The Surprisingly Expansive Role of the National Guard

In 2022, some New Mexico students entered their classrooms to find camouflage-clad National Guard members preparing to give the day’s lessons. These civilian-soldiers were filling in as substitute teachers.

National Guard members maintain civilian lives while undergoing regular military training that readies them to be summoned to war. When not on a federal mission, the guard can be summoned by governors to respond to domestic emergencies.

But what qualifies as an “emergency” is up to interpretation. We tend to think of the guard helping communities in the wake of natural disasters, but states have deployed guard members for tasks as varied as helping police check bags in New York City’s subways and driving Massachusetts children to school during a bus driver shortage.

The guard has historically been “used for all sorts of things,” although driving students and substitute teaching did “stretch the frontiers a little,” says John Goheen, director of communications for the National Guard Association of the United States (NGAUS), a membership organization that lobbies on behalf of National Guard officers.

As states struggle with workforce shortages, the National Guard is a useful stopgap measure for governors facing pressure to deliver quick solutions. However, guard members sometimes aren’t trained for the civilian roles they’re asked to fill. Their use for certain roles can also be controversial, especially given their military training.

When guard members deployed to New Mexico classrooms in 2022, some residents reportedly worried they wouldn’t be up to the task of meeting children’s emotional needs, and that putting a military presence in schools could be harmful to kids. The guard’s upcoming deployment to support police in a section of Albuquerque has renewed concerns about deploying a military force to police local communities.

Some guard leaders also worry that lengthy state-level missions take the force away from its primary role of preparing for war, according to Goheen; because of that, they don’t want to become “the easy button” that governors go to all the time for all problems.

A ‘Convenient Resource’

Sending in a military group to handle disaster recovery and humanitarian missions may strike residents of other countries as unusual. But over the past 50 to 70 years, the U.S. military has been involved in many missions that other governments would assign to civilian agencies, says Scott Anderson, a Governance Studies fellow at the Brookings Institution. This is, in part, because the U.S. has such a robust military; there’s bipartisan support for generous military funding, which helps ensure it has strong resources and capabilities, especially around logistics and delivery.

There’s also the ease of this solution for governors: they can call upon the guard directly, mobilizing them to address a given need immediately.

“It's a very convenient resource, where you have large groups of people available to provide surplus manpower at the governor's direction, to pursue a response to all sorts of crises,” Anderson says.

Plus, the guard is affordable: the federal government pays for the guard’s training and drilling, while states only pay salaries when they deploy the guard and only pay for the specific equipment they use. Goheen notes, “For the most part, it’s a real bargain for the states.”

The pandemic may have opened governors’ eyes to just how versatile the guard is. When the guard mobilized to support COVID-19 response, the federal government footed the bill while the governors gave the guard its orders. That may have encouraged governors to readily take advantage of this resource and more deeply explore what roles the guard could play.

Then-NGAUS president, retired Brig. Gen. J. Roy Robinson, wrote in 2022 that, “Over the last two years, never have so many Guard soldiers and airmen undertaken so many missions to help their communities in a time of need.”

Addressing Workforce Shortages

Workforce shortages are driving more uses of the guard. This year, New York deployed the National Guard to fill in for prison guards during a wildcat strike. New Mexico asked the guard to substitute in schools when educators catching COVID-19 worsened the pre-existing teacher shortage. Massachusetts’ use of the guard as drivers came amidst a national school bus driver shortage. A recent guard deployment in Albuquerque comes at the behest of the city police chief, who sought support for his long-understaffed agency.

Guard members have a mix of skills from both their military and civilian lives. Their military training tends to prepare them to be flexible.

“The benefit of using National Guardsmen for state missions is their trainability,” says New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham via email. “Training is a normal part of the military. Learning new, task[-]specific skills to support any state mission is a matter of regular business for the Guard.”

Plus, in some cases, guard members train for common domestic missions. One team within the New Mexico National Guard trains to be ready to respond quickly to natural disasters, for example. As guard members prepare to deploy to support Albuquerque police this month, they’ve first been completing 270 hours of training, per the governor. These guard members will train skills like radio procedures, prisoner transport, drone operations, first aid and emergency vehicle operations, Lujan Grisham says. She adds that many of these guard members have familiarity with Albuquerque law enforcement from prior joint training exercises, including in a 2017 event. That event simulated how local, state and federal partners could collaboratively respond to a hypothetical massive earthquake.

But the amount of specific training guard members get for state-level missions varies. Guard members volunteering to be substitute teachers in New Mexico reportedly cleared a background check and got a few hours of training before being assigned to a class. (The goal was in part just to keep schools open to provide safe spaces, child care and meals).

Sometimes the preparation for state missions is very limited.

“We don’t normally get training for these specialized situations in advance,” says Eric Durr, director of public affairs for the New York Division of Military and Naval Affairs. “We basically deploy people and kind of figure it out.”

Anderson says he’s heard concerns from guard members that, although they do their best to respond to any kind of mission, they’re a military force and not always the best equipped for certain civilian jobs.

Governors are “using a finite military resource, and putting a burden on soldiers and their families, to do a mission where it’s not clear that they're … the right ones to do this, by any stretch of the imagination,” Anderson says. “It's just they are the tool that's available. … They are round pegs being shoved into a square hole.”

Supporting Civilian Law Enforcement?

The guard is a somewhat unique part of the military. The Posse Comitatus Act prohibits federal military from enforcing civilian law, but this ban doesn’t extend to the guard when it’s activated for a state-level mission. But that doesn’t mean the practice is without controversy.

Asking a group that’s been trained in a military combat or occupation context to potentially use force against unarmed residents in a civilian context is a difficult transition, Anderson notes. And there’s risk of mistakes arising from the different way terms are used in a policing context versus a military context. One example comes from 1992, when marines accompanying local law enforcement on a domestic disturbance call at a home misunderstood a police officer’s call to “cover me.” In the policing context, “covering” means holding fire but preparing to shoot if necessary; in the military context, it means to lay down covering fire, and the Marines responded by firing 200 shots into the house.

Federal and state governments have deployed the National Guard to respond to civil unrest like protests and riots, at times with fatal results. Guard members killed several civilians when responding to protests in Detroit and Newark, N.J., in 1967, and in Kent State in 1970. Those incidents sparked public outcry that led to changes in how guard members were trained.Guards responding to civil unrest do not have authority to make arrests and are mainly intended to help police maintain peace and order.

Recently, some jurisdictions have publicly announced limits on how they plan to use the guard to support police. Last year, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said that guard members helping police in New York City subway stations would not carry long guns while at bag checking stations. And Albuquerque will use the guard in a “non-policing, support role that strengthens public safety without overstepping it,” Lujan Grisham says. Reportedly, the deployment will have guard members go without guns or military uniforms and they won’t conduct arrests or do direct police work; instead, they’ll handle tasks like guiding traffic around accidents, transporting detainees to jail, monitoring security cameras and other support tasks that free up police time.

Despite the potential drawbacks, it's easy to understand why governors turn to the guard, again and again.

“There aren't that many other pools of resources, particularly personnel, that governors have routinely available to them,” Anderson says. “There's not really a civilian parallel. Maybe there should be.”