Air National Guard History – Part 3
FORGING THE AIR NATIONAL GUARD
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Part 1 | Part 2| Part 3 | Part 4
Beginning in 1951, the Air Force established specific mobilization requirements for the Air Guard in its war plans for the first time. The ANG would train against those requirements and plans for the first time.
ANG leaders proposed the air defense runway alert program as a way to combine realistic training and support of a significant combat mission in peacetime.
Beginning on an experimental basis in 1953, it involved two fighter squadrons at Hayward, California and Hancock Field at Syracuse, New York. They stood alert from one hour before daylight until one hour after sundown.
Despite Air Staff doubts and initial resistance, the experiment was a great success. By 1961, it had expanded into a permanent, round-the-clock program that included 25 ANG fighter squadrons. Today, the ANG provides 100 percent of the Air Force’s continental-United States-based air defense interceptor force.
The runway alert program was the first broad effort to integrate reserve units into the regular peacetime operating structure of the American armed forces on a continuing basis. It was the precursor of the total force approach to reserve components training and utilization.
The third major innovation — the gaining command concept of reserve forces management — meant that the major air command responsible for using a Guard or Reserve unit in wartime would actually train it during peacetime. ANG leaders had pressed for that arrangement for years. However, the active duty Air Force had strongly resisted the change.
The concept was grudgingly adopted in 1960 because of budget cuts and public criticism of the air reserve programs by General Curtis E. LeMay, then Air Force Vice Chief of Staff. It improved the effectiveness of ANG units by giving Air Force commanders direct personal incentives for improving the performance of those reserve organizations.
It also established firm precedents for the total force policy by integrating the Air Guard into the daily operations of the active force. The fourth major policy innovation — the selected reserve force program — reflected Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara’s determination to build an elite force of highly capable reserve units to support the Kennedy administration’s flexible response policy. He wanted America’s military forces, including its reserve components, prepared to respond immediately to a spectrum of conflicts including guerilla and limited conventional war.
To support flexible response and improve readiness, McNamara acted to shrink America’s large reserve establishment and merge the National Guard with the purely federal reserve components. Efforts at merger had been tried several times since World War II, always failing. It failed again in the early 1960s.
McNamara then created a selected reserve force in each of the military services. They had priority access to equipment, could recruit to full wartime strength, and were allowed to conduct additional training each year. They would provide most of the nation’s strategic military reserve in the United States while a growing share of the active force was engaged in the Vietnam War.
Through the 1950s, the Air Guard evolved into a force that was increasingly integrated with the planning and operations of the Air Force. By the end of the decade, the Air Guard had become a larger, more capable, and increasingly diverse organization. By the end of Fiscal Year 1960, its personnel strength had grown to 71,000 including 13,200 technicians.
The ANG’s force structure included tactical fighter and reconnaissance, troop carrier, heavy airlift, and aeromedical evacuation units. But, while it continued to modernize its weapons systems, its aircraft were still obsolescent by active duty Air Force standards. For example, in 1960 its fighter inventory consisted entirely of jets including F-100s, F-104s, F-84s, and F-89Js.
During the 1960s, the air reserve components began to demonstrate the fruits of those four policy innovations. In 1961, President Kennedy activated a limited number of Reserve and Guard units during the Berlin crisis. In a show of American resolve, the President dispatched 11 ANG fighter squadrons to Europe.
Although they required significant additional training after they were ordered into federal service, all of those Guard units were in place overseas within one month of mobilization.
By contrast, mobilization and overseas deployment during the Korean War had taken ANG units at least seven months. Some 21,000 Air Guardsmen were mobilized during the Berlin crisis. During the Berlin callups, reliance on second-rate equipment continued to plague the Air Guard. Although publicly lauded for their performance, the Berlin mobilization revealed serious shortcomings in the ANG. Basically, it had not been trained and equipped as a highly ready force capable of immediate deployment and integration with the active duty Air Force in a broad spectrum of scenarios ranging from a general war with the Soviet
Union to low level counterinsurgencies or “brush fire wars” as they were called in the early 1960s. Instead, the Air Guard was still a “Mobilization Day” force that required substantial training, personnel augmentation, and additional equipment after it was called into federal service.
Despite adoption of the gaining command concept of reserve forces management, the Air Force lacked plans and adequate stocks of spare parts to integrate Air Guard units in situations short of a general war with the Soviet Union. Guard units had been limited by DoD policy to 83 percent of their wartime organizational strength. The gap had to be filled by mobilizing approximately 3,000 AFRES individual “fillers.” Air Guard pilots, although considered excellent individual flyers, had to be trained on a crash basis for transoceanic flight, crash landings at sea, and aerial refueling.
During the summer and fall of 1961, the Air Guard had to respond to frequent changes in personnel manning documents by the Air Force. For all these and other reasons, Air Guard units mobilized in 1961, required extensive training, re-equipment, and reorganization once they were called into federal service.
The United States Air Forces in Europe (USAFE) lacked spare parts needed to support their aging F-84s and F-86s. ANG units had been trained to deliver tactical nuclear weapons, not conventional bombs and bullets. They had to be retrained for conventional missions once they arrived on the continent.
Altogether, it took an enormous effort to make those units operational in Europe, the majority of mobilized Air Guardsmen remained in the continental United States. Privately, the Air Force concluded that the Air Guard units sent to USAFE had achieved an extremely limited operational capability before they returned home in 1962 after the crisis abated. They were skeptical about the military value of the entire deployment. Senior officers noted that it had required a major diversion of USAFE’s resources and doubted the effectiveness of ANG units in the opening stages of a general war.
Please check back next week for part 4 of the 4 part series…