Advocates Confident of a JCS Seat For National Guard Within Five Years

Capitol Hill supporters of a proposal to give the National Guard chief a seat on the Joint Chiefs of Staff hope to claim victory within the next several years, a dizzying amount of time to make an historic change that would expand the elite four-star group for the first time since the Marine Corps received full voting rights nearly three decades ago.

The issue has been percolating in Congress during the last few years, as the National Guard has played an increasingly critical role in homeland security operations while also managing heavy overseas deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

But in the last year, supporters have been buoyed by the Guard’s effective response to Hurricane Katrina and capitalized on the country’s reliance on the Guard to mount increasing support for their push to significantly boost its influence within the corridors of the Pentagon.

“If it doesn’t happen this year … I think it’ll happen in the next five years,” said Mississippi Rep. Gene Taylor, a senior Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee.

Taylor is one of the co-sponsors of a bill making its way through both chambers that would, among other things, promote the three-star National Guard Bureau Chief to a four-star member of the Joint Chiefs. That bill, introduced in both chambers earlier this year, continues to attract new co-sponsors from both parties.

By press time, 39 senators had signed on to the Senate legislation, including Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairwoman Susan Collins, R-Maine.

Across the Capitol, 60 members of the House have co-sponsored the bill. Notable co-sponsors include House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee ranking member John Murtha, D-Pa., and several members of the House Armed Services Committee.

“No one has a more effective constituency than the Guard because they are citizen-soldiers,” Taylor said. 

Should supporters gain a seat in the next half-decade, it would be a meteoric rise for the much-deployed National Guard, which lawmakers have said has been frozen out of top-level Pentagon decision-making discussions ranging from base-closure recommendations to budget negotiations.

The Marine Corps, for instance, received a partial seat on the Joint Chiefs as part of the National Security Act of 1947, but could only vote and weigh in on matters affecting the Corps. It took until 1978 to achieve full parity with the Army, Navy and Air Force on the four-star panel.

Using the Marine Corps as a reference, Defense Department officials are urging Congress to study the Guard issue carefully, and not rush to judgment. Similar to discussions leading up to the Marine Corps’ addition to the Joint Chiefs, opponents argue that the Guard already has representation on the Joint Chiefs, by way of the Army and Air Force chiefs of staff.

“Time is needed to allow for thoughtful and constructive discussion and evaluation,” Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R.  England said at a June House Armed Services Committee hearing on the matter.

But supporters will not be discouraged.

“If the Guard is going to continue to play a larger role as it is now … something is going to have to happen to elevate our voice in DoD,” said Maj. Gen. Roger P. Lempke, the adjutant general of the Nebraska National Guard. “Whether it is the [Joint Chiefs of Staff] or something else, somehow the systems, the process as it is now, is going to have change.”

Lempke, who has been pushing hard to boost the Guard’s cache, said he sees many parallels to the Marine Corps’ acquisition of a full Joint Chiefs seat. Like the Guard, he said, the Marine Corps is a “unique component.”

Indeed, that argument is picking up steam, despite Defense Department leaders’ insistence that the Army and Air Guard are a part of the “total force” of their respective services.

In June, Rep. Joel Hefley, R-Colo., the third-ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, acknowledged that arguments put forth by England and other Pentagon officials are compelling. However, he argued that the Marine Corps’ seat is precedent-setting.

“They already have a member of the Joint Chiefs who is not a separate branch service,” Hefley said. “If you were in a court of law and you’re looking for a precedent, it would seem reasonable that we have that precedent already.”

However, the National Guard, which is both a state and federal entity, is “institutionally different” from the Marine Corps, said Robert Goldich, a former defense analyst at the Congressional Research Service. He added the Guard may have to settle for less, such as a proposal that promotes the Guard chief to a four-star general but withholds the Joint Chiefs seat.

House and Senate lawmakers are now working through a provision in the Senate-passed version of the fiscal 2007 defense authorization bill that would make the Guard chief a four-star general and give the bureau the ability to set its own requirements for weapons and other technologies.

