Previous IFPA-Fletcher Conferences

National Security Strategy and Policy:
Planning for and Responding to Threats to the U.S. Homeland

October 28-29, 2004
Ronald Reagan Building
and International Trade Center
Washington, D.C.

Lieutenant General H- Steven Blum, USA
Chief, National Guard Bureau

Introduction By: Dr. Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, Jr.

LTG H- Steven Blum: Thank you. General Inge and I were having a little offstage discussion before this panel, and we share an optimism that you don’t often find in this town. I've got to tell you, the glass is at least half full. We’re not going to be satisfied until it’s filled up and overflowing. But it is not half empty. And things have happened in the last three years that we lose track of as an American people, things that move us further from our unpreparedness and closer to where we need to be in this current environment, in this new kind of war, facing this new kind of threat here at home and overseas.

I will tell you, and I don’t want to restate anything Tim Lowenberg said because he shortened my presentation by at least 50%, and Joe Inge shortened it by about another 15%, but I've got to reemphasize that -- there are two organizations that were stood up here in the last two years or less. One was the United States Northern Command. For the first time since George Washington, this nation has a single military commander that deals with all threats to our 50 states and its territories, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia, threats from both land and sea, and what George Washington didn’t have to deal with: space, aerospace, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and foreign terrorists, although he may argue that point.

The people who were at Northern Command -- General Eberhart, General Anderson and the joint team they assembled - - were men of vision, men of high integrity and absolute commitment, deadly serious about protecting this nation and the mission that they were given. And the people who are out there now carry on that same spirit and we’re very fortunate that we had General Joe Inge following General Anderson, because there’ll be no dropping of the baton. In fact, the pace will probably pick up. And we've got Admiral Keating going out there to replace General Eberhart soon, so I'm even more optimistic about Northern Command.

The other organization, which was stood up under the Secretary of Defense, was the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense. Finally we have somebody at the OSD level paying attention solely to homeland defense, not - not viewing it as an additional duty

So these are very, very positive moves, and while there were some growing pains, we’re moving through that. The Guard plays a critical role, as Tim Lowenberg told you. There are 53 other Adjutants General -- exactly like him-- well, some have hair, some are better looking, but they have the same kind of jobs in the 50 states, the two territories, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia.

And while I'm talking about the District of Columbia, which is pretty close to where we are right now, General Jackman has a big headache-causing responsibility: he’s in charge of something called the Joint Task Force National Capital Region. This place called the District of Columbia is the most difficult, most complex, most sophisticated, most layered and most territorial place on the planet Earth in which to conduct military operations. And he’s got to do it with land, sea and air assets. The good news is, he’s already wired in with all of the affected areas outside of the political boundaries of the District of Columbia, places they call the State of Maryland and the State of Virginia.

The three Adjutants Generals, and the governors and mayor, the heads of those political entities, have already signed a memorandum of understanding, a memorandum of agreement, to mutually support each other, and they're not going to let Title 10/Title 32 turf or pedigrees get in the way of doing what the people of the District of Columbia and those who suffer the effects of an attack in the District of Columbia and the surrounding areas need; they're not going to let that get in their way. And that’s all been preworked out, and people don’t know that, and people need to know that. You need to help tell that story.

I'm going to tell you in about the next five or ten minutes - and I promise I’ll stop there, because I really want to hear your questions, they're intriguing - what the Guard is doing now. If you think you know about the National Guard and you haven't looked at it in the last two-and-a-half years, you don’t know what the National Guard’s all about. It is not the National Guard of your grandfather, your father or your older sister. It is not the National Guard that went to Desert Storm. It’s not the National Guard that existed on the 10th of September 2001.

There are four very significant people who send me questions to answer. So I thought I'd share them with you (Slide One). When you have the President of the United States asking this kind of question of the Chief of the National Guard Bureau, through the Secretary of Defense, you can tell there is attention being given at the very highest levels to this issue that we’re here to discuss today.

When you see Secretary Rumsfeld, and this is a paraphrasing of his series of snowflakes that trickled down and ultimately ended up with me to take a look at and help answer, you can see what his focus is. The Deputy Secretary of Defense, Secretary Wolfowitz, has even a more detailed list of questions, but I didn’t share it with you.

