AUGUSTA, Maine — The National Guard is a servant of two masters. So what happens if the two masters disagree about fundamental plans for the service’s future?
As it turns out, it’s messy — really messy.
National Guard units, descended from the state militias you read about in high school while studying the Revolutionary War, take orders from their home state’s governor and the service branch to which they belong — the Army or Air Force, as the case may be.
In Maine, questions over who “wins” disagreements about the Guard may be coming to a head. Gov. Paul LePage recently fired his Maine National Guard chief, Brig. Gen. James Campbell, over the general’s handling of plans to convert most of the 133rd Engineer Battalion into an infantry unit.
LePage opposes the plan, but recent action by the National Guard Bureau in Washington, D.C., shows the U.S. Army is moving ahead with Campbell’s recommendation the transition be made.
Campbell’s replacement, Brig. Gen. Gerard Bolduc, says he’s optimistic a solution that pleases the state and Pentagon can be reached. But if it can’t, what is the fate of the 133rd?
Neither LePage’s administration nor the National Guard Bureau seem willing to directly answer that question. But if history is any indication, control over the shape of a unit such as the 133rd seems to rest not in Augusta but in Washington.
Federal law makes clear a state’s governor must approve of any organizational change to National Guard units in his or her state, but even that doesn’t tell the whole story. Title 32 is one of the main laws governing the National Guard, and it includes this clause: “No change in the branch, organization, or allotment of a unit located entirely within a state may be made without the approval of its governor.”
That could be why LePage has been so adamant in telling the media he will not allow any change to the 133rd. But perhaps he should take note of what happened in Pennsylvania, where former Gov. Ed Rendell used the “governor’s approval” provision of Title 32 to fight off the Pentagon’s plan to restructure the Air National Guard in his state.
In 2005, the Base Realignment and Closure commission, known as BRAC, recommended Pennsylvania’s Willow Grove Naval Air Station be closed and the 111th Fighter Wing of the Pennsylvania Air National Guard, which called the base home, be deactivated.
Rendell sued the Department of Defense, citing Title 32, and won at the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled the 111th could not be deactivated without Rendell’s approval.
It seemed like a slam dunk, but it was far from it.
Despite the governor’s authority, the Department of Defense still holds powerful sway over the National Guard. It owns nearly all the equipment used by National Guard units and controls those units’ missions — as well as the purse strings.
In Pennsylvania, that meant the Pentagon still had a lot of power over the 111th.
In 2009, Rendell gave up on his plans to save the Willow Grove base, citing a lack of federal funding and the military’s refusal to provide an air mission for the 111th, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. Then, the Air Force took the unit’s aircraft away in 2010.
With no flying mission and no aircraft, the unit essentially was dismantled, even without the governor’s approval. Willow Grove closed and, according to the Morning Call, a newspaper in Allentown, Pennsylvania, local officials feared the Guard base would close as well.
The 111th was saved, in a sense, when it was given a new mission, operating unmanned aerial vehicle, or drones, in 2013. Rendell won in the sense that the 111th was not entirely deactivated. But the unit today looks nothing like the aviation combat group it resembled for decades.
If you’re LePage and you’re trying to ensure the Army doesn’t reconstitute a National Guard battalion under your nose, it’s a harrowing story.
Campbell referenced the indirect control the Army and Air Force wield over local Guard units in a scholarly article published last year by the Army War College, titled “The National Guard as Strategic Hedge.”
“The services do not exert direct control over the National Guard all the time, but they do, in fact, exert a significant amount of indirect control through regulatory and fiscal mechanisms,” Campbell wrote.
Pennsylvania’s experience demonstrates that if LePage and the U.S. Army can’t come to an agreement, the Army is well poised to win the standoff.
Follow Mario Moretto on Twitter at @riocarmine.
