Guard reshuffles force to offset deployment stress.

• Author: Kennedy, Harold

To continue to meet growing deployment requirements around the world, the U.S. National Guard is changing its force mix, said Lt. Gen. H Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau.

"We do not want to use the same units over and over," Blum told defense writers. "We have great concern that, if we do, we may not be able to sustain those units indefinitely. The guard is an all-volunteer force that has to balance a civilian career, or a civilian education, or a civilian life with military service."

To achieve that balance, Blum said, the Guard is developing a more predictable force structure based on the Air Force Air Expeditionary Force concept, which the Army also is considering. "The [AEF] structures buckers of capabilities against windows of time," he explained. "That's kind of what I want to do with the Army National Guard.

"If you're a member of the Army National Guard, you know, 'Okay, in about '07, if the country needs me, that's probably when I'm going to be mobilized and deployed.'

"I am frankly taking the best that I can extract from the Air Guard model and applying it to the Army Guard situation," Blum said. The two services are experimenting with interchangeable, modular units, which can be mixed and matched, as needed, he said.

"We're kind of making 'plug-and-play' units that will exist in the Army, the Guard and the Army Reserve," Blum explained. "It isn't going to matter which component these components come from, as long as they come with the same capabilities wanted by the combatant commander."

For example, Blum said, the Air Force, the Air Force Reserve and the California and Nevada Air Guards are cooperating to stand up a fully integrated Predator unit at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev.

"This is huge," he said. "They're forming it right now. It's imminent. It's moving very quickly."

The RQ-1A Predator is a long-range, medium-altitude unmanned aerial vehicle designed for surveillance and reconnaissance missions. Blum declined to comment on whether the new Predator unit being formed at Nellis will be equipped with Hellfire missiles.

In October, the Colorado National Guard and the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command, at Peterson Air Force Base, Colo., established the nation's first ground-based Midcourse Defense Brigade. "That's 100 percent Army National Guard," Blum said. "We transitioned from air defense units, that we don't think we'll need in the future, to the kind we absolutely will need."

The brigade has to be operational by October of this year, Blum said. "We are ahead of schedule in filling the positions, training the soldiers and getting the people assigned and ready...