Then you - look at the Combatant Commanders and see the kind of capabilities that they're asking the National Guard to - develop so they can respond here in the United States.

And then there are the nation’s governors who I meet with twice a year.

END OF SIDE A
SIDE B

They have asked the question at the bottom, which gets to the heart of some of the earlier panel discussions: how can you tell me that I'm going to have the right forces when I need them, the right capabilities to do homeland defense, to support homeland security operations, and to do it where the people are counting on me as the elected official to discharge my legal authorities and responsibilities as the governor of a state or territory. How do you do that? How, Chief, are you going to assure me that my Adjutant General, Tim Lowenberg, has what he needs to protect the state, and that we didn’t send everything to Iraq or Afghanistan or Kosovo, or anywhere else around the world?

This (Slide Two) is what your National Guard is doing today, this afternoon, while we’re sitting here. Everything that you see up there is going on. Every aspect of the National Security Strategy, the 1-4-2-1 Strategy, is being done right now by 115,000 citizen soldiers and airmen from the Army and Air National Guard in 44 countries around the world: defending the homeland here at home; doing critical infrastructure protection here at home.; supporting law enforcement here at home; doing hurricane relief, forest fire relief; providing consequence management capabilities to support a civilian agency, whether state, local or federal.

Certainly you saw what happened in Florida. The relief efforts were done under the command and control of Governor Bush through the Adjutant General in Florida, through the standing Joint Force Headquarters that every state and territory now has and has had since October of last year. It would not have been possible without the transformation of the National Guard.

Twelve states responded to Florida through emergency mutual assistance compact agreements. Fifty-two of the 54 governors of our land have formally signed such agreements and will send their forces, their equipment and their special capabilities to make sure that no neighborhood goes in need, whether Mother Nature imposes some injustice upon it or whether a terrorist event happens, or both happen simultaneously. Which can happen. The Florida hurricane season would have been a magnificent time to compound the mix if al-Qaeda had had the wherewithal and the means to deliver an additional complication to that already complicated environment.

We had 21 other states not affected by the hurricane ready to respond if the 12 that were involved couldn’t handle it. None of this broke the Title 10 threshold. It doesn’t mean that if we had needed federal help we wouldn’t have asked for it and we wouldn’t have welcomed it, but it was not necessary. That’s not a bad thing. That’s a magnificent thing, because the Title 10 force right now is very stretched trying to do their Title 10 job overseas and get us ready to go overseas and help them do their Title 10 job. That’s what General Inge was talking about, the 175,000 citizen soldiers he helped prepare to go to Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the time that he spent doing the kind of things we’re talking about to the left-hand side of the chart.

General Lowenberg’s state partnership presentation alluded to the fact that there are 48 countries in the world that states have formal relations with. Now, you may think that’s nice and interesting but not terribly relevant; but it’s awfully relevant and it’s everything to do with the four that’s up there in that orange band, deter forward in four critical areas. We don’t do programs because the State of Washington wants to do something. The State of Washington does what the Combatant Commander of PACOM, Pacific Command, asks him to do, with regard to Thailand, as part of the combatant commander’s theater security cooperation engagement plans.

We have the same thing happen in other regions; the National Guard is supporting General Abizaid in CENTOM, it’s supporting SOUTHCOM, it’s supporting EUCOM. As a matter of fact, seven of the nations that we started out with state partnership programs in the early ‘90s are now members of NATO and have forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, and those programs were a significant accelerator or catalyst for the transition from a communist satellite country to an independent and free nation that is now a member of NATO.

So the state partnership program is not just something that makes you feel good; it produces significant results in stabilizing regions of the world that would be at risk, for a Combatant Commander - not for the State of Washington; they're not running their own foreign policy. A lot of people misunderstand that program. And it’s a mil-to-mil program that quickly moves to mil-to-civ, and civ-to-civ, so it is really value-added and brings extra skills, expertise and tools to the fight that you couldn’t get any other way.

