A Guardsman for the JCS?: Resurrecting a battle fought and lost eight years ago, two Senators plan to introduce legislation that would make the chief of the National Guard Bureau a four-star general with a seat on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It is not a new idea. The same move—led by Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska)—ran to ground in 1998 during the last bout of trouble between the Army Guard and the active Army. (Read our 1998 article “Guard Controversies.”) The latest initiative—led by Sen. Christopher Bond (R-Mo.) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.)—again focuses primarily on Army troubles, but it also follows on the heels of Air National Guard discontent over the Air Force’s BRAC 2005 decisions and, more recently, plans to cut ANG end strength.
In the face of Chinese war plans to disrupt U.S. command-and-control networks in the event of a conflict, the Air Force needs to focus less on its “connect everything” efforts and prepare its combat aviators to fight without a constant connection to higher-ups, according to a new report from AFA’s…
