Who Should Decide The Army’s Future? Active Vs. Guard

http://breakingdefense.com/2014/02/who-should-decide-the-armys-future-active-vs-guard/

Who Should Decide The Army’s Future? Active Vs. Guard
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
on February 25, 2014 at 1:22 PM

The National Guard has lost the budget battle inside the administration. But it has hardly lost the war. “We are disappointed by today’s budget preview, but we are not surprised. Nor are we defeated,” declared retired Maj. Gen. Gus Hargett, president of influential National Guard Association of the United States, in a statement released shortly after Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s budget briefing yesterday afternoon. In fact, the odds are looking pretty good for NGAUS because the next fight will be on Capitol Hill, where the Guard’s home-state roots give it a home-field advantage.

That fight will center on the NGAUS-backed proposal to get an independent entity to make decisions about the entire structure of the Army — regular active-duty, National Guard, and Army Reserve. That entity would probably be the same kind of commission a gridlocked Congress has already created for the Air Force and military compensation.

How hot is this issue? One Guard leader, Minnesota Adjutant General Maj. Gen. Richard Nash, formally renounced his membership in the Association of United States Army because AUSA opposes the idea. “It is now clear to me that AUSA does not view the Guard and Army Reserve as full partners,” Nash wrote to AUSA chief retired Gen. Gordon Sullivan, who has written Congress denouncing the independent panel idea. “Why would AUSA oppose an open, transparent commission?”

“We do not need help from outside,” said Sullivan, a retired active duty officer and former Army Chief of Staff himself, when I spoke to him Friday in Huntsville, Ala. at AUSA’s winter 2014 conference. “I don’t think the chief or the secretary need help from the outside from some group that’s not responsible, not accountable, to put the Army together in the future.”