National Guard Stripped of Equipment, America Left Unprotected

Ill-equipped Guard units alarm states

By Kirsten Scharnberg
Tribune national correspondent
Published March 19, 2006

SEATTLE -- The conflict in Iraq, launched exactly three years ago as bombs began lighting up Baghdad's midnight skies, has left America's National Guard as one of the most critically wounded casualties of the war.

Since the war began, the Guard has been badly stripped of equipment and resources even as it is tasked with one of the most important on-call jobs on American soil: to be the first line of homeland defense and security in the event of a catastrophic terror attack or a devastating national emergency such as Hurricane Katrina.

Statistics, compiled last year by the Government Accountability Office, are startling:

Non-deployed Guard units have just 5 percent of the lightweight rifles and 14 percent of the machine guns they are authorized to have.

Units nationwide have just 8 percent of the flatbed semi-trailers they are authorized to have and 10 percent of the Humvees.

And despite the fact the Guard likely would be the first force to respond to a terrorist attack, which many experts fear could involve the use of chemical or biological weapons, its units have only 14 percent of their authorized chemical decontamination equipment and virtually none of the chemical agent monitoring equipment they are supposed to have.

Well, better go down and get your own gun, cause if you think the National Guard is going to help you in the event of a national disaster, invasion or terrorist attack, think again. Where was that thread that dared us to give reasons why not to support the war in Iraq? Well, add this to the list, by God.

It's funny because people are complaining because they don't have enough... Of course, if they had all of it you would here people saying the NWO is about to take over.

CMDR,

Yes, you're absolutely right on this one.

BUT seeing that we are threatened all the time, you'd think we'd have protection?

TA, I had much the same thoughts after reading similar news about a month ago, and I posted a story along these lines to the WOT forum. I don't like it one bit that the NG, the state militias basically, have been so depleted of men and equipment. It stinks in a lot of ways.

WOT has left US MORE vulnerable than ever

cmdr and dg, lol, that exchange was delightfully simple and to the point.

World solution simple: Disable every last bit of our entire military, except for the units required to directly support enough nukes to defend ourselves. And keep the subs a cruisin', just in case. A foreign miltary steps foot on American soil, they lose their country. Otherwise, they get to keep it. Seems to me that would be more in line with what our Constitution says. And oh, terrorists? Where? We keep our nose out of other country's business, and I don't think we'd need to worry bout them too much.