The Brookings Institution hosted a conversation with the bureau chief of the National Guard, topics included the guards role during the birx pandemic and protests following the death of george floyd. The chief of the National Guard bureau which means a member of the joint chiefs of staff and officer for overseeing the army and air force National Guard combined the total strength of half 1 million airmen and soldiers under his supervision and command and he is the distinguished airmen and fighter pilot, texan, formerly of activeduty air force in the 1990s and did a number of students in various positions, sometimes in more of a guard capacity, sometimes full time and for the last eight years have been at the leadership of the National Park bureau in washington, now as its top officer, we are privileged to have him today as he prepares for imminent in the rotc entry, the graduation from the rotc program was 1981. He has been serving his country long and very well despite his youthful appearance he has been at it for quite a while and we wish him well. Before we do that we look forward to a rich conversation at the end of which we will handle some of your questions if you wish to email events brookings. Edu. Some opening thoughts on the state of the guard and health and responding to the birx crisis in the United States. That is not our only topic, we will also think more broadly about the guard and its role in the tell aforesaid a difficult moment in history with the return of Great Power Competition around the globe. Thank you for joining us and without further a do over to you. Thank you for having me to talk about the National Guard. I experienced a complete transformation of what the National Guard brings in terms of combat capability from Strategic Reserve to Operational Force to the roles we play across every day. Go back to the beginning of the year in january of 2020 we couldnt have predicted what happened in the next 6 months. Early in january, there was potential kinetic operations, tensions running high. Two month later, california National Guard dropped coronavirus test kit onto a cruise ship anchored off the coast of San Francisco and that was before the coronavirus became a National Pandemic and a National Emergency and two months later yet again george floyd was killed, widespread nationwide unrest the likes of which we have not seen. In the midst of these headline grabbing events the National Guard, National Disasters whether it is floods in michigan, wildfires in kansas, tornadoes in tennessee to name a few and it has been a crazy year and it is early july. If you look at the totality of the effort of the National Guard including federal missions more than 120,000 members of the National Guard were mobilized, 45,000 more doing birx operations in every district in territory in the district of columbia, 40,000 more were doing operations in support of civil disturbance operations in 33 states. All across the country the National Guard was delivering personal protective equipment and in some cases manufacturing personal protective equipment. Food banks and test centers protect protesters First Amendment rights that protest peacefully. Sharing best practices as we learn how to do these things and did this difficult time it is a time of great flexibility and innovation and showcasing capabilities of the National Guard. We are doing these while we sustain federal commitments to combatant command around the world as part of the army and air force. Not a title x or federal missions were interrupted or disturbed. Thankfully Similar Service operation seem to be receding. There is no sign of operational tempo as we look to the relatively nearterm, the events of the past six months the role of the reserve component, the National Guard, 20 of all the department of defense, National Guard has proven an indispensable force that america needs. My thoughts on some things to share with the group we learned about what the Operational Force is and how to use it and i will make four main points. One is we have become an Operational Force with continuous sustained rotation. Part of the army and air force and that is a good thing, from the fullspectrum operation, fullspectrum in between we have become an indispensable part of the army and air force to do their title x and federal missions and that needs to continue. Some other things i will get to in a bit, some questions. The second thing, what we have learned is the strength of our force is experienced the cost structure when not being used. The posture reserve component in the future against known requirements, something we should continue to do and leverage. It is a good thing and builds readiness for us. When you do that it allows us to be predictable for our Business Model which must get into people with other careers and other employers to let them know and train the appropriate level of readiness as we do now so that is number 2. Average us more against known requirements and in some cases we do that but there is opportunity to do more of that. The third thing is in the old model Strategic Reserve model when we take new equipment and put it in the component, shake out the other stuff and campaign that into the reserve components that model does not work, you must be deployable, sustainable and interoperable or you are irrelevant in any battle scenario. The concurrent and balanced recapitalization and modernization of our force is something i worked hard for as we move forward with this Operational Reserve model. The last thing, a historic time as we stand up another service, space force, there are advantages to taking the model of the National Guard and leveraging that and creating a space National Guard component of the space force. We have been in it for 25 years and make sure one of the most important things we do is the culture, the training, professional development and Army Officers in the interNational Guard as parent services, as part of the space force. Adopting it, could actually free up active structures to make it ready, it is the most lexical piece of the force. It could go anywhere and be anywhere and do things we are not built to do in a reserve component. By using a known deployment to put requirements against the reserve components, that frees up may be a more efficient active component to be used. I would share that always ready and always there, that is our motto and people think of us as a slower version of the army and air force. In the air force we train the same level of readiness and we are not as fast but pretty close as an air force squadron. I would say on the army sided is slower, less readiness built intentionally. Readiness is expensive to build and as you build it you dont buy tomatoes and they will rock. You want to build it just in time. Using us as a force that determines assigned Mission Readiness is something we should leverage. You might want to see the 80 second airborne, to train reserve components. So that is important. We provide strategic depth to the army and air force and someday to the space force. That will happen eventually but through combat capability at a lower cost it allows us to sustain combat capability in capacity terms for the potential of a major war and allows us to save money on an active component that is expansive and ready. To allow us to modernize that, needed weapons we need in the future. Using us for readiness capabilities in the future as we look at rotational models in europe or korea, using the reserve components to do that. Modernization, the ability to modernize the force, is important. The National Guard units, vermont with the second unit air force to get the f 35, recognizes that and on the army side the same thing will be true, new helicopters, vertical lift or other capabilities the army has. What we have learned over time, the component no longer has a piece of equipment, begins to die, less sustained and dont intend to cut back on the money