Pentagon Now Calls Shots for California’s ‘Weekend Warriors’

The California National Guard and Guard units in other states have become involved in missions in Central America in large measure because the U.S. Defense Department has changed the nature of the National Guard over the last 15 years.

The practice came under fire after disclosures in April that 30 California guardsmen were to be used to stand watch over a road-building project in Honduras. The news, together with a later disclosure that the state’s Air National Guard had been flying regular, but unpublicized, supply missions in Central and South America for eight years, prompted foes of the Reagan Administration’s policy in that troubled region to back legislation and file a lawsuit in efforts to halt the practice.

Under laws and traditions that go back to the American Revolution, the National Guard is a state reserve force made up mostly of civilian “weekend warriors” under command of the governor. It is to be used mainly in local emergencies, unless federalized by the President in time of war or other national emergency.

In practice, however, the state Guard, and especially its Air National Guard component, has been converted into part- time--and often full- time--auxiliaries of the regular Army and Air Force.

The Defense Department pays more than 98% of the California Air National Guard’s $103.5-million annual budget. The Air Force trains its members, supplies their planes, issues their paychecks and routinely assigns them missions as part of the regular Air Force.

Increasingly, even part-time guardsmen spend far more time on duty than the specified 39-day annual minimum training time. In addition, their annual “training camp” takes them to places like Korea, Honduras and West Germany.

“It’s evolved away from being weekend warriors,” said Maj. John Smith, a spokesman for the National Guard Bureau in the Pentagon. “Twenty-seven per cent of Air Guard personnel are on active duty now,” he said, “working with the active Air Force on a day-to-day basis.”

The California Air Guard’s uniforms, planes and paychecks all say “U.S. Air Force.” They put in so much time on Air Force missions from Korea to Turkey that, for many of them, there is only a paper tie to the governor, “a titular head,” as one high-ranking officer put it, whose authority some of them regard as an anachronism.

“The governor? I heard that stuff on the radio about whether the governor was going to let us go, and I was thinking to myself, ‘What the hell does the governor have to do with it?’ ” said another officer, relaxing between flights in a bar in Central America.

“Some of the real old-timers in the unit can remember when we got paid from Sacramento, but I can’t. I get paid by the U.S. Air Force. That’s who we work for.”

An example is the 1,500-member 146th Tactical Airlift Wing at Van Nuys Airport, an Air National Guard unit that has been sending planes to Central and South America.

In 1984, parts of the Van Nuys unit spent two weeks on active duty in Central America; three weeks in Europe, ranging from England to Norway to Turkey; a pair of two-week tours in the Philippines, and four weeks in Hawaii. In 1985, Van Nuys units spent a week on duty in Alaska, eight weeks in Panama, two weeks in New York and two weeks in Florida.

So far this year, the Van Nuys guardsmen have spent two weeks in Korea, two weeks in Panama and are scheduled for assignments later in the year in Japan and Canada.

The changed role of the Guard has led to a conflict with at least some of the nation’s governors over use of the troops in foreign countries, places where they might be involved in politically dangerous actions--especially Central America, where the Reagan Administration’s anti-Nicaraguan policies draw strong objections from many Democrats.

National Guard involvement in Central America began in 1977 and has grown steadily. This year, about 7,500 guardsmen are scheduled to participate in Central American missions.

Although 35 states have participated without protest in the missions to Central and South America, sizable opposition has surfaced this year. The governor of Massachusetts this year refused to allow guardsmen from that state to travel to Central America. Maine and Washington refused to allow their guardsmen into Honduras, which borders Nicaragua, shelters the contras and is the site of a major Reagan Administration military buildup at Palmerola.

Arizona, Kansas, Washington and New York imposed limitations on a case-by-case basis. The governor of Texas allowed an armored unit to take part in exercises with the Honduran army. Under pressure from community leaders, he visited the unit there and said he was satisfied that they were not in danger.

Gov. George Deukmejian complained in May that he had never approved the previous seven years of Air Guard missions to Central America by the 146th Tactical Airlift Wing. Deukmejian said he was unaware of the missions until they came up in a legislative hearing on the dispatch in May of 30 Spanish-speaking California National Guard military police to guard road-building equipment in Honduras for the Missouri National Guard.