(Refers again to slide two) Swiftly defeat efforts in two regions. You see right now there are 115,000 National Guardsmen, Army and Air, called to active duty right now, serving around the world. Almost 90,000 of them are in one of these key regions. Forty percent of the forces on the ground, out of the United States Army in Iraq, are Guard and Reserve. This is not your older brother’s National Guard. This isn’t even like the National Guard that existed last week; next week, it’ll even be better.

The missile defense between the four and the two is something brand new, and that’s what General Inge alluded to. For the first time in the history of this nation, we have the ability to shoot down an intercontinental ballistic missile threatening our homeland. This is a homeland defense issue, too. It’s just a new method of defending it. They're stationed in Alaska and Colorado and they're National Guard.

So there’s nothing in our National Security Strategy that we’re being asked to do that we’re not performing right now, simultaneously, and we’re not doing any of them at the expense of another. We haven't dropped one of these missions, failed in any of these missions, or put any of these missions at risk. So don’t make the mental leap that you can either do one or you can do the other. You need to be able to do all of them. You need to be able to flex and flow the force as the active force needs us to reinforce them for the Title 10 war fight, or for sustainment operations to give the Army staying power overseas. And at the same time those same critical skills that General Inge made sure our soldiers had before they went overseas in harm’s way are directly transferable to defending the homeland. The only difference is the rules of engagement, and the fact that we have a Constitution in our country that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. That’s the only thing that changes. So it’s the rules on use of force and the rules of engagement that change, but the capabilities are identical.

This (Slide Three) is a useful chart to show where the Guard fits in, because many are confused, to include some in my own organization, as to where we fit in the big scheme of things. If you look at this chart, it has two yellow lines, double yellow lines; these two yellow lines mean you stay in your lane and you don’t pass. The top lane is the strategic lane, and in that lane is US Northern Command, Pacific Command, and Strategic Command with some implications to homeland defense, and Joint Forces Command with some implications (although less than it used to be) to homeland defense. But they're strategic level commands; Combatant Commanders.

Then you come down to where General Lowenberg makes his living in the State of Washington. He stays in the military lane at the tactical level, as a standing Joint Force headquarters that coordinates and synchronizes. Command and control is a legal term, it’s a legal authority. The reality of what the military does when called out to support a lead state or federal agency is we coordinate, synchronize and control the application of military specialty skills and equipment to fill the niches or the needs that are there in a civilian community.

We work for a state, local or a federal agency. Whoever asked that question, “Will there ever be a time where a civilian is in control?”, you forgot what document you raised your right hand and swore to defend. It tells you very clearly you're always under civilian control, and when the military gets called out in the United States - unless martial law is declared - you are under the control of the elected official called the governor in every place in the United States, except the District of Columbia, and then you're under the control of the mayor. Unless a federal emergency is declared or some similar unusual occurrence.

But I’ll tell you, when is a civilian not in control? They're not in control when the President takes control away from the governor. Tell me in the history of this nation when that’s ever happened, or when you envision that ever to happen, and you’ll know when the military’s in control. We are in support of a state, local or federal agency.

Now, if there is an operational headquarters needed between the strategic headquarters and these tactical Joint Force Headquarters, that call will be made by the Combatant Commander that has responsibility for the event. It will not be made by anybody that’s in that double yellow line below the word “tactical.” We don’t select who the operational headquarters are; the Combatant Commanders do.

Okay, so now we have the Chief of the Guard Bureau addressing us; what the heck does the National Guard Bureau do? We don’t see you in the strategic lane. You're right, we’re not. We don’t see you in the operational lane. You're right, we’re not. We don’t see you in the tactical lane. You're right, we’re not. And if I get into any of those lanes, you're going to have a big pile-up. We don’t belong in those lanes. I have to stay out of that road altogether. That’s why you don’t see me in any of those lanes, you don’t see my organization in any of those lanes. We’re out on the side.

So what do we do? We provide the policy, we provide the resources to the states so that the Joint Force Headquarters can do what the Combatant Commanders want them to do, when they want them to do it, how they want them to do it. We act as a channel of communications between those Combatant Commanders and the Adjutants General and the states and therefore the governors, and my chartered job is to be a channel of communication between that constituency and the Department of the Army and the Department of the Air Force. That’s what the Guard Bureau does; that’s what I do.