or enough to maintain it, hard decisions over time, it becomes in deplorable and not sustainable in a combat environment. The space National Guard if ive been too so in my support of that. Weve been in that part of it for 25 years. One thing the National Guard brings is unit equipped force structure. If you need to grow the capacity in the army and air force and space force, you cant do that with argument tees and single people, you need unit structure that will be mobilized, that is what we bring. We bring the obvious attributes for the last six months, from the title x responsibilities can be tasked to do any number of things, running food banks, that was not anything they were trained to and they can be test organized at every level and do any task the nation needs to do with a myriad of different tests throughout the birx operations. The last 6 months have shown if you really want to get into it, the continuous deployment, more than 1 million members of the National Guard in the combat zone, many of them multiple times. Since i have been chief we had sustained continuously 30,000 men and women in the title x things and another 10,000, done things in the homeland, what you had done in new york, folks sitting in there, counterterrorism opportunities, our ability to do things in the homeland have been enormous. Lately, the covid19 the birx operations, these operations are beginning to reseed to respond in support, of Law Enforcement turning sideways. The guard has proven we are always ready, always there and i am proud of this, in a recent article, Swiss Army Knife of the United States a letter, we are tasked to do various things from pandemics, the joy of my life has been the chief of the National Guard so i will pause and say thanks and turn it over to you for questions. I want to ask a couple different questions Going Forward but i want to ask you to build on what we touched on in the ways we thought about it and how it has evolved over your career because you are soon to retire and you have seen so much and it helps dramatize the choices for the nation Going Forward. After covid19, this is not a particularly partisan issue, people on both sides of the aisle understand there may be severe pressure on the Defense Budget on the years ahead even if it doesnt transpire in the next four months of the Political Campaign this year and i should have noted brookings this is not a partisan question, this is an awareness the country is looking for ways to build a more economical military in the years ahead so i want to ask you in a minute about ways in which the guard could contribute to that becoming a larger overall faction of the Nations Armed forces but to set that up we should spend more time on the history you live to because coming out of vietnam, there was the concept of the total force which was a decision the Garden Reserve should be integral to any military deployment so we would never again have a division between an active force that was not known, not understood, not integrated with communities back home and the rest of society. We have a concept of a total force with the reserve more than the guard playing a role at providing capability, the active force simply doesnt have so if they need to be mobilized going into a major conflict that is one concept. Then you alluded to a second concept which is the idea of a Strategic Reserve, in the cold war. As you alluded to, it wasnt necessarily anywhere near as good, the second wave, the third or fourth ways of a multiyear conflict. We saw as you say, the guard becomes an operational part of the military, nearly the same capabilities as the active force, they could spell it, do things more economically. That is the overall lay of the land. If you want to comment any further, how good has the guard become as being as capable or as capable as the active force, you mentioned desert storm, going from the active to the National Guard, there is still a debate especially in the army of how the National Guard brigades in desert storm, there was a big internal fight about how they should have used the National Guard more in that conflict. There are still debates whether the National Guard brigades in iraq and afghanistan performed as well in the tougher sectors. What do we know especially about the army side where as you say it is harder to maintain unit readiness if these are big for mason, what about the ability of the National Guard on the use brigades to be just as good as an active army brigade with the historical perspective, sorry for the long question but i wanted to frame this and pick up your points allegory vault on your career, reflect a little more on that and speak to how good the guard has become today. Imus in the morning we are completely Different Force than the one i joined almost 40 years ago. We are more ready, more disciplined. We have become, mikes parents predominantly until the last eight years or so has been predominantly air force but we have become what the air force demanded that we become. Part of that was a reduction in the size of the air force coupled with continuous deployment cycles to the middle east sincerely 90s following the gulf war. They needed the National Guard to become part of the deployable cadre that could go and we had to deploy with their own kids, our own commanders who had the work. The air force really, i would like to think coupled with 1991, the changed the air force many of the active components of which i was one, migrated in the inter National Guard and we brought with us a sense of a more disciplined air force, more tactically oriented air force more connected to the active components than we were before when we had separate components and i would like to think sometimes i think it was just the National Guard that got better but i live out here on fort mcnair and there used to be a golf course on this particular base. There is no time for golf courses, people are focused on strategy, developing officers and there is less time for those kinds of things but i can tell you out of the active component i thought i would make the best Fighter Squadron in the world and i got to my place and set a bunch of great Fighter Pilots here but six fulltime people in the units, the rest were all parttime. The maintainers were very experienced but they had been stationed for a long time and we are not going to do this. I had doctors and bankers, fulltime work for those to the degree the air force needs them. More fulltime people in the air National Guard than there used to be and it is a better equipped, more equipped and it is better and it is a more disciplined and combat capable force than the one i joined. I talk with less credibility but to train an Army Brigade Combat Team it is the monster undertaking of logistics, to maneuver 3500 people to get all integrated together to work and practice it. It is a platform based system, you get six of them, you can do your mission from your home base, the army not so much. To do the collective training required for big Army Formations is hard to do and expensive and takes time. Time is a big limitation as members of the Garden Reserve. I watch these folks in brigades the go to National Training centers, the commander, the company commander, the battalion commander, they have lives as accountants or salesmen or doctors or whatever they do in civilian lives but then they dedicate 90 or 100 days to get to that, needing readiness event to get that team ready to go to war or deployment. There is no similar mechanism to watching our brigade combat team. That said, all the same things apply, the army demand the same standards, the same fitness, the same rigorous application of Training Resources toward individual training status, we are better more disciplined force and we may not be able to get out the door as fast as an activeduty army brigade can. We take 80 days or 100 days and when you talk about this the movement to a war zone of the government