Budget fight: Army vs. National Guard

Now that combat operations in the Middle East are coming to a close, internal squabbling in the Pentagon has focused on how much — not whether — troops the military should cut.

The National Guard is primed to defend its budget at the expense of the active Army, as Guard leaders are maintaining that Guard soldiers are cheaper than Active soldiers:

“The nation cannot afford to have a large standing army right now.” said John Goheen, spokesman for the National Guard Association, the body’s lobbying arm in Washington. Guard personnel represent a better bargain than than full-time soldiers as the nation ends its combat commitment in Afghanistan in 2014, Goheen said. Guard soldiers cost less than their active-duty counterparts because they train less frequently, don’t live in subsidized housing and are called upon only when needed.

Cutting 70,000 active soldiers and creating equivalent manpower in the Guard could save an estimated $13 billion a year. Currently, sequestration mandates that the ranks of active-duty soldiers would decline 26% from 2011 to 2019 compared with a 12% drop for the National Guard. The National Guard is pushing for further cuts in the active duty forces, saying that a force could become small as 420,000 and still be viable.

A standing Army of 420,000 souls would still be among the largest in the world. Army brass dispute that so small a force could win wars, but that is just budget voodoo. The wars the Pentagon is planning are small-scale air/sea intensive battles in the Pacific.

National Guard soldiers are a scalable force. Guard soldiers cost less than their active-duty counterparts, frankly, because they train less (220 days per year compared with 39). They also do not receive the welfare state benefits active Army troops receive.

In the short term, less training is not as large of a problem as it would seem. Scalable budgets means that a true crisis would lead to an influx of training to National Guard coffers, and the transition of thousands of active duty soldiers to the National Guard would ensure years of expensive training stays in the force.

No one, of course, is saying that long-terms standards would stay the same if a large percentage of the force cut their training days by more than 75%.

The real concern here is the shifting of military welfare benefits to the private sector. The truth of the matter is that mental welfare, consoling, and physical rehab is easy to obtain on a military base than when a soldier is at home. Social cohesion suffers as well, due to soldiers having access to their unit one weekend a month as opposed to every night in the barracks.

It’s as if the Army, like other multinational corporations, is looking into employing more temps; and in this economy, well, a job is a job.