 As many of you know, the Chief of Staff of the Army, General Odierno, approved the aviation restructure initiative back in December of 2013, and the first execution order came out four months later. This ARI, as it is called, is a five-year plan with the stated objective of streamlining the Army's aviation assets amid tightening budgets. Part of this plan is to cut three of the 13 active duty aviation brigades, and the reserve component would retain 12, 10 in the National Guard and 2 in the reserve, to eliminate the fleet of OH-58 helos and use apaches to fill the recon and scout roles, to replace TH-67 training helicopters with dual-engine Lakotas. And of course, the Army plan, as announced, was to pull the apaches from the Guard inventory and, in turn, provide Black Hawk helicopters. This ARI did meet with quite a bit of controversy, and in fact, the fiscal year 2015 National Defense Authorization Act called not only for a commission to look at the structure of the Army going forward, but a special focus on the transfer of the Apache helicopters. Today's discussion builds upon previous discussions we have had here at CSIS, both public and private, including last month's panel with active-duty Army participants talking about the ARI. Today's discussion is not to debate the issue. It is to offer a State's perspective and, in fact, three State's perspectives. Immediately to my left is Major General Michael McGuire. He is the Adjutant General from the great State of Arizona, or he is also the Director of that State's Department of Emergency and Military Affairs Cabinet-level position. He was commissioned in 1987 and has held several operational combat and training assignments in the F-16 fight in Falcon. He joined the Arizona Air National Guard's 162nd Fighter Wing in 2001, and he's commanded the 214th Recon Group at Davis-Monthan and the 162nd Fighter Wing. To his left is Colonel Ray Davis, who is currently the J3 Director of Military Support for the South Carolina National Guard. He was commissioned in 1992, I don't mean to make him older than he actually is, or he was assigned as artillery but then shifted to aviation in 1995. In the last 17 years, he's spent in the 151st Attack Reconnaissance Battalion, including his Battalion Commander. And finally, we'll hear from Chief Ken Jones. He was an Aviation Standardization Officer with the 97th Aviation Troop Command in the Utah National Guard. He has done that since 2013. In 1980 and 81, he completed armor basic officer bases. Let me try this again. In 1980 and 1981, he completed armor officer basic course at Fort Knox and then armor rotor wing flight school at Fort Rucker, where he graduated as the number one of 50 students. He left active duty in 1992 as a captain and entered the Utah National Guard as Chief Oren Officer too. Between 1992 and 2012, he was a Standardization Instructor Pilot, Instrument, Flight Examiners, Officer Gunner, and Tactical Ops Officer. He has nearly 13,000 flight hours, plus 4,000 simulator hours, and 2,271 combat flight hours in the Apache. So I challenge any of you to countermand anything he says about the Apache today. But without further ado, I'd like to turn the floor over to Jamal Gweyer. Sir? Well, good morning, Stephanie, and thank you for having us. First off, I feel it appropriate to introduce who I am, not in the form of a bio, but just to make clear that I do serve in concurrent positions as the Director of Emergency and Military Affairs in the State of Arizona and as the Adjutant General and Commanding General of the Arizona Army and Air National Guards under the command of our Commander-in-Chief, Governor Doug Ducey. And I'm here today to do exactly what the title of the panel is, which is provide a State's perspective on the Army Restructuring Initiative, or better known as ARI. And, you know, I'm sure there's quite a few of you that have ties to the United States Army that are wondering why, by his own admission, a career F-16 pilot who has just short of 18 months in joint command that could not spell TASM-G or many of the other acronyms associated with the Army nearly 18 months ago is sitting up here. I think it is to provide what I'd call an objective look at how we got to the need for a panel on a State's perspective. So I'll take you back to the first time that I had been in the position, was appointed in September 9th of 2013. And in late November, nearly 60 days later, I was at the Guard Senior Leader Conference, and senior Army official officially rolled out to the Agents General this proposal. And the preamble for the professional Army officers in the room to this was that the attack or shooting battalions of which the Army, at the time, possessed 37, were the infantry battalions of 100 years ago, and that a division commander would not put his soldiers in harm's way in an era where we had air dominance without having those shooting battalions in tow and ready to support our soldier, sailors, airmen, and Marines on the ground, be it in close air support or air interdiction, time-sensitive