This (Slide Four) is what the governors in the two meetings I had with them demand that we provide. They want a more predictable model. They don’t want to wake up one morning and be surprised that their National Guard left and they didn’t know about it. They want to make sure that when they wake up in the middle of the night and they call their Adjutant General and say, “What can you do? Something just happened. What do we need to do? What do we have to do it with?”, that they have the right capabilities in the right places to be able to respond in a timely fashion, and that sufficient capabilities remain under state control.

On this slide (Slide Five), the pyramid is drawn by the Chief of Staff of the Army, not by me. It was hand drawn by General Peter Schoonmaker last July. It’s significant. Go to the top, the apex, the tip of the pyramid. The upper right-hand corner is what Secretary Rumsfeld sees as a vision for the active Army. We want the active forces, not just the Army -- Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, he wants all the active forces to be joint and expeditionary capable; to leave, deploy and take decisive action around the world in 72 hours and to fight for the first 30 days, and if possible not call up the Reserve components in that first 30 days. He wants to be able to do that without calling up a general mobilization or a partial mobilization of the Reserves for a 30-day operation. If it is planned to go longer than that, then clearly the Reserves would be necessary, and the diagram shows the active and Reserve component depth reinforcing on the right side the pyramid and on the left side, which means they can go both ways, the same time, or some combination thereof.

But what is significant is, General Schoonmaker divided the pyramid in half. For the homeland defense piece, he – not I - wrote the words Title 32. He clearly intends the National Guard to take the lead and respond between zero and 24 hours, and whenever possible be the first military responders for homeland defense and to support homeland security operations. Now, there may be times when it’s not possible and you have to do something different. But when it’s possible, that’s what he’d like. Just as the Secretary would like that green side of the pyramid to stay green, or all active, whenever possible; but when it’s not possible, then the AC and RC provide depth.

Now let’s move to the circle to the left of the pyramid. The green quadrant represents the 115,000 of the 460,000 citizen soldiers and airmen that are deployed around the world. They are not available to their governors, they're not even here in CONUS, they're overseas. And they're overseas for periods up to 24 months. They average 18 months; some as short as nine months, but most are gone 18 to 22 months - not available to the governor; that big wedge is gone. That scared the governors when they saw it -- “How are you going to make sure I have what I need and still provide the President and the SecDef and the Army and Air Force what they ask for to fight for the combatant commanders?” I said I’ll show you how we’ll do that in a minute, and I will.

The yellow piece refers to the 100,000 that are getting ready to replace these folks. The part in red, the semicircle in red shows the 50% of the Army and Air National Guard is not overseas and is not scheduled to go overseas imminently. We want to get that model to rotate about once every six years, which we can do if we divest ourselves of some units that are no longer needed for today’s threat, that were once wonderfully suited for the old Cold War threat. For instance, whether you know it or not, the Guard has 70% of the Army’s artillery, and that 70% is not all deployable, modern artillery that we would use in a war fight today. So it’s useless, when you get right down to it, for what we’re talking about. Overseas, it’s of marginal use, and here at home it’s useless, because we’re not calling artillery in on American people under any circumstance.

So I need to take them and convert them into units that will be useful -- more military police, more transportation, more medical units, more units with WMD capability, chemical units, and so forth.

(Slide Six) Within that circle on the left, there are some core competencies that I show with this purple circle. If you look at what’s inside that purple circle - it’s purple because green means Army Guard and blue means Air Guard, and together, somebody decided, that makes purple. It really doesn’t, but in the military purple symbolizes joint capabilities. Inside of that purple circle is your civil support teams; your Joint Force headquarters; some maintenance, either Army or Air Guard; some aviation, either Army or Air; some engineers, either Army engineers or Air Guard engineers.

A medic is a medic. I don’t really care if they're wearing a blue suit or a green suit, it doesn't bother me as long as they know how to do lifesaving medical care. Communications are communications. Transportation; you don’t care if you're in a blue truck or a green truck, you just need transportation. And security forces, same thing there. An Air security police or an Army military police are capable of doing the same job under most circumstances. There are certain conditions that they're not capable of doing the same job, and we wouldn’t put them in those. But you can see that this delivers a very comfortable capability.

