The National Guard as a Strategic Hedge

This article suggests alternatives to proposed organizational reductions and balance between the Active force and the National Guard.It examines specifics of the cost, use, and effectiveness arguments on both sides of this contentious issue.Finally, this article serves as a catalyst to renew the broader public discussion regarding the proper roles of the regulars and the militia-the National Guard-as integral parts of the nation's defense and security architecture.A s the year 2014 approaches, the nation anticipates the close of what has widely been described as the longest war in our country's history.With the assumed ending of that war, many citizens and political leaders anticipate our regular military will be required to do what it has historically always done at the end of a war-shrink.Despite the fact the war in Afghanistan is not the nation's longest, and our involvement there will likely not entirely end in 2014, the broad expectation or even demand that the military's size and budget be reduced is both normal and necessary.1 This expectation of significant post-war regular military reductions reflects long, deep-rooted, and traditional national practice.Indeed, following most of our country's earliest wars there was a significant national movement to eliminate the regular army altogether, and return to our traditional reliance on the citizen-soldiers of the militia for the country's defense.After the Revolutionary War the Continental Army was, in fact, effectively disbanded, with less than one hundred soldiers retained to guard stores. 2 After the War of 1812, the War with Mexico, the Civil War, and the War with Spain, the regular army was drastically reduced, and in spite of continuous fighting on the Western frontier, the nineteenth-century regular army never exceeded a "peacetime" strength of approximately 30,000.3 In contrast, the organized militia strength remained at well over 100,000 during this period.4 The first half of the twentieth century was little different, with the regular army (including the nascent Army Air Force) reaching a strength of only 125,000 on the 1 The Seminole Wars lasted on and off between 1819 and 1858; the Sioux Wars between 1854 and 1890; the Apache Wars between 1849 and 1886; and the fighting with the Cheyenne people from the 1850s until 1878.The US involvement in Vietnam lasted fourteen years, from 1961 when the first combat advisors were deployed until 1975 when the government of South Vietnam collapsed.2 In 1784, Congress disbanded the Continental Army in the wake of the Newburgh controversy, and left only 80 soldiers and a handful of officers to guard remaining military stores.See Allen Millett, and Peter Maslowski, For the Common Defense, a Military History of the United States from 1607 to 2012