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The longest government shutdown in U.S. history should soon be over, but the damage to the National Guard will likely continue for a while.
That was the message retired Maj. Gen. Francis M. McGinn, the NGAUS president, delivered during a media roundtable Monday with three other military association leaders at the Air and Space Forces Association in Arlington, Virginia.
In addition to NGAUS and AFA, the Association of the United States Army and Reserve Organization of America participated. The four associations represent more than 1.5 million service members.
The event attracted multiple media outlets, including NBC Universal, The Associated Press, Spectrum News, USA Today, Politico, Defense One, Voice of America, Military.com and a Japanese newspaper.
Video of the event is available here.
McGinn said the shutdown has been “uniquely hard on the 433,000 Army and Air National Guardsmen,” especially on the Guard’s more than 30,000 authorized dual-status technicians.
He explained that members of the “unique personnel classification” are drilling Guardsmen who also work Monday to Friday in uniform.
“Their contributions are critical to our daily operations and generating readiness, and really one of the main reasons we provide 20% of the Joint Force and only 4% of the budget,” McGinn added.
While they are indistinguishable from their Active Guard Reserve brothers and sisters, they are considered government employees and not service members. Consequently, they have not been paid for their work since the end of September.
“All of them have struggled to pay their bills,” McGinn shared. “The strain is wearing on their families. Meanwhile, morale has plummeted.”
“I have spoken to adjutants general across the country and they fear an exodus of talent,” he added. “Some of these jobs are already difficult to fill in the first place.”
McGinn had a simple message for lawmakers: Fix this.
Retired Lt. Gen. Burt Field, the AFA president and CEO, agreed.
After the government reopens, he said, Congress should “pass a bill that doesn’t allow this to happen again for our military service members, civilians and Americans.”
The “damage” of this shutdown extends beyond paychecks, McGinn said.
More than a month of vehicle and aircraft maintenance is piling up, he said. In addition, service members have lost opportunities to train and attend military school.
Retired Maj. Gen. John Hashem, the ROA executive director, echoed the concern.
“It’s not just, ‘We’ll pick it up next month,’ it’s that we are in turmoil now — I just can’t throw you back into school if I had to take you out of it,” he said. “I just can’t get you ready for the next exercise because now, probably, the exercise has been changed entirely.”
Guardsmen and Reservists, he added, are essential to national defense. They offer “a true bargain to the taxpayer, they exist in a fragile balance between civilian life and military obligation.”
When the government shuts down, Hashem said, that balance collapses. “Everything has a compounding effect,” he said.
—By John Goheen
