Major General Laura Yeager, commander of the California National Guard’s 40th Infantry Division, spoke about the issue during a panel at a conference for the Association of the U.S. Army. With the cost for National Guard deployments being reimbursed fully, Yeager said that governors have become too reliant on the guard for extended periods, creating too much idle time. The issue has also been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The governor knows that when there’s a problem he can’t solve, he can come to the National Guard and we’ll get it done,” Yeager said, according to Army Times. “Over the last 18 months, the 100 percent reimbursement of our forces has actually disincentivized the state [from] releasing our forces from the mission. There were some periods of time where I had medics—I have very limited medical support in my state—[who] were on orders, but they were not on mission for almost two months.”
With troops being held on missions for extended periods, Yeager explained that there were frequently times when they were idle. In addition to preventing the National Guard from deploying these inactive troops to places they might have been needed, these situations also damaged morale.
As a remedy for this predicament, Yeager suggested that states should be liable to pay some portion of the bill for National Guard deployments. With an actual financial obligation, extended missions with considerable idle time might become less common.
“In the future,” Yeager said, state governments should have “some skin in the game” when it comes to deploying the National Guard.
Lieutenant General Jon Jensen, director of the Army National Guard, noted that the guard answers all calls from state governors, regardless of their actual necessity for the task or the political implications of a given mission.
“What may be described as a political decision can also be described as a security decision, depending on where you sit on [an] issue,” Jensen explained. “So what we look at is, whoever’s making the decision—are they making the decision within their authority, [and] is it a legal order? If the answers to that are all yes, then obviously we need to go to the mission,” he added. “We can’t get caught up on whether [a mission] is a political issue or not.”
