Air Guard: guardsmen shift roles to align more with Air Force.

• Author: Kennedy, Harold
• Position: Air National Guard to reorganize in order to be effective in national security role

The Air National Guard is reorganizing--shedding some traditional missions and taking on new ones--in order to play a larger national-security role as its active-duty partner, the Air Force, shrinks in size.

The changes are controversial, but necessary, officials said.

The Air Force reduced its numbers by 40 percent at the end of the Cold War, leaving it with approximately 352,000 personnel currently, but that's still too many, said Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley. So the service plans to get rid of another 40,000, or about 12 percent, over the next five years.

The reason? Like the other services, the Air Force is seeing much of its funding eaten up by combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a result, it is having trouble paying for new aircraft, such as the F-22A Raptor, F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and a next-generation tanker.

"To stay within our allocated budgets and to increase our investment accounts, the reality is we have to draw the force down," Moseley said.

Officials also considered cutting as many as 16 percent of the Air Guard's 108,000 troops. But they ultimately rejected the idea. "We did not think that was the best way to do it," said Lt. Gen. H Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, which runs both the Army and Air Guard.

"You have to remember: If they're going to come down 40,000, we're their off-ramp for a surge capability," he told a recent gathering of defense writers in Washington, D.C. "There will be no dramatic reduction in manpower in the Air National Guard in the near term."

The Air Guard, however, is making "some significant adjustments of the skill sets and the capabilities that we deliver with the force," Blum said.

That process already has begun, explained Air Guard Brig. Gen. Allison A. Hickey, director of total force integration. The Air Guard is reorganizing many of its units across the country and retraining their personnel, she told National Defense. The goal is to make those forces more fully interoperable with active-duty Air Force and Reserve organizations.

"We've asked ourselves, 'What are all of the mission sets that we don't do now, but need to do?' We've identified 300 or more," Hickey said. "Now we're trying to figure out which ones will give us the biggest bang for our buck."

Making those decisions is complicated by the Guard's dual mission role, she said. Unlike the active-duty Air Force and reserves, the Air Guard has both state and federal missions.

Usually, especially during peacetime, its units report to the governors of their respective states or territories to protect lives and property during natural disasters, public disorder or terrorist attacks.

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