targeting, whatever the demand might be. But in that shadowed against the Budget Control Act and the looming issues with sequester that the Army was going to have to take some reduction and they planned to pay the bill in ARI with this divesture of the OH-58 Alpha Charlie, the OH-58 Delta Kiowa warrior and the TH-67 essentially vertically cutting some aviation resources and cutting their inventory from seven to four platforms. And the remaining requirements for the Kiowa warrior would be absorbed by the Apache and that as a result of that we would just have recently made a decision to field what, by all accounts, is the most complex aircraft in the world in the F-35 and deliver that to the Air National Guard. But I didn't say anything. I listened 60 days in the job. I'm the rookie, so I paid attention and moved forward and left there determined as an adjunct general that happened to have ADCON authority of an attack battalion in the State of Arizona to return to the State and talk with the battalion commander and the attack aviators from the perspective of a professional aviator to say, are you incapable of doing the mission? Are you truly incapable of not meeting the requirements of the United States Army? And the answer I got back was that, sir, our attack battalion in Arizona has deployed three times since September 11th. We've accepted every mission set that's been delivered to us, have never turned a mission away, and have returned with honor each time and served this country with honor. So I took from that the idea I spoke with then Governor Brewer and I asked her if I had her permission to publish an op-ed that basically was run in the Arizona Republic and was picked up by a number of national media outlets to basically refute the idea that we were not capable of doing these missions. Governor Brewer and I both had the luxury of being one of two Apache States, us in Missouri, that also had a seat on the Council of Governors, which was a mandated Council of 10 Governors, five Republicans and five Democrats that were supposed to work in a consultative manner with the Department of Defense. So in 2014, late 2014, when the budget was rolled out, we went to a Council of Governors meeting and the narrative at that time that was delivered to us from senior Army leadership had nothing to do at this time with the idea that we were incapable of doing the mission, the narrative had something to do with the idea of why would a governor need a Pachy's? What state mission is there for a governor to need a Pachy's? And I was struck by that as that seemed to be an odd statement as a guy who had served in the F-16. I think that the corollary is why would a governor need the F-16's, and that the proper way to phrase the question is why does a state need a Pachy's mission, it's not the individual governor, and more importantly, why does the nation and the Army need a Pachy's? And if the Army and the nation believes that a Pachy's is part of the infrastructure that we need to support and prosecute the nation's wars, we need strategic depth and a combat reserve, and the primary combat reserve of the United States Army is the Army National Guard. And so it made no sense to me why we would engage in that kind of a discord. So I again got home from that trip, met with Governor Brewer and asked for her permission to publish at least my version of an op-ed, and this one was run in defense news and picked up at the national level about, this is at least my answer to why a state needs a Pachy's, because I think that's a slippery slope when we look at combat arms and the requirements that we need to provide strategic depth for the nation for the unforeseen. I don't know what will happen in the future, but I do know that the world that we live in is very unpredictable. So we moved forward and the Secretary of Defense's office was very receptive to the pushback from the governors, and so they agreed over the summer to put together a CAPE study. And forgive me the acronym. Cost assessment and program evaluation. Okay, one of the offices, lots of acronyms, especially for an air guy going into OSD. But they agreed to put together a CAPE study to investigate a counterproposal from the guard to increase a total number of available battalions from 20 to 24 using a multi-compo and guard-pure mix, and see what the difference in retaining that structure in the guard would be. And the 20% increase in attack aviation capacity in the Army was best case, a 2% increase in budget, worst case an 8% increase in the aviation budget in the Army direct rate. And so understanding how budget decisions are made as a Cabinet Secretary back at home, and we go through this similar drill in our State, I found it to be odd that when we get to where we are today, where we're having a panel on the State's perspective, when I left that briefing in late November as a member of the Council of Governors being briefed by CAPE, that the Army would opt to continue on the path where the return on investment versus the override and cost, I found it to