The California Army National Guard

I spent fifteen years in the Army National Guard. Seventeen, if you count my two years Individual Ready Reserve time. All of those years were spent here locally: Six years with A Company of the 579th Engineer Battalion and nine years with the Military Police Detachment that started out as a component of the 570th Military Police Company and then bounced around to, if memory serves me correct, the 870th MP Company today. I even spent six months full time, filling in for a full timer that went to training back east. I enjoyed the Guard and have no regrets. I retired in '92.

That aside, I've thought off and on about what a financial drain the Guard is on taxpayers and was actually thinking about it earlier this morning when, to my surprise, the Sacramento Bee ran a story on our top heavy, free spending California Guard. No surprised there, as far as the content of the story. It just deals with the higher ups, for the most part. They're a lot like our state legislature as far as handing out favors to cronies. They don't mention the cost of the Guard all the way down to the lower levels.

Contrary to what supporters of the Military Industrial Complex claim, as far as I'm concerned, National Guardsman get paid quite well. The most money I've ever made in my life was while on active duty with the Guard. What gets me is when I think of all the money I've seen go down the tubes. At the time I didn't think much about it. Some examples:

Myself and a few others taking a five ton truck out to the Samoa Coast Guard Station to fire off 5000 rounds of M-16 ammo. Not for training. We had to fire all the ammo so we could send the cases back. If we didn't use the ammo, we couldn't put that into our budget request for next year, or so I was told.

Meal tickets, that while they were a blessing, were quite extravegant. One time we were at a pizza place in Concord and ended up getting pizzas for a number of civilians there cause we had the meal tickets to pay for it.

Going to Annual Training one year on a chartered bus. No problem except there were only five of us, as I recall, for an entire greyhound size bus.

In Saudi Arabia, the powers that be, basically boarded the entire company and everyone got a promotion whether they deserved it or not, or even if the soldier wasn't in a position warranting such promotion. That's a lot of money being sucked from the taxpayers with the increase in pay.

While it might have changed since my day, there used to be a number of guardsmen that would just hang around the armory during drill, never really doing much of anything. Getting paid for sitting around drinking coffee.

And when you think of the gasoline we burned up in just an average weekend drill, it boggles the mind. The Guard is a very expensive operation to run and not all those expenses are justified. That's the norm in such organizations, though, I suppose.

All that said, in fairness, that was over ten years ago and some things have changed. I know they started weeding out some of the "hangers on" that found the Guard and attractive way for easy money, at least in the lower ranks. And as we see in the news, since the President declared war on the world, the Guard has taken a very active role in that war. Still, it gets to me every time I hear of another mobilization or even see military people around town, how much this is all costing us. Yet this, even to libertarians like me, is deemed within the constitutional role of government and the proper use of taxpayer money.