Bad Dog hearts go out to the residents of Greensburg, Kansas. That's some pretty serious total devastation.
I saw the governor interviewed on CNN yesterday. She sounded pretty good."Kansans are resilient," she said, echoing a depiction of Midwesterners offered by other state and federal officials in the wake of the devastation.
"We have an opportunity to rebuild an entire rural community," Sebelius said, adding that the "eyes of America are on us."
I don't know many Kansans, but I'm betting these folks are pretty capable.
But I did have to wonder, when she hinted that because there's a war in Iraq, and there are Kansas National Guardsmen there, there aren't enough trucks and humvees available for disaster recovery.
OK. As of 2006, the Kansas Army National Guard was authorized more than 7,000 soldiers, and the Air National Guard more than 2,200. Hmmm...let's page through the report and see what else we've got...$224,844,522 worth of vehicles. Now, I know that Kansas has a bunch of tanks, but looking at the table (page 73), we see that tanks and other weapons systems are not included that $200 million-plus.
We also see that the combined Army and Air National Guard in Kansas is staffed at slightly more than 79%...which translates into 7,851 bodies in uniform (also on page 73).
Now, an exact number of vehicles is not broken down for us. But we know we're not counting weapons systems, and I'm guessing we're not counting construction equipment, either.
Now, the good governor tells us that half their shit is in Iraq. I don't believe her, since National Guard equipment tends to be old, green, and lack armor. The vast majority of the vehicles in Iraq are "stay behind" equipment. You train on your unit's equipment, then you go to Iraq and fall in on the equipment the unit before you used. When it's broke or worn out, new equipment comes directly into theater.
I'm not disputing that some of their shit is in Iraq (or some other, more rear location in theater). But I dispute that half of their too-outdated-for-the-regular-Army trucks are there (the Guard does not, traditionally, get anything even resembling the latest and greatest gear in the rear).
And although the governor did not say that half of their people were gone, even if they were, it would still leave 3,925 uniformed individuals in the state.
News reports tell us Greensburg has a population of 1,500. The state could give each citizen a uniformed battle buddy, still have one soldier (or airman) driving a truck around to support each resident, and still have 925 other Guardsmen to man the phones at the armory and do officer things.
But this seems to be a theme for Governor Sebelius. This is an excerpt from an article published 17 April.
Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius says she fears deployments of Kansas National Guard troops and equipment could hurt the state’s ability to react to disasters on the homefront.
Her remarks this week, which were similar to ones she had made in the past, came as more governors criticized Washington’s use of Guard members in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. National Guard personnel are under the dual command of the president and the governor in their home state.
Hmm...I started out this post in sheer annoyance at the governor. And I still think she's stretching it - her people should be sufficient for this disaster.
But not for something much bigger, hey?
This is something we need to keep in mind as we continue to work our Guard so hard downrange. That's not really what the Guard is for, and perhaps we need to think about that as we dicker about expanding our active duty forces.
I knew a Guardsman once when I lived in Minnesota. He was an officer, but he'd been a Regular Army enlisted man during Desert Storm. He liked the military, but he liked Minnesota even more. He loved being in the Guard, because he loved the idea of being able to help Minnesotans. He absolutely relished jokes about someday being called up to invade North Dakota (this was during a particularly vicious period in the Great Walleye and Pheasant Disagreement of the early ought-somethings).
He was called up and sent to Bosnia in...2002? Once he got back, and as I was leaving, he was seriously contemplating resigning his commission. He was a Minnesota National Guardsman to serve Minnesota, and he felt he'd done his time in the sand.
It's fortunate that many of our Guardsmen choose to continue to serve, even in the face of continuing combat deployments. But that's not really why we keep them around. And we should be careful not to ignore their actual purpose, because when our homes are blown down, or our streets flooded, we'd all be awfully happy to see our hometown Guard guys pull up in the big trucks full of fresh water.
The National Guard takes a lot of shit from just about every other organization on the military totem pole, but we should occasionally remember that they are, as they like to say, "twice the citizen."
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