The compromise proposal, which congressional aides say still concerns Senate Armed Services Chairman John Warner, R-Va., does not include a Joint Chiefs seat, nor does it give the Guard its own budget authority.

Lawmakers will have to reconcile the Senate’s provision with the House-passed authorization bill, which deferred any major National Guard decisions until after the independent Commission on the National Guard and Reserves completes its review early next year.

Stevens Would Support Coast Guard Re-alignment

Sen. Ted Stevens has said he would support legislation to take the Coast Guard out of the Department of Homeland Security. Placing the Coast Guard under the purview of Homeland Security was a “very burdensome overlay of supervision it does not need,” he recently told reporters.

While Stevens said he would support legislation to align the Coast Guard with another agency, he would not provide details on his own legislative plans.

Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Thad Allen recently told the Senate Commerce Fisheries and Coast Guard Subcommittee that containing his agency in the Department of Homeland Security allows for better coordination with Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

“We are a better organization for having FEMA in the department working with us and we think FEMA is a much better organization for being in the department with the Coast Guard and working together,” said Allen, who was, at one point, designated the FEMA federal coordinating official during Hurricane Katrina relief efforts.

Allen also noted that the Homeland Security secretary is the national incident manager for non-military operations.

British, Australians Provide Training Input

In an effort to bolster the abilities of its corporals and sergeants as a part of the Marine Corps’ move to Distributed Operations, the Corps reached out to British Royal Marine noncommissioned officers (NCOs) as well as Australian NCOs for advice on how to train younger Marines for the responsibilities the new warfare concept will place on them.

“Culturally, they focus on the noncommissioned officers,” said Vince Goulding, the director of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab’s Sea Viking Division, which manages the Distributed Operations experiments. “Their services really pay a great deal of attention to producing quality corporals particularly.”

He added that in the U.S. Marine Corps, “if you are a good guy, you do all the stuff you are supposed to do, pay attention and you try real hard, at some point with or without school, you’re going to become a squad leader.”

This simply will not be good enough as the Corps moves to Distributed Operations, in which lower-ranking Marines will be called upon to make decisions that were previously the prerogative of higher ranking officers. 

The first observation the British and Australians made was “you guys don’t ask a lot of your corporals and sergeants,” Goulding said. “For our lance corporals, in particular, they never get trained to make the transition from carrying a rifle and doing what they are told to do to leading other Marines.”

He said that when 1st Platoon, Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines hit the ground in Afghanistan last spring as a part of the Corps’ first battlefield experiment with Distributed Operations, they had just come back from Iraq.

“This was a combat unit,” he said. “And we were a little disappointed with their capability, frankly.”

Goulding added that as a result of Australian and British input, the Corps was making sweeping changes in its schoolhouses to improve the training of young Marines.

Woman Admiral To Command Battle Group

Military women are set for another new achievement with the Navy’s selection of Rear Adm. Carol M. Pottenger as commander of Amphibious Group One. The assignment would make Pottenger the first woman to command a multiship U.S. Navy battle group.

Pottenger, with 29 years of service as a Navy officer, currently is commander of the Military Sealift Fleet Support Command in Norfolk, Va.

Commissioned in 1977 through the Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps program on graduation from Purdue University, Pottenger was one of the first women chosen for duty on a Navy vessel other than a hospital ship, serving aboard the destroyer tender Yosemite. She later served aboard another tender, Yellowstone, and then was executive officer of the ammunition ship Kiska.

Pottenger’s first at-sea command was the ammunition ship Shasta. She later commanded the fast combat support ship Bridge — the largest of the Navy’s support ships — supplying aircraft carrier and amphibious battle groups in the Indian Ocean during Operation Enduring Freedom in 2001-02.

Amphibious Group One, based in Japan, consists of four ships: the amphibious assault ship Essex, the amphibious transport dock ship Juneau and the dock landing ships Fort McHenry and Harpers Ferry.