However, he allowed the two-week mission in June by three C-130 planes and 60 men from the 146th and has resisted efforts to limit his authority over the guard. He vetoed a bill that would have required him to notify the Legislature whenever guardsmen were sent to Central America.

However, the bill’s backers, Assemblymen Art Agnos (D-San Francisco) and Tom Bates (D-Oakland), are pushing ahead with plans for an amendment to the state Constitution that would require the Legislature’s approval before the governor could allow guardsmen to be sent to any country where there had been armed conflict within two years.

The proposed amendment was withdrawn this week by Agnos, who said it would be offered after the gubernatorial election to counter Republican charges that “this was an election year issue to embarrass the governor.”

A lawsuit seeking to halt use of California guardsmen in Central America has been filed by Americans for Democratic Action and others, who describe themselves as opponents of Reagan Administration policy in that region.

Deny Authority

Meanwhile, there are proposals in Washington to deny governors the authority to block use of the Guard in foreign countries. Sens. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) and Phil Gramm (R-Tex.) tried to add such language to a defense appropriations bill in the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The matter was delayed pending hearings later this year by the subcommittee on manpower and personnel, headed by Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif).

The Goldwater-Gramm proposal raises serious constitutional questions, because the Constitution gives states the authority to raise and control their own militias in peacetime.

The change in the National Guard has its roots in the “total-force policy” announced in 1971 by Melvin Laird, secretary of defense in the Nixon Administration.

With the draft being eliminated and the Vietnam War winding down, smaller defense budgets were in sight. The only backup available for a smaller U.S. military in case of war was the reserves and the National Guard.

Hand-Me-Downs

Until then, the Guard had been looked on as the military’s third string. It was equipped with obsolete hand-me-downs, and many units would have required months of training before being called into action overseas. Such refresher training had been possible in previous wars, but military planners presumed that there would be no time for it in any serious future confrontation.

“Total force” meant everybody available to the Pentagon within a week or so of the start of hostilities, and that meant the Guard, Laird said in an interview.

“The total force was an idea whose time had come. We had to start relying on the Guard for a more important role in national security planning,” he said.

Laird said, “Eliminating the draft helped me get support in Congress for the idea,” which he said included supplying expensive new equipment directly to Guard units, instead of giving them castoffs from the regular services.

Cause Problems

He and the other planners of the total-force doctrine foresaw that incorporating the National Guard into the regular military to such an extent could cause problems with the governors, Laird said.

Even at that time, he said, there were suggestions that governors be deprived of the right to block the Defense Department’s routine use of the Guard.

“Some in Congress and the Pentagon thought that if we put so much money into modern tanks and planes for the Guard, we should have some federal override to get the use from them. I didn’t think it was a good idea then, and I don’t think it’s a good idea now,” Laird said.

Laird said his plan was for the President and the secretary of defense to encourage governors to support the plan, “and I don’t think this secretary of defense and this Administration have done a good job in explaining the total-force concept to the governors. . . .

“They have to get the governors on board on this, instead of starting a fight with them,” Laird said.

‘Political Tool’

However, he said, some of the governors “fail to understand that they should not use the National Guard as (a) political tool.”

Laird’s total-force program has resulted in a much larger federal stake in funding the Guard and closer links between the Guard and regular units.

All Guard units acquired, in effect, “big brothers” in the regular military, those units they would reinforce in wartime. The Army began taking Guard units on overseas training missions, a major change for many guardsmen.

“It got serious about five years ago,” said Lt. Col. John Zaver, a spokesman for the California adjutant general’s office and commander of an infantry battalion from Modesto.

“Things have definitely changed,” he said, noting that he took his 800-man battalion to Korea for exercises in March. “Even five years ago, we would have gone to someplace like Camp Roberts,” a National Guard camp near Paso Robles.

Brigade Sent

“We send cells of 10, 20, sometimes 50 people, to exercises in Japan and Germany. The Minnesota National Guard sent a whole brigade to Germany this year, about 3,000 personnel,” Zaver said.

“There was a big change that hit about five years ago, and it’s been changing more every year since,” said Reid Beveridge, a Delaware National Guard officer who edits the National Guard Magazine.

