WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY

Increased deployments, election-year politics are raising Guard issues on the congressional agenda

As Friday afternoon slipped into evening in western Ohio, acting Army secretary Les Brownlee was still hard at work. he spent a frigid Feb. 13 visiting AM General's Humvee manufacturing plant near South Bend, Ind., before flying to a sec ond plant in Fairfield, Ohio, where armor is added to the Army's workhorse vehicles.

Brownlee met with plant managers and shook hands with production line workers in an effort to speed up assembly of armorplated Humvees that are urgently needed in Iraq.

In large part, Brownlee could thank Rep. Rob Simmons, RConn., for his extended workday.

When three National Guardsmen from Simmons' eastern Connecticut district were wounded in a roadside bomb attack on their Humvee in Iraq Dec. 30, Simmons took up their cause.

"I talked to the families, and I was upset. I don't want to be standing at a grave site next time because we didn't get the stuff they need out there fast enough," said Simmons, a Vietnam veteran and retired Army Reserve colonel.

Simmons' first step was to fire off a letter telling Brownlee more had to be done to get armored Humvees to Iraq faster.

Then, when Congress reconvened, Simmons brought the matter up directly with Defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Peter Schoomaker, Army chief of staff.

Simmons, himself, traveled to the O'Gara-Hess & Eisenhardt plant in Fairfield and the Army's proving ground in Aberdeen, Md. It soon became clear what was delaying the delivery of armored Humvees to troops in Iraq.

"It seems that the military has underestimated the capacity of private industry and the research laboratories to ramp up production," he said. Based on that miscalculation, the Army ordered fewer armored Humvees and set later delivery dates than necessary.

Simmons wasn't the only one concerned. On Feb. 4, when Rumsfeld appeared before the House Armed Services Committee (HASC), Reps. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, and Gene Taylor, D-Miss., all zeroed in on the problem.

The Pentagon got the message, and nine days later Brownlee was inspecting production lines.

The Guard has an unusually high profile this congressional session, thanks to the war in Iraq and members like Simmons.

By late spring, about 40,000 of the 110,000 U.S. military personnel deployed to Iraq will be Guardsmen and Reservists. And such heavy reliance on reserve forces is prompting many lawmakers to take their closest look in years at the Guard.

Issues ranging from problems some troops are having getting paid to the medical "insurance gap" to the need for better dental coverage are getting congressional attention.

But with 170,000 Guardsmen mobilized over the past two and a half years, the most important question for many lawmakers is whether the military is calling too often on part-time troops.

"We are using the National Guard and Reserve as never before, and we have to be careful not to put such strains on these citizen soldiers that they leave in droves or that recruiting suffers," said Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Md., the HASC's senior Democrat.

Skelton relates this story about a visit to his home state: "I was in Missouri recently and met with one wife of a National Guardsman now serving in Iraq. She told me that when her husband returns from overseas, he will be getting out of the National Guard, and as many as one third of the other folks in her husband's unit will be too. This may be anecdotal evidence of what's going on in our reserve components, but it is certainly cause for concern."

A recent National Guard Bureau survey concluded that as many as 22 percent of those returning from Iraq may opt to quit the military. The figure is only slightly higher than the 17 percent of Army Guardsmen who depart the service each year. It is also less than the 28 percent who left the year after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. However, it did validate some existing anxieties.

"Concerns about morale and, potentially, about recruitment and retention are real," Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., the senior Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, told Rumsfeld.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, this has been a country at war, Rumsfeld replied.

"If we were not to call up the Guard and Reserves today, then why would we have them at all?" he said. "This is the purpose of the Guard and Reserve. It's what they signed up for."

During hearings before the armed services committees in both houses, Rumsfeld and David Chu, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, emphasized that despite nearly 200,000 call-ups, few Guardsmen and Reservists have been involuntarily ordered to active duty more than once.

"Just 7.15 percent have been involuntarily mobilized more than once since 1990," Rumsfeld said. "Indeed, I'm told that a full 58 percent of the current selected reserve, or about 500,000 troops, have not been involuntarily mobilized in the past 10 years."

Nonetheless, the call-ups for Iraq and Afghanistan have made it clear that it's time to "rebalance" the mix of active and reserve troops, Rumsfeld said.

Pentagon force planners want to decrease the number of reserve troops in "low-demand specialties such as heavy artillery," and increase the number in higher-demand jobs such as military police, civil alfairs and special operations.

In addition, Rumsfeld said Pentagon personnel managers are studying how to shift some high-demand positions from the Guard and Reserve to the active-duty force "so that we are not completely reliant on the Guard and reserve for those needed skills," he said.

