At Ease - Wisconsin National Guard Department of Military Affairs

What’s
cards?
By William Matthews
Originally featured in January 2009 National Guard magazine;
reprinted with the magazine’s and the author’s permission.
Almost every morning lately, when Col. Elizabeth
Austin arrives at work at the North Carolina National Guard
headquarters in Raleigh, there’s at least one tractor trailer full of
new Guard equipment waiting for her.
Often, there’s an empty tractor trailer too, waiting to load
up obsolete equipment and haul it away.
For Austin, the North Carolina Guard’s logistics director,
these are clear signs of big changes that are coming to the
National Guard.
After years of skimpy budgets and chronic equipment
shortages — problems made worse by six years of war — the
National Guard is starting to arm and modernize in a big way.
in the
Equipment: Brand-new gear, and lots of it!
Equipment is streaming in to certain Guard units (including
those in Wisconsin), and over the next seven years, Guard
officials say they expect $34.1 billion worth of new gear to be
delivered to Army Guard units nationwide.
It will be a wide range of new weapons and materiel,
from the most modern digital M-1 tanks and unmanned aerial
vehicles to the newest armored security vehicles and WIN-T
satellite communications systems. There’s a lot of more ordinary
gear on the way as well — night vision systems, thermal sights,
small arms, radios, trucks, helicopters and more.
At the National Guard Bureau, they’re calling it “the
equipping tidal wave.”
“That’s not an official name,” said Paul Brown, the Army
Guard’s deputy chief of logistics. It’s just the best description of
what’s beginning to happen.
It’s not obvious in a lot of places yet.
Officials at the Maryland National Guard, for example, say
they’re not inundated with new gear. Nor is Texas or Indiana.
But by 2010 that will change, Guard Bureau officials
assure. And they have assembled an Army National Guard
Equipping Working Group to help the states deal with the
deluge.
“A lot of the states don’t have experience dealing with the
quantity or some of the systems” they’re going to be receiving,
said Joe Billman, a consulting specialist with Serco, Inc., a
Virginia-based professional services firm hired to help navigate
the equipment tidal wave.
“It’s very important that we follow disciplined business
practices or we will lose control of the fielding process,” a
Guard Bureau document warns.
It’s not as easy as simply opening the armory gate to let the
tractor trailers in.
Guard leaders in the states have to start thinking ahead —
and soon, Billman said.
The working group has developed an eight-category check
list to help Guard units prepare for “the mass influx of new
equipment.”
First the states need to find out what equipment they’re
going to be receiving and in what quantity. The Guard Bureau
has a pretty good idea of that.
Once they know what they’ll receive, states next must
figure out whether they’ll need new personnel, and how much
additional training will be needed for current Guard soldiers.
Then: Will new equipment need new maintenance and
storage facilities? Will environmental assessments be necessary?
What will units do with old and obsolete gear?
42 at ease