Protecting the Homeland
But wait! Aren't the National Guard the troops who rescue us from fires and floods, the ones who are called out when there's a natural disaster?
Indeed, they are mobilized for just that in times of peril, but responding to national disasters has never been the Guard's main purpose, although recruitment efforts often emphasize that role. Today's National Guard represents the evolution of the original state militias, created for military purposes -- fighting enemies from Indian nations on this continent to rebels in the Philippines. The National Guard Bureau's 2019 "posture statement" identifies "three core missions." None of these involve supporting elite athletes, but neither is there any mention of the Guard's well-known role in confronting fires or floods. Its stated core missions are "fighting America's wars, securing the homeland, and building enduring partnerships." Those "enduring partnerships" turn out to be arrangements with military forces in the 79 countries (just under a third of the world's nations) where the National Guard has "strategic state partnerships," or SSPs.
My friend tells me that the regular Army and Air Force look down on the Guard; they're not real soldiers in the eyes of the full-time military. Maybe that's why General Joseph Lengyel, the chief of the National Guard Bureau, whose photo and signature introduce that posture statement, is at pains to represent those forces not as the friendly folks in uniform who pull flooded-out Americans off their roofs, but as a full-on fighting force. In case there's any doubt, illustrated with drawings and photos of a multicultural array of rifle-toting men and women, it says clearly: "Fighting America's wars will always be the primary mission of the National Guard."
But what about that second core mission, "securing the homeland"? Could that be where its natural disaster work comes in? Not according to the posture statement, which puts it this way:
"The homeland is part of the global battle space. In the past, America benefited from its favorable geography with friendly neighbors to the north and south and large oceans to our east and west as natural barriers. Today, we no longer enjoy this safe haven as a result of new technologies and weapons that can reach the heart of America with little or no warning."
Touting its "dual-use nature and robust presence in 2,600 [U.S.] communities," the document assures its readers that the Guard is here -- in fact, just about everywhere -- to protect us from the "[p]roliferation of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, and high-yield explosive devices" that "has increased the threat of a weapons of mass destruction... attack on the United States."
In the spirit of being everywhere, it even dispatched 2,200 troops to the U.S.-Mexico border late last year, in response to President Trump's many election-time warnings about the approach of a caravan of desperate refugees and asylum-seekers from Central America. As far back as April 2018, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis authorized the deployment of up to 4,000 members of the National Guard, to stay there at least through August 2019 -- in addition to the regular Army troops whose initial 45-day deployment has already been extended twice. In fact, at the end of January, President Trump defended the expected deployment this month of yet another 3,500 regular troops "to stop the attempted Invasion of Illegals, through large Caravans, into our Country."
Working jointly with the U.S. Border Patrol, Guard members are not deployed to police the border directly, but engaged in a variety of activities including stringing concertina wire, reviewing intelligence, and flying helicopter surveillance missions.
Dual Use, Dual Authority?
Who commands the National Guard? That's a complicated question. Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution recognized then-existing state militias and gave Congress the power to call them out "to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions." From the beginning, those militias (which, with the passage of federal legislation in 1903, became the National Guard) were under the dual control of the federal and state governments. Congress was also given the power
"to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserving to the states respectively, the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress..."
Except when a state Guard has been "federalized" (called up by Congress or the president), each governor serves as the commander-in-chief of his or her state's units. When they are federalized, however, the president is their commander-in-chief.
The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act forbids the use of Army troops for law enforcement purposes inside the United States (except for suppressing insurrections). Federal legislation in 1956 expanded the Act to cover the Air Force, while Department of Defense regulations also forbid the use of the Navy and Marines (but not the Coast Guard) for domestic policing.
The National Guard, on the other hand, is under no such prohibition and so its troops have often been deployed in response to events inside this country. An illustration of the Guard's dual (and, in this case, dueling) command structure occurred in 1957, when nine black students attempted to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Governor Orval Faubus called out the Arkansas Guard to "preserve the peace" by preventing the students from entering the school. In response, President Dwight Eisenhower federalized the same forces and ordered them (along with soldiers from the Army's 101st Airborne Division) to assist in the integration of Central High. (As the only "insurrection" in Little Rock then was the governor's rejection of the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring public school segregation unconstitutional, it's quite possible that the use of regular Army troops violated the Posse Comitatus Act.)
Eisenhower's successor, John F. Kennedy, sent the Guard to Birmingham to oversee the integration of the University of Alabama and that state's public schools (over the objections of then-Governor George Wallace). In 1967, both the National Guard and federal troops were sent to Detroit at the request of Mayor Jerome Cavanagh to put down an urban insurrection there.
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