The US National Guard has always played a varying role in homeland defense. In the 1950s and 1960s, the air sovereignty mission often had the Air Guard in particular doing the heavy lifting in intercepting airspace violations. The original air defense batteries guarding our key cities and installations with Nike Hercules missiles were mostly Army National Guard battalions.
This legacy continues today with most air sovereignty missions handled by Guard pilots. The unique challenge of defending our nation’s capital from airborne threats is shared by Guard air defenders and interceptors. The nation’s strategic missile defense capability is handled by the California, Alaska and Colorado Army National Guards working together.
The great strength of the Guard in this mission is the fixed nature of the operations. In Colorado and Alaska, Guardsmen have conducted the same mission, in the same location, for nearly a decade. The hometown nature of the Guard and the unmoving nature of the mission are a natural fit. Even in the austere environment of interior Alaska, the right men and women have gravitated to both the mission and location, serving with pride in what some might consider a daunting and undesirable duty.
The Air Force, originally conceived as nearly an exclusively strategic force, has fundamentally readjusted its posture, if not its doctrine, in the post-Cold War era. This transition has brought benefits to the geographic combatant commander in the form of the expeditionary air wing. The creation of Air Combat Command joined the strategic bomber force with the tactical fighter force.
However, in the recent past, this arrangement has left the strategic, non-expeditionary forces seemingly frayed. Several highly visible failures led at one point to the firing of both the chief of staff and secretary of the Air Force.
It is interesting to note that in the galaxy of stars that make up the US Air Force’s general officer corps, only one with four stars wears the badge of the nuclear missileer. Walking the E-Ring of the Pentagon will show hundreds of magnificent portraits of planes and the pilots that fly them, but none show the missileers at their post.
Doing the same job, largely in the same domestic locations, is a model that doesn’t appear to work in a profession that rightly rewards deployments in combat and a willingness to move often. The challenges of the intercontinental ballistic missile force(ICBM) force seem to be well suited to the strengths the National Guard brings.
The ICBM force is arrayed in three Western states, much like strategic missile defense. They similarly belong to US Strategic Command, while responding on the same networks to Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command during day-to-day operations. They do not deploy, nor should they. They are in a highly specialized field with little translation of skills to the remainder of the flying Air Force save, perhaps, as a vestigial reminder.
Can the successful model of Guardsmen manning missiles be translated to the ICBM force? For clarification, the Guardsmen who man the missile defense units are all full-time soldiers. They serve as Title 32 Guardsmen while off duty and on duty they transition to Title 10 chains of command in much the same way the Air Guard performs air sovereignty missions. The manning belongs to the state while authority to perform their mission belongs to the active-duty combatant commander.
Further, within the 100th Missile Defense Brigade in Colorado, several positions, including the brigade executive officer, are regular Army soldiers working side by side with Guardsmen.
An experiment in this model with one of the missile wings should be considered as a possible solution to the perceived “rot” within the missileer ranks. A transition of one of the missile wings to the North Dakota, Montana or Wyoming Guards could provide proof of concept. Already, Air Guardsmen in Alaska man the early warning radar at Clear Air Station, integrated into the same command-and-control system and are a seamless part of our greater strategic deterrence.
This is not to diminish the importance of the mission. On the contrary, our nuclear strategic deterrence is the bedrock of our homeland defense and gives us the freedom to advance our allies’ interests globally.
The National Guard performing the ICBM mission naturally integrates the foundation of our homeland security and maximizes the operational potential of the Guard, while allowing the active Air Force to focus on expeditionary airpower. The changing world, and specifically the changing global nuclear landscape, demands similarly a change in perspective and assumptions. ■
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Lt. Col. Darling is a US Army infantryman assigned to the Alaska National Guard. These opinions are his own.