Now, this (Slide Seven) is the reality of the world. This is the way every state looks in what we call the First Army Area, or east of the Mississippi, today. Pretty darn healthy. Red is good; what you're looking for is a state that has less than half red. If you can find that, I have a problem state. If you can’t find that, I've delivered on my promise to the governors to give them the balance they're looking for, the predictability they're looking for. Now I've got to rebalance where some of these units are in the country to give them the right capabilities when they need them, in the right place, to respond at the right time.

This (Slide Eight) is what it looks like on the West Coast, and that’s pretty darn healthy, too. Now, I can tell you, it didn’t look like this last April. I wouldn’t want to show the slides from last April. But by working as a team of teams, in a transparent, collaborative way, with US Army Forces Command, Northern Command, Joint Forces Command, OSD, the Department of the Army, Department of the Air Force, we have achieved balance. There is collaboration and cooperation going on that most people who worked in Washington more than three years ago would not believe possible.

And for the first time in the history of the United States, the Army Active; the Guard and the Reserves, all seven of the reserve components, there is no daylight between us. Any one of the Reserve chiefs could come up and give my pitch. Any one of them – the Navy Reserve; Admiral Cotton could come up and give my pitch. Ron Helmley, Chief of the Army Reserve can come up and use my slides and tell you what I'm telling you and mean it. General Schoomaker, the Chief of Staff of the Army can give my slides, could make this pitch today better than I can, and mean it. That is historic, ladies and gentlemen. That never existed before. And when you’ve got that kind of synergy and power, there’s nothing this nation can’t do when we start pulling that together. And we will get that kind of cooperation wired together at the interagency and intergovernmental level, which we are moving towards, and which these state Joint Force headquarters will be the building blocks for, It is pretty tough not to have the agencies wired together in the State of Washington when the same guy in charge of the military is in charge of the state emergency response agencies.

(Slides 9 & 10) Here’s some capabilities the Guard has developed in the last year. I’ll run through these as fast as I can. In the upper left-hand corner, there’s a standing Joint Force headquarters in 50 states, two territories, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. It’s real, it’s not a viewgraph, it’s ’s living, breathing, and working every day.

If you move to the one in the upper right, that’s Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear and high yield conventional Explosives Enhanced Force Response Packages. Basically, what they do, if you combine these four maps and these four maps, you have a magnificent coordination, control and synchronization mechanism for sharing a real-time, common relative operating picture of what’s going on, a shared awareness of what’s really going on, so you know what’s needed and not needed. It’s a 24/7 operation that exists today. Now instead of having one CBIRF that only covers the District of Columbia and is only vested in the Marine Corps, we have 13, with12 of them in the Guard. And we didn’t stand up any new CBIRF units. We took existing Army and Air Guard units, leveraged our capabilities and packaged them together. They're units that are in the part of the force availability chart that’s red, so we’re not training people that are getting ready to go to Afghanistan or Iraq, we’re training the people who will be back here at home for three or four years so there’s some stability and expertise developed.

So what you have now is a ready, reliable force - nobody’s talking about wanting to be a relevant force anymore. We’re beyond that. We’re an essential force and we’re an accessible force. And we offer uniquely American solutions; read that “constitutionally sound” defense solutions to our complex security challenges that we face both here and abroad. Thanks. [Applause]

Questions and Answers

DR. PFALTZGRAFF: Since many of these questions have to do with missile defense, and no one has asked General Blum a question specifically, I wanted to ask General Blum if he would elaborate a bit on the chart that he had on which he showed the role of the National Guard in missile defense. So if that could be added since it’s going to be quite an array of answers on missile defense.

GENERAL BLUM: On the missile defense piece, it’s pretty simple. The Air Force has given certain pieces of that to the Air National Guard to execute and it's got to do with radars. And in the Army National Guard, there’s a significant role to play. All of the forces that are in Fort Greeley that basically maintain, operate and control and launch these things, the land element of that resides 100% in the Army National Guard in Alaska, some in California, and Control Brigade headquarters is in Colorado. That’s pretty much what we do -- we do what the Army wants us to do for space and missile defense command and to make this thing work.