Having more of the high-demand personnel on active duty should mean fewer unexpected Guard call-ups.

But there is potential danger to the Guard if too much capability is transferred to the active-component military, said retired Maj. Gen. Richard C. Alexander, NGAUS president.

It could return the Guard to the second-string status it has labored for more than three decades to surmount, he warned.

And it's not yet clear what positions-if any-would be shifted from the active-duty force to the Guard to replace the Guard slots moved to the active force.

Spurred by complaints from Guardsmen, lawmakers are pressuring senior military officials to solve two big problems-the gap in health care coverage and simply getting paid.

Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Kan., described the plight of a constituent who was called up, reported for duty and then was put on hold for several weeks before he deployed.

After he left his civilian job, his employer-sponsored health insurance coverage stopped, but coverage through the military's Tricare system didn't start until he was deployed.

"His wife delivered a baby in that interim, and he had to come up with $4,000 out of his own pocket because of that gap between losing the insurance" and the start of Tricare coverage. That's got to be corrected, Tiahrt told Rumsfeld.

In the Senate, four members last year introduced legislation to offer all Guardsmen and Reservists essentially the same health coverage active-duty troops receive. Unlike active-duty troops, Guardsmen would have to pay premiums of about $4 a week for family coverage. Supporters include Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., Mary Landrieu, D-La., and Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-SD., (page 36).

A one-year trial program was then approved that allows uninsured Guard and Reserve personnel access to Tricare on a costshare basis. But the plan has yet to be implemented and it expires Dec. 31, 2004.

Graham, however, introduced S. 2035 in January, which would make the Tricare coverage permanent.

Besides fixing Guard health care, the military needs to fix the Guard's pay system, said Rep. Ed Schrock, R-Va. Difficulty getting paid has been a problem for the better part of a decade, yet the Defense Department has failed to correct it, he said.

When 62 soldiers from a Colorado National Guard Special Forces unit deployed in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, "one hundred percent of the soldiers in that unit experienced pay problems," Schrock said.

Auditors from the General Accounting Office uncovered pay problems that included overpayments, underpayments, late payments and improper deductions from paychecks.

Some soldiers lost their homes as a result of pay problems, Schrock said. Others opted to leave the Guard and return to Iraq and Afghanistan as civilian contractors to relieve financial hardship.

"The most important thing to note is that many of these problems are the same as those discovered in the Gulf War in 1991," he said.

Pentagon officials promised to have the problem fixed in three years, when a new computerized personnel system is in place.

"I consider this timeline unacceptable and continue to be amazed at how poorly DOD performs simple administrative functions," Schrock said. "We can plan to go to war in three to four months, but we can't put these pay problems behind us. We have to make sure this is fixed."

Meanwhile, two New Jersey lawmakers have vowed to fix the reserve retirement system. Rep. Jim Saxton, R-N.J., and Sen. John Corzine, D-N.J., are sponsoring legislation to reduce the retirement age from 60 to 55 for Guard and reserve personnel who have served for 30 years or more.

The bill is one of several recently introduced that would lower the age that retired Guardsmen and Reservist would become eligible for retirement pay. Some would simply lower the age for all to 55. Other are based on a sliding scale that lowers the eligibility age based on years of service.

Graham's bill to make Tricare permanent, for example, includes provisions to lower the retirement age one year for every two years of service past 20. Those with 34 years of service could retire at 53.

Reducing the retirement age for pay is supported by both the NGAUS and the Enlisted Association of the National Guard of the United States (EANGUS).

"Our position is that the contract with the Guard and reserve has changed a lot, but we haven't changed the terms of the contract since 1948," said retired Master Sgt. Michael Cline, EANGUS executive director.

Congress also is considering improvements to the Montgomery G.I. Bill and better dental care for Guardsmen and Reservists. Education costs are rising rapidly, but reserve education benefits have not kept up. The value of the Montgomery GI bill benefits for has dwindled by about half, Cline said. Proposals before Congress would increase the value of education benefits and extend the time Guardsmen and Reservists are eligible, he said.

As for dental coverage-there simply isn't enough of it.

With tens of thousands of Guardsmen on active duty, Congress seems receptive to Guard problems and is in a mood to help.

It's an election year, Cline noted. "Now is the time to put the pressure on. Now is the time we're most likely to get results."

William Matthews is a Springfield, Va., freelance writer who specializes in military matters.

Copyright National Guard Association of the United States Apr 2004
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