Riot Report Says Guard Bungled : Unrest: A series of errors kept troops from going into action for nearly a day, study finds. Commander calls the report ‘fair and accurate’ and says changes are under way.

Ill-prepared and ill-equipped to respond to the riots that erupted after the not guilty verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating trial, the California National Guard bungled its initial deployment of 2,000 troops to Los Angeles because of a series of errors that could have been avoided, a retired general concluded in a report ordered by Gov. Pete Wilson.

The soldiers were on the scene and could have been ready to hit the streets before dawn the day after the verdicts but they were kept in their barracks for most of the day because they did not have bullets, batons, protective shields or the training required to fulfill their mission, retired Army Gen. William H. Harrison said Wednesday.

“There were failures, absolute failures, on the part of the Guard,” Harrison said at a news conference attended by Gov. Wilson.

Wilson acknowledged that the review revealed a “comedy of errors” but added: “There wasn’t anything laughable about it.” He said the study and its recommendations will serve as a road map to guide the Guard and other state agencies in improving their performance.

Brig. Gen. Robert W. Barrow, the Guard’s acting commander, described the report as “honest, fair and accurate.” He said the force was already implementing changes to enable the Guard to respond better to urban violence.

Among other things, the Guard is decentralizing its ammunition storage system to make ammunition available quickly throughout the state and is assuring that all Guard troops can have immediate access to riot gear.

Retired Adjutant Gen. Robert C. Thrasher, who commanded the Guard at the time of the riots but has since stepped down, also said he accepted the accuracy of the charges that his forces were not prepared for riot duty.

But Thrasher said that even with all the problems, the troops were on the streets about 18 hours after the governor called them into action.

“You’re talking about probably the most rapid response in the history of any military organization,” Thrasher said. “That ain’t bad. That’s almost remarkable.”

Harrison concluded otherwise.

His study exonerated the rank-and-file reserve troops who responded to Wilson’s mobilization order after a jury in Simi Valley acquitted four Los Angeles police officers on most charges in the King beating. But he was less kind to the full-time commanders who directed the operation and were responsible for preparing the force for such an event.

The Guard, he wrote, was “deficient in civil disturbance training, ill-equipped for civil disturbance deployment and lacking a civil disturbance mentality. In short, they did not anticipate an on-the-street role and were not prepared for that mission when ordered to mobilize and deploy in support of local law enforcement agencies.”

Harrison traced that failure to an attitude that evolved during the 1980s, when the Guard placed a lower priority on preparing and training for urban civil unrest. This attitude, he said, was prompted by tighter budgets and a growing belief that improved local law enforcement could handle any civil problems that might arise.

After the federal government withdrew funding for civil disorder planning, for example, a quick-response unit created by former Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. in 1976 was allowed to wither away during the Administration of his successor, George Deukmejian. Later, the number of troops required to undergo civil disturbance training was reduced from 10,000 to 5,000.

But even those troops were not trained and prepared in accordance with state and federal regulations, Harrison said.

“The 5,000 civil-disturbance-trained soldiers (that the California National Guard) was supposed to maintain, for all intents and purposes, did not exist,” the general wrote in the report.

Harrison said he found no evidence that Guard officials were specifically told in the weeks leading up to the verdicts that they would not be needed under any circumstances, as some Guard officials suggested immediately after the riots.

But he said the Guard leaders’ many conversations with local law enforcement officials and the state Office of Emergency Services led them to believe that they would be used only in a very limited way if at all. That was one reason the force had lent so much of its riot protective gear to law enforcement agencies that it had to borrow equipment from other states to equip its soldiers.

“They didn’t anticipate they would ever be on the street,” Harrison said.

This set the stage for the events of April 29 and 30, as the looting, arson and violence grew so intense that it could not be halted by the Los Angeles Police Department, the Sheriff’s Department and the California Highway Patrol.

About 9 p.m. on April 29, after conferring with Mayor Tom Bradley, Wilson ordered Gen. Thrasher to send 2,000 troops to Los Angeles. The soldiers were quickly called and assembled and were in place in about 10 armories around Los Angeles by 4 a.m. on April 30.

