National Guard: Gates weakening security

[tigershark]

National Guard: Gates weakening security
By Roxana Tiron
Posted: 06/11/09 09:24 PM [ET]

National Guard leaders from 48 of the 50 states sent a letter to the House and Senate Armed Services committees on Thursday warning that a budget decision made by Defense Secretary Robert Gates would weaken national security.

The adjutants general from the states, along with three representing U.S. territories, are challenging Gates’s request to halve the C-27J Joint Cargo Aircraft program and transfer all responsibility to the Air Force, in a rare rebuke of the secretary outlined in their letter.
o make their point, the 51 adjutants general who signed the letter indicated the decision “decimates the Joint Cargo Aircraft program [and] is a cause of grave concern.” The National Guard leaders wrote that it would weaken national defense and that they have a hard time understanding “how such a colossal shift in strategy can be rationalized.”

The Army and Air Force so far have shared the program expected to field at least 78 cargo aircraft, mostly for National Guard units. Gates’s fiscal 2010 request would cut the number of planes to 38.

“The cuts would have a devastating impact on the National Guard and weaken our national defense,” the adjutants generals wrote. “Whether responding to regional wind and ice storms, hurricanes on the coastlines, or a large scale terrorist incident, the National Guard needs the [C-27J] to timely deliver personnel and emergency supplies to areas that would otherwise be inaccessible.”

At press time, a spokesman for Gates could not be reached for comment.

While the adjutants general are expressing concern about the impact of the budget decision, they are also sending a clear message that the Guard and Reserve leaders still are not included in major Pentagon decisions despite Congress’s efforts over the past couple of years to ensure that happens.

“Canceling a program for which there is no alternative and that resides primarily in the National Guard to serve both the Governors and DoD [the Department of Defense] without consulting with the leadership of the National Guard is precisely the type of behavior the National Guard Empowerment Act was meant to end,” the adjutants general wrote in the letter.

Source and full story
http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/guard-gates-weakening-security-2009-06-11.html