The head of the Oklahoma National Guard told his troops in November that \u2015 per an order from Gov. Kevin Stitt \u2015 units under his jurisdiction would not enforce a mandate from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to be vaccinated against COVID-19.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Defense Department\u2019s response has been incredulous. The mandate\u2019s a direct, lawful order, multiple senior leaders said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In addition, the president has the authority to give state-status Guardsmen governing orders, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told Military Times on Feb. 16. That includes vaccine compliance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cFailure by a member to comply with deadlines and requirements can lead to prohibition on participation in drills, training, and other duty conducted under title 32 and will jeopardize the member\u2019s status in the National Guard,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But National Guard troops not on active duty, known as Title 10 status, might not have to follow the mandate, calling into question how much power the Pentagon has to enforce its policies for roughly 1 million troops who spend most of their time off-duty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now the issue has come to a head. Multiple lawsuits<\/a>, filed by governors who disagree with the mandate, will hash out who has the final say, They\u2019re hoping to settle a long-running dispute about who, ultimately, sets standards and policies for the National Guard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Questions about authority came up again, in December, when the department unveiled an updated policy governing affiliations with extremist ideology. The Pentagon said it applied to Guard members. The National Guard Bureau said it didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The truth was somewhere in the middle, but to understand the disagreement one must understand the Guard\u2019s history.<\/p>\n\n\n In some ways, National Guard is almost a misnomer for a force that spends the majority of its time under a governor\u2019s control. Founded as a network of state militias, the Army and Air National Guard have participated in conflicts more and more, up to and including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where their operational tempo was practically indistinguishable from that of active duty units.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a result, <\/b>Guard organizations have sought increasingly more parity with the active duty component. In the past decade, the Army<\/a> and Air Force<\/a> stood up commissions studying the role of their National Guard components and whether they should be absorbed into the federally controlled Reserve organizations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The answer was they should not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe Air National Guard, and the Army National Guard, fought so hard to be taken seriously as an interchangeable option to the active component, more so than even the Reserve component did,\u201d Katherine Kuzminski, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, told Military Times in a Jan. 24 interview.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cCertainly, this isn\u2019t the Guard writ large, right?\u201d she added. \u201cThis is the Guard, in some states, really undermining this credibility that they fought so hard for.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But Guard leaders, and their advocates, don\u2019t necessarily see it that way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMost of the rhetoric that you hear is coming from people who don\u2019t necessarily have a clear understanding of the history of the country, or the National Guard, or why things are organized and certain activities are authorized under the different authorities,\u201d retired Brig. Gen. Roy Robinson, president of the National Guard Association of the United States, told Military Times on Friday.<\/p>\n\n\n\tNational Guard, state control<\/h2>\n\n\n\n