Indian-American Lobby Supported Nuclear Deal

The U.S.-India nuclear agreement announced during President George W. Bush’s March 2006 visit to India marked a turning point for the Indian-American segment of the U.S. population in terms of political influence.

“The huge Indian-American community in the United States has played a big part in mobilizing support for India during the debate over the nuclear deal,” said Pramit Mitra, a research associate in the South Asian Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

“The community has huge influence on the Hill. They’re spending more money. Unlike five years ago, they now understand the principles of lobbying,” he said.

Under the pact, India agreed “to bring itself under the nonproliferation system and open itself up to international inspection and oversight and safeguards for the very first time on a large scale,” said R. Nicholas Burns, U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs.

Bush agreed to request Congress overturn “the prohibitions on civil nuclear energy technology and financial cooperation from our business sector,” Burns said. The administration is willing to approach “the multilateral agency that governs international cooperation — the Nuclear Suppliers Group — and seek a change in international practices so India could be part of the global system on nuclear power production.”

Senators Seek ’08 Shipbuilding Boost

In anticipation of the fiscal 2008 budget, 16 senators from both parties recently sent Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld a memo urging him to boost the Navy’s shipbuilding budget to $14 billion.

That figure amounts to about $3 billion more than the Navy will spend on new ships next year, but equates to roughly the amount the Navy has said it needs annually to carry out Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Mullen’s 30-year plan to field a 313-ship fleet consisting of advanced submarines, destroyers and other ships.

The senators, such as Jack Reed, D-R.I.; Trent Lott, R-Miss.; Olympia Snowe, R-Maine; and Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., who hail from states with heavy shipbuilding interests, argued in their letter that the defense budget has grown more than 50 percent since 2001, but the ship procurement budget has been reduced by 17 percent.

Unmanned Undersea Vehicle Delayed

Development of a versatile unmanned undersea vehicle has been delayed, according to Landon Hutchens, a spokesman for the Naval Sea Systems Command.

The Navy was expected in May to issue to industry a request for proposals for the Mission Reconfigurable Unmanned Undersea Vehicle System (MRUUVS), a successor to the Long-Term Mine Reconnaissance system. The MRUUVS is a torpedo-shaped vehicle designed to carry interchangeable mission modules for undersea missions such as surveillance, intelligence collection, antisubmarine tracking, mine hunting and tactical oceanography.

Hutchens, declining to state the reasons, said that the request for proposals would be “delayed until a date not yet determined.”

Senate Panel Highlights Foreign Fishing Incursions

Michael Chertoff, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, has been tasked to submit a report to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation and the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure regarding the detection and interdiction of illegal incursions from foreign fishing vessels into the United States.

President Bush signed the Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation Act of 2006 in July. It calls for the department to focus on areas “where the Coast Guard has failed to detect or interdict such incursions” since 2000 — particularly in the Western/Central Pacific and the Bering Sea.

The report, expected to be submitted by Sept. 11, will include an evaluation of the possible use of “unmanned aircraft and offshore platforms” to aid in detection and interdiction of illegal foreign fishing vessels.

Coast Guard Readies Ship Tracking Experiment

Dulles, Va., based ORBCOMM is expected to deliver a deep-ocean satellite in August to support the Coast Guard’s Automatic Identification System, which delivers ship information to Coast Guard authorities from merchant vessels in territorial waters.

Related to this satellite launch, Adm. Thad Allen, Coast Guard commandant, has been authorized to pilot a three-year project to track up to 2,000 vessels using this and other satellite systems and long-range tracking techniques.

Allen will award $12 million over three years to a nonprofit that has “a demonstrated capability of operating a variety of satellite communications systems.” At press time, the Coast Guard was unable to provide an estimate of when or to whom the service will award the contract.

Reporting by Seapower Correspondent Megan Scully. Managing Editor Richard R. Burgess, Associate Editor Matt Hilburn, Assistant Editor David W. Munns and Special Correspondent Otto Kreisher contributed to this report.