There has been a lot of speculation and assumptions on just how the National Guard (NG) would be assigned to "defend the border." I heard one critic say that she was alarmed that there would be a bunch of guard soldiers running around in back yards armed with M-16s and a lot of innocent people would get hurt. That comment was indicative of how biased some are against the use of any military force on the border.

In a radio interview the head of the NG explained the current concept how the border mission would be executed. He explained that there would be a core force made up of guardsman from the border states of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. They will man a National Guard Joint Force Headquarters. Their mission will be to coordinate, plan and synchronize all the efforts of other National Guardsmen that would come in for shorter periods of time, usually in conjunction with their annual training (AT).

The NG Bureau is developing four separate state plans that will be coordinated from the National Guard Bureau in Washington. The only awkward part of the plan I see is that the troops will be under the command and control of the state governors. It makes for blurred responsibility and unclear chains of command. Of course, the federal government will pay for these soldiers. In essence, the soldiers remain "state assets," doing a federal mission, but not "federalized" which would create a problem with Posse Comitatus restrictions. Yet the status of the soldiers also means that are not indemnified as are federalized troops.

Guard manpower will come into the border region as units arrive to perform their AT. Instead of going to some regional camp or post they will go to the border for their AT. For instance, an engineer unit from New England would not go to Fort Drum for annual training, but to Fort Bliss or Huachuca. From there, they would do their typical annual training tasks and missions on the border.

On paper this all looks fine, but as is often the case the devil is in the details. Units located far from the southern borders will eat up much of their time traveling to the mission site. This suggests that AT duration will have to be expanded to get useful mission time on the border before the unit gets replaced by another unit coming down to replace it. Tasks normally done during AT that require range and manuever space will now have to be done during weekend drills which will make completion of the annual training requirements more challenging for the guard units.

Actually this model is not new. There has a similar joint force operation doing counter-narcotics operations (JTF6) out of Fort Bliss since it was ordered by the then SecDef Dick Cheney. The command structure proved effective, but the missions it attempted often ended up as "lessons learned" on how not to achieve success, at least in the "War on Drugs." One joint operation in 1990, Operation Green Sweep, almost resulted in civil insurrection in California when it was directed against pot growers there and saw military forces invading private property.

If anything, the joint war on drugs operations provides lessons on how not to use the National Guard in counter-illegal-alien operations in the Southwest US. Hopefully, this new mission is different enough that the Guard will benefit from the organizational and equipment lessons learned that surfaced when those counter drug missions were conducted.

The organizational and command structure that grew out of Operation Alliance in the Southwest has proved workable and effective and would have been a rip roaring success if the mission of counter drugs was not flawed from the onset. This should not happen given the current concept of operations which emphasizes the National Guard in a supporting role, with civilian organizations doing all direct actions.

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