Home Guards?

Nothing is so calculated to outrage the U.S. National Guard as a suggestion that its wartime role should be that of a home-defense force--and when the National Guard is outraged, Congress is sure to hear about it. Guard leaders on such occasions can be counted on to identify themselves with the original Minute Men, point with pride to their organization's long history, and cinch their argument with a slogan, e.g., "There will always be a National Guard." This week the slogans were falling like raindrops.

When the decision was made to gear the U.S. military establishment to atomic necessity, John A. Hannah, Assistant Defense Secretary for Manpower, who is on leave as president of Michigan State College, was assigned to head a committee studying the National Guard system and to submit his findings to the National Security Council by April 1--but he has already fired without waiting to see the whites of the militiamen's eyes.

"A New Role." In a mid-January speech at Lansing, Mich., Hannah said: "Can you imagine Michigan consenting to have its National Guard units sent away if Detroit and Lansing and Grand Rapids were under aerial bombardment? Do you think the police and other public-safety organizations could handle the situation under attack without the National Guard to provide the disciplined leadership and control to handle casualties, open lines of communication, protect and care for the homeless, maintain order and restore civilian production? . . . Indeed, the National Guard has accepted a new role. Under a program announced recently, the Guard will assume a major share of the responsibility for guarding major industrial and population centers against such attacks as we have been considering."

"Let It Begin." The mere thought of the National Guard serving in any sort of civil-defense capacity while other American soldiers were fighting elsewhere was enough to bring bellows of rage from doughty Major General (ret.) Ellard A. Walsh, 66, longtime president of the National Guard Association. Walsh knew that behind Hannah's faint praise lay basic distrust of the peacetime Guard: Hannah is convinced that many Guard outfits are shot through with political officers, overaged officers, incompetents, and youths who joined up to avoid the draft. Challenged Walsh: "If they want war, let it begin here."* Then he really warmed up: "If the distinguished savant from Michigan State College, or anybody else for that matter, believes that the Army National Guard can be built up and maintained by assigning it to a home-guard role in the national-defense system, he has never been more mistaken in his life, and the entire National Guard, Army and Air, will resist to the utmost the imposition of any such concept."

This week Walsh continued the fray with a lengthy speech at a Santa Fe meeting of the Adjutants General Association, a National Guard ally. Cried he: "I predict we will experience some distinctly unpleasant times in the not too distant future ... It behooves us to keep our powder dry." Hannah was on hand too, but was clearly in enemy territory. The battle was joined, and Hannah may soon test an old article of Pentagon faith--not necessarily true--that when the National Guard Association cracks the whip, Congress obediently jumps.

*In paraphrase of John Parker to his Minute Men at Lexington, April 19, 1775: "Stand your ground. Don't fire unless fired upon; but if they mean to have war, let it begin here."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.