Army National Guard

By the end of fiscal year 1999, the Army National Guard plans to have 367,000 personnel in military commands in the 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Guam. War planners, the Defense Department (DOD), and the Army have noted that many Guard combat units are not needed to meet the national security strategy of fighting and winning two nearly simultaneous regional conflicts. According to DOD documents and Army officials, these excess forces are assigned to secondary missions, such as providing wartime rotational forces, serving as a deterrent to future adversarial regimes, and supporting civil authorities at home. Previous GAO reports and the report of the Commission on Roles and Missions of the Armed Forces have discussed the need to make better use of reserve forces. This report examines how the Army National Guard Division Redesign Study addresses this need.

GAO found that: (1) the Army National Guard Division Redesign Study developed an option that provides for the conversion of some Guard combat and supporting forces to fill needed, but unresourced, support requirements; (2) this planned conversion is a step in the right direction, but neither this study nor the studies from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation deal with the critical issues of validating the need for the remaining Guard combat structure and eliminating any excess forces; (3) as a result, the studies leave substantial Guard structure in place that has no valid war-fighting mission; (4) according to Department of Defense and Joint Staff officials, however, the Quadrennial Defense Review may consider them; (5) the Army National Guard Division Redesign Study working group (chartered by the Army's Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and Plans) and a parallel study group (the Guard's Division Project Action Committee) considered several options to redesign the Guard combat divisions to fill support requirements; (6) three of these options were evaluated to determine initial costs and feasibility; (7) a General Officers Working Group then selected the option to convert two of the Guard's combat divisions and six combat brigades, about 42,700 spaces, into required support spaces; (8) this option also allows the Guard to keep the other six combat divisions, minus three combat brigades, and create two new divisions with each division containing three enhanced brigades and an active duty administrative headquarters; (9) the study's preliminary estimates are that it would take about $2.8 billion to convert these combat spaces and could take from 10 to 29 years, depending upon annual funding, to complete the conversion; (10) however, the Army does not plan to begin this conversion until it has purchased all the equipment needed to convert another 66,000 active and reserve support spaces, identified through another Army analysis, into required support spaces; (11) the total cost for this first conversion effort is an estimated $2.6 billion; (12) the final costs and implementation time frame for the Division Redesign Study and the feasibility of the new divisions are still being evaluated; and (13) according to Army officials, preliminary results from the cost evaluation indicate that costs could be less than originally estimated.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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