Nation: Changing the Guard

“America,” declaimed South Carolina’s Representative Mendel Rivers, “is too young to die! Meet your challenge! The tocsin sounds, your country calls. We will walk this road together. Tell us your story, and I give you my word you will not bear this cross alone.”

The cross, as the 89th annual conference of the National Guard Association needed no reminding, was a burden of criticism unparalleled in the Guard’s 331-year history. And Mendel Rivers’ philippic, which was extreme even for the highly emotional chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, brought an enthusiastic ovation from some 1,100 delegates assembled in Washington last week.

Resistance to Change. What its defenders did their best to ignore was the National Guard’s sorry performance during the summer riots in Newark and Detroit. In both cities, several deaths were attributed to unnecessary gunfire from Guardsmen. The regular Army generals who commanded the Michigan contingent reported that that state’s Guardsmen were trigger-happy, scary and undisciplined. In the wake of the Detroit upheaval, the President’s Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders also found that Negro representation in the Army Guard is minuscule (1.15% nationwide v. 10.6% in the Army in Viet Nam), officer quality below par, and riot training perfunctory.

The Pentagon, which has been trying to reorganize and reorient the Guard for nearly a decade, moved swiftly to upgrade it. The New Jersey Guard was allowed to go above its official strength level so that more Negroes could be recruited; in four weeks, 106 Negroes have been enlisted, and 130 more are being processed. State units were ordered to raise minimum time spent on riot-control training from six to 32 hours a year, with added courses for officers. Another plan for improving efficiency through a realigning of many units was given an added push, despite the opposition of many Governors, who resist any change in the present setup, which tends to make the Guard a strictly local and highly political implement of the statehouse.

Unanswered Questions. Actually, Guard competence varies greatly from state to state and even from unit to unit. Some Guard units this summer performed more than creditably in the troublesome task of quelling rioters, and 1,300 Texas Guardsmen worked night and day last week in protecting the populace against the ravages of Hurricane Beulah. Yet its overall performance in Newark and Detroit poses timely questions about its fundamental purpose that no amount of speechmaking can hide.

Can it, for instance, perform both as a backup to the nation’s regular armed forces and as a kind of superstate police force—when both jobs require sophisticated skills and equipment undreamed of even a decade ago? To equip both Guard and Reserve units for modern battlefield conditions would cost no less than $10 billion. Should Guard units be brought more tightly under federal control, so that officers, who now are often deeply involved in state politics, have to meet uniform standards of competence? So far, Congress has resisted any suggestion that it look into these and other Guard problems, but the summer’s riots—if nothing else —may finally force it to examine one of its most sacred icons.