But the troops were unable to move into assignments because of a series of other problems that plagued the mission. The most notable of these was the fact their ammunition did not arrive until 2 p.m.

This delay, Harrison said, was caused by errors that he attributed to the Guard’s lack of readiness.

The report cited indecision about how many and which kind of aircraft to use to transport the ammunition, slowness in loading the ammunition on the helicopter chosen for the mission, and a decision to reroute the helicopter along the way to save money.

Harrison also said that most of the mobilized troops lacked the civil disturbance training required by state and federal procedures. He said the soldiers got some training while awaiting delivery of their ammunition, but he criticized the instruction as being unnecessary because it was based on outdated assumptions about the nature of the threat the troops would face on the streets.

He said the training was designed to prepare the troops for “unarmed mobs.”

“That was urban warfare down there,” he said, adding that the troops’ combat training and participation in the Gulf War had prepared them for the duty.

If everything had been done right, Harrison said, the ammunition and equipment would have been waiting when the troops arrived in Los Angeles.

“They could have been put out in the street at 4 o’clock in the morning,” he said.

Harrison also criticized the Guard’s performance in the later stages of the riot operation. He said convoys moving from Northern California were out of contact with headquarters for long periods. He said that lack of communication must be remedied.

“No military organization can be considered combat-ready if it cannot command and control its units,” he wrote. “It cannot command and control if it cannot communicate with its combat power.”

Wilson said he expected the Guard to conduct training exercises on urban violence.

The governor also announced Wednesday that he had appointed Maj. Gen. Tandy K. Bozeman to replace Thrasher as the Guard’s commanding officer. Bozeman has been commander of the California Air Guard. He also is a commercial airline pilot and has a doctorate in archeology from the University of California.

Guard Deployment Snags

Retired Army Gen. William H. Harrison’s review of the performance of the California National Guard in the Los Angeles riots detailed a series of errors that kept the soldiers assembling in Los Angeles from being dispatched because they lacked ammunition and equipment. Here are the highlights:

Guard headquarters staff in Sacramento first thought they would be using C-130 cargo planes to move the ammunition and other equipment from depots in San Luis Obispo County to a staging area in Los Alamitos. They later decided to use a helicopter, dispatching the cargo planes to carry Highway Patrol officers instead. The helicopter crew was not alerted until 1:20 a.m. on April 30, more than four hours after the mobilization order.

The CH-47 helicopter’s departure from its Stockton base was delayed when its four-person flight crew realized belatedly that they would need gas masks because they would be transporting tear-gas grenades. They had to wait for a soldier to arrive with a key to the supply room where the masks were stored.

Once the helicopter arrived at Camp Roberts in San Luis Obispo County, where the ammunition was stored, it had to refuel, so the chopper was forced to land in an area away from the ammunition supply point. The ammunition had to be trucked to the helicopter.

The crew failed to bring rollers to ease the loading of the heavy pallets laden with ammunition, and the helicopter’s winch could not do the job without the rollers. So the cargo had to be loaded by hand.

After the pallets were loaded, the crew was told that the cargo contained some obsolete grenades that had to be removed. One pallet was taken off, the grenades were located and replaced, and the pallet was reloaded. In the process, three pallets were broken and had to be resealed. The helicopter finally left Camp Roberts at 9:45 a.m.

To save money by conserving flying hours, aircraft and flight crews, the state headquarters staff decided to send the helicopter to Camp San Luis Obispo to take on additional equipment rather than sending that material in a separate aircraft to Los Alamitos.

The helicopter arrived at Camp San Luis Obispo at 10 a.m. After it was determined that the equipment--batons, flack vests and face shields--would not fit on the helicopter, some of the ammunition had to be removed to make room. After waiting for a load of “lock plates” needed to convert the automatic weapons to semiautomatic, the chopper left San Luis Obispo at 12:20 p.m. and arrived in Los Alamitos at 1:50.

The first Guard unit to participate in the riot operation, the 40th Division MP Company, arrived at Vermont and Vernon avenues at 3:35 p.m.