By Vicki Allen
U.S. National Guard units are under-equipped and increasingly unready to help in domestic disaster relief because essential gear is left behind after service in Iraq and Afghanistan, a congressional report said on Thursday.
Heavy demands on the Guard since September 11, 2001, have caused “declining readiness, weakening the Army National Guard’s preparedness for future missions,” the Government Accountability Office said.
It said the Pentagon’s strategy for the Guard was “unsustainable and needs to be reassessed,”
The report said Guard officials believed the response by its units to Hurricane Katrina last month “was more complicated because significant quantities of critical equipment, such as satellite communications equipment, radios, trucks, helicopters and night vision goggles, were deployed to Iraq.”
Guard troops and other relief workers complained that they did not have the equipment to communicate properly for days after Katrina swept ashore, destroying phone and radio links.
The Bush administration has dismissed concerns expressed in Congress that foreign deployments had hampered the military’s ability to respond to domestic disasters. “We’ve got plenty of troops to do both,” President George W. Bush said last month.
The report said the Army National Guard estimated its units had left for follow-on troops overseas in Iraq and elsewhere more than 64,000 items valued at more than $1.2 billion.
STRAINED RESOURCES
The report said the Guard could not account for more than half of those items and had no plans to replace them as Pentagon policy required.
That left non-deployed Guard units with only about one-third of the equipment they needed for overseas missions, “which hampers their ability to plan for future missions and conduct domestic operations,” the report said.
The Army National Guard was formed as a part-time force, with its members living civilian lives while doing periodic military training. But the Pentagon has relied heavily on these troops in combat roles in Iraq.
The Pentagon says 78,000 of the roughly 440,000 National Guard troops nationwide are deployed overseas, including many from the states hardest hit by Katrina.
The extensive use of Guard equipment overseas has “significantly reduced the amount of equipment available to state governors for domestic needs,” the report said.
Rep. Tom Davis, a Virginia Republican who chairs the House of Representatives Government Reform Committee, said Hurricane Katrina showed that “the National Guard is our nation’s first military responder, and I find it unfathomable that they are approaching equipment bankruptcy.”
While the GAO said the Pentagon was taking steps to improve the Guard’s equipment readiness and balance its roles in domestic and overseas operations, it had not yet put money for that in its budget.
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