Gates: National Guard equipment levels lowest since 9/11; UNITS HAVE ONLY 56% OF REQUIRED EQUIPMENT [View All]

[DeepModem Mom]

LAT: National guard equipment levels lowest since Sept. 11
By Peter Spiegel, Times Staff Writer
May 9, 2007

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon, bearing the brunt of criticism for shortfalls in National Guard supplies in the wake of last week's devastating tornado in Kansas, acknowledged Wednesday that Army National Guard units currently had only 56 percent of their required equipment.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates told a Senate hearing that current equipment levels are the lowest since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He said that the Bush administration's current defense budget request, which asks for $22 billion for the Army National Guard over the next five years, would take guard units up to 76 percent of their authorized equipment levels....

Gates faced pointed questions on Guard readiness at a Capitol Hill hearing from a bipartisan group of senators, who argued that repeated deployments to Iraq were causing shortages in equipment needed for homeland security and national disaster response.

The issue moved back into the spotlight after Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, a Democrat, pointed to the shortfalls after a tornado flattened the farming town of Greensburg, Kan. Guard shortfalls delayed the state's emergency response, she said....

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White House and Pentagon officials have insisted that sharing agreements between the states would ensure that any shortfalls faced by one state during a disaster could be filled by neighboring states. But some experts have challenged that claim, noting that nearly every state is running short of equipment because of overseas deployments.

"These compacts are practically nullified now because all states have people in the sand box; I am talking about Iraq," said Melvyn Montano, former head of the New Mexico National Guard. "If you have four or five states around you, where are they going go get their equipment from? Because they all have been deployed."...

The Army National Guard has told members of Congress that it had $23.6 billion in unfunded requirements that it would need to get back to 100 percent readiness. Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., said failure to fill those requirements means that some states only had 35 percent of their guard equipment....

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-guard10may10,0,986825.story?coll=la-home-nation