and Fascist rule. We have to become a nation of givers, rather than a nation of takers.
But Bush wants us to become a nation of takers. One of the first remarks out of his mouth was that we needed to get back to shopping after the 9/11 attacks. In other words, don’t worry about enlisting for the military; go back to sleep. George Bush is watching.
Activated National Guard And Reserve Soldiers Took Paycuts. Surveys in 2004 showed that 40 percent of reservists and National Guard soldiers make less money while mobilized than they earned in their civilian jobs. Surveys of all Guard and reserve personnel found that among mobilized troops whose pay was cut, the average reduction was $3,000, although some took pay cuts in the tens of thousands. [Washington Post, 11/11/04]
GAO Report Cites Massive and Widespread Pay Problems for Activated National Guard Soldiers. A January 2004 GAO report studied six different Army Guard units and found Army Guard soldiers were being denied timely and accurate payroll payments. The report found that, “Overall, 450 of the 481 (94 percent) Army Guard soldiers from our six case study units had at least one pay problem associated with their mobilization. In addition, our limited review of the pay experiences of the soldiers in the Colorado Army Guard’s 220th Military Police Company, who are currently deployed to Iraq, indicated that some of the same types of pay problems that we found in our six case study units continued to occur.” [GAO Report, “Army National Guard Personnel Mobilized to Active Duty Experienced Significant Pay Problems,” 1/28/04]
Citizen-Soldiers Face Difficulty Holding Jobs. Reservists and National Guardsmen are encountering serious obstacles in their civilian career paths because of extended deployments. While “there are laws designed to protect the civilian jobs of deployed Guard and Reserve troops… some still come home unemployed if their companies skirt the law or cut jobs for other reasons…” [Associated Press, 6/3/05]
National Guard Families Complained About Flagging Support And Services. Tricia Fleming, 35, wife of Texas Army National Guard Spec. Lloyd Fleming, complained about flagging support and services for Reservists’ families and overlong tours of duty for soldiers such as her husband – he left home in January, arrived in Iraq in March and wouldn’t return till next July, she said. [Cox News Service, 9/3/04]
This all happens because the Bush administration values profits over human lives. While Alberto Gonzales and John Ashcroft were busy drafting laws skirting around the Geneva Conventions, they have failed to enforce our laws against employers firing people because they have guard duty.
This all goes back to the Straussian theory that people like our National Guard men and women are just pawns in a larger, grander game that mere mortals can’t understand. In 21st-century terms, George Bush is treating our national Guard units like units on a 21st-century Playstation game that is much larger than life.
The GAO Found Army Reserve Facing Increasing Equipment Shortages. In July 2005, the GAO found that “Army Reserve units are not generally allotted all of the equipment they need to deploy.” Since September 11th, commanders have required deploying units to have 90 percent of their required equipment, yet in February 2005 the Army Reserve reported it had about 76 percent of the equipment it requires, an estimate that includes older equipment. [GAO, “An Integrated Plan is Needed to Address Army Reserve Personnel and Equipment Shortages.” Rpt # GAO-05-660, 7/12/05]
* Nearly Half of Army Reserve Equipment Needs to be Repaired. The Army Reserve estimates that “currently as much as 44 percent of its equipment needs servicing.” [GAO, “An Integrated Plan is Needed to Address Army Reserve Personnel and Equipment Shortages.” Rpt # GAO-05-660, 7/12/05]
National Guard Units In US Recently Forced To Give Up Equipment. Already suffering from manpower shortages, the National Guard’s overstretched forces are being confronted with another problem: not enough equipment to supply Guard troops at home. “To fully equip troops in Iraq, the Pentagon has stripped local Guard units of about 24,000 pieces of equipment. That has left Guard units at home, already seriously short of gear.” [Detroit Free Press, 6/13/05]
* Soldiers Forced Were Buying Their Own Equipment As Late As 2004. “Some Army maintenance chiefs, in desperation, are using their own credit cards to make purchases. One soldier, who asked not to be identified, listed boots, goggles and protein bars as particularly coveted items.” [MSNBC.com, 4/15/04]
This is a prime example of the Bush administration’s mentality of blaming people first. In other words, if you don’t have the right equipment, it is your fault if you don’t pay out hundreds or even thousands of dollars for your own equipment. That is like King John doubling the taxes, tripling the taxes, throwing all the people in jail for not paying up, and then blaming the poor for not working hard enough and saving enough.
Here is another example of the GOP mentality of blaming people first:
Hunter Declared a Few Months of Health Coverage Good Enough for Reservists. Congressman Douglas Hunter, Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, removed a provision from the Defense Department budget that would extend TRICARE health coverage to all reservists and their families. In an attempt to justify his actions, Hunter stated that, in fact, Reservists and their families have TRICARE coverage from 90 days before mobilization until at least 120 days after they return, so extended coverage was not needed. [Biloxi Sun Herald, 5/28/05]
* Republicans Cited Mistrust as Reason to Deny Healthcare to Reservists. In a further attempt to rationalize the removal the provision from the Defense Department authorization bill, Chairman Hunter declared that civilian employers will “game the system” and take advantage of the reservists’ benefits. [Biloxi Sun Herald, 5/28/05]
In other words, they don’t trust you to make your own decisions about health care. After all, it’s your fault that you are not rich like them. Therefore, we will not give you any benefits because you will screw up on them anyway. And they don’t trust you to use the equipment they pay for you to use, so they are not going to buy you any.