In the case of the Air Guard, units were given not just training exercises but missions that would otherwise go to regular units, such as the cargo flights that sent the California Air National Guard from Van Nuys to Central America for the 15th time in June.

Beginning in 1977, the Air Force Military Airlift Command turned over virtually all passenger and cargo missions in Central and South America to the Air Guard and reserves, rotating the duty.

Fighters Sent

For six months of the year, state Air Guard units bring cargo planes to Howard Air Force Base in Panama. The Air Force Reserve covers the other six months. When the Guard has the job, there are always cargo planes from two states on hand. Other units send fighter planes, the major air defense for the Panama Canal.

Last month, the canal Guard duty went to New Mexico, which sent eight fighter planes. Georgia was there with cargo planes when California arrived. At the end of the first week, the Georgians flew out as the West Virginians flew in.

The California Air National Guard mission in Central America is to operate a sort of freight service.

The one thing they know is that they are not supposed to be carrying ammunition or other explosives. If they do, the plane is supposed to be loaded at a special explosives dock, and they are not allowed to mix passengers in the load.

Every member of the unit interviewed said that had never happened to them, although none could guarantee that some other plane had not done so.

‘Rare and None’

But so far as he can determine, said Lt. Col. Tandy Bozeman, the wing’s vice commander, such missions have been “between rare and none.”

So far as reporters on the trip in June could determine, the pallets usually contained routine supplies for embassies and military missions--everything from hair spray to frozen food. It was difficult to know exactly what the cargo contained. Forklifts deliver the pallets loaded with tons of material, often in boxes identified only with serial numbers, and covered with cargo nets and plastic sheeting.

In Belize, one plane dropped off the luggage of the military attache’s daughter, home from college for the summer. To Tegucigalpa, Honduras, they brought radar and radio parts, and to Guatemala, a safe. The U.S. Air Force officer who turned up was disappointed it was not the armored station wagon he was expecting. A Huey helicopter rotor went to El Salvador.

Two Places

The guardsmen spent virtually all their time in one of two places: the sky or on heavily guarded U.S. or Central American air force bases. Occasionally, they would make tourist forays into nearby capitals.

An intelligence briefing before they began flying gave a summary of military aircraft in the region, with particular attention to Nicaragua. The Nicaraguan Air Force has only two aged T-33s, Korean War vintage jet trainers, which have not flown in a year, an intelligence officer told them, but there are anti-aircraft guns on Corn Island, off the Caribbean coast.

“Outside the 12-mile limit, they don’t have anything that can reach you,” he assured them.

In El Salvador, he said, “the intensity of the war has decreased since June of ’84. . . . Operations at Ilopango (military airport in San Salvador) are astronomically more safe than they were a year ago,” especially since government forces recaptured a volcano overlooking the city.

News Reports

There were news reports, not confirmed, that guerrillas in El Salvador might have SAM 7s, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles, he said.

That prompted a “tactical approach” to Ilopango, the most military thing the unit did aside from dropping a battalion of regular army paratroopers on an exercise in the jungle near the Panama Canal.

The plane flew north from Panama over the Pacific Ocean. When El Salvador was abeam, Lt. Jim Mock of Agoura swung the plane toward the east and put it into a shallow glide from 16,000 feet. When the plane crossed the Salvadoran coast, it was rapidly approaching 300 feet, an altitude at which passengers can see the license plates on cars below them.

Song Hummed

For 25 miles, Mock thundered over the treetops at 240 m.p.h., in theory leaving unprepared missileers stunned in his wake, as he hummed the theme song from “Bonanza:”

We got a right to pick a little fight, Bonanzaaaa.

“If anyone fights any one of us, he’s gotta fight with me.

Mock said later that he was virtually certain there were no missiles, but that he had been given a choice between making a tactical approach or simply flying in like the airliners that travel to San Salvador every day.

“I did it for the fun of it,” he said. “They gave me a license to buzz a whole country, so I used it.”

Later, at a dinner party at a Panamanian restaurant, where a balmy tropical wind blew in from the night as a party of guardsmen dined on steaks and seafood, Bozeman, the senior officer on the trip, looked over his men and asked:

“Would someone take a picture of this and send it to Tom Bates?”