Antiquated National Guard

The proud old 31st National Guard ("Dixie"'; Division thinks that it is getting rough treatment from the Pentagon. The division was recruited in Alabama and Mississippi with the slogan "Fight Together--Fight with Your Buddies." It had barely begun training this year at Fort Jackson, S.C. when the Army took 4,300 men from the division, put them in other outfits as replacements. Last week, rumors were flying that a second, even heavier, levy was in the works.

Angry cries of protest sounded throughout Alabama and Mississippi. The 31st's commander, Major General Alexander G. Paxton, announced that morale and training had "hit a new low." Alabama's fat and usually jovial Representative Frank Boykin boiled up, introduced in Congress a sweeping resolution designed to stop the Army from breaking up National Guard divisions. Among its provisions: "In any case where a division of the . . . National Guard shall have been ordered into the active military service of the United States, no unit or component of such division shall be separated, detached, or otherwise removed from the jurisdiction of such division."

Boykin's bill, if made law, would destroy whatever usefulness the National Guard may still have for the Army.

For years, U.S. military men have been dead set against forming combat divisions on a regional basis, partly because the impact of casualties on a specific locality can have a shattering effect on civilian and military morale. Best known example: whole towns in New Mexico and Wisconsin went into mourning when National

Guard units largely recruited in those states were lost on Bataan when the Japanese attacked in 1942.

Boykin's bill will probably die in committee. What will not die is the issue his bill raised: if men are recruited and organized on a fight-with-your-buddies basis, then morale is bound to plummet when the Army, for one excellent reason or another, breaks up the regional divisions. Until the Defense Department finds the courage to stand up to the politically powerful National Guard Association, U.S. defense is going to waste billions of dollars and much precious manpower on an antiquated and disruptive form of military organization.

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