be a surprising decision. That I would think that juxtaposed against the preamble from nearly 15 months prior, that this type of battalion is the most critical element of supporting our soldiers in an asymmetric war, and a war that we're currently engaged in today, I can't imagine any service component wanting to take risk or reductions in that area if that truly is the thing that is most important in the fight. And I came to the determination that truly, that this is a decision that's being made as a result of budget. This is, in my opinion, a temporary, a permanent destruction of capability and reserve capacity in the National Guard based on a temporary budget problem. I believe that the budget and the budget crisis that we face is part of our national security equation, but I also believe as a Cabinet Secretary that as just as I do back at home, my duty is to advocate for what's best in our case for the State and I believe that the Secretary of Defense is doing the same for the Nation. The way we get after fixing that problem is what is flummoxed both myself and now our current Governor, Doug Ducey. So with that, I'd like to turn it over to Colonel Ray Davis and Chief Jones and I'll say as a preamble, these are two great Americans and I'd think for everyone in the audience it's important for me to say that I look at them as soldiers. These are members of the Army. They're Army first. The fact that they're in the National Guard, that is a fact, but these soldiers train shoulder to shoulder and have fought shoulder to shoulder for the last 13 years and I am humbled to have an opportunity to be here. So Colonel Davis. Thank you, General McGuire. I'm Colonel Ray Davis. I've been a part of the South Carolina National Guard for the past 28 years. The last 22 years I've been an Army officer and on behalf of my Adjutant General, Major General Robert Livingston and Governor Nikki Haley, it's truly an honor to be here with you today. I'm here because I've had the opportunity and the distinct privilege to lead some of America's finest sons and daughters in combat. I've deployed three times, two of which were combat tours to Iraq. The first was in 2004. My unit was an Alpha Model Apache unit. I was the operations officer and when we deployed to the Iraqi Theater and we formed an aviation task force and we performed a myriad of missions. We attacked reconnaissance, lift, medevac. It was all in support of ground troops. Late 2004 was a very volatile time in Northern Iraq. One afternoon in Mosul, December 2004, one of our air weapons teams was engaged in a, we call it a tick, troops in contact. We had infantry soldiers on the ground directly engaged with insurgent forces. We responded to that call for assistance and during this response, CW4, then CW2, Austin Norris, his aircraft was hit 16 times by machine gun fire. One of those rounds hit CW4 Norris' left forearm. His co-pilot took control of the aircraft. They flew back to the forward operating base. He was promptly medevacked out of country and over the course of two months, CW4 Norris went through six surgeries. He fought very hard and rejoined our unit and completed that deployment with the rest of the soldiers. CW4 Norris and the entire unit served with distinction and for that service during that deployment, the entire unit was awarded a valorous unit award. With that 2004 deployment, we had about six weeks notice that we were going to be mobilized. We spent two and a half months at the mobilization station, which included our gunnery requirements and our theater specific training. In 2009, I took command of the 1st to 151st Attack Reconnaissance Battalion. In 2011, we mobilized again. I want to set the record straight on post-mobilization training timelines. It's true we spent more time than other units with different airframes at the mobile station, but we were completed two separate and distinct requirements. Every unit, regardless of component, Army, National Guard and Reserve had to complete the unit fielding and training program. We completed the resident portion of the unit fielding and training program along with the post-mobilization requirements. That in itself was a success story that we did it in the time allotted. This unit, along with the others that have been fielded, the 864D and the reserve component, they don't have to do that again. If we're called upon, we go through the same training that everybody else does and we're ready to go wherever the nation needs us. This capacity and this capability is bought and paid for. It resides in our reserve component. Once we were in our rack, we were tasked again as part of a multi-compo task force with the same myriad of missions. It was a little more complex this time. We had, in addition to the attack reconnaissance lift and medevac, we also had a UAS detachment with us, Gray Eagles. We were almost 700 personnel and 50 aircraft, which it made it one of the largest battalion aviation task forces to ever serve in the Iraqi theater. They say in the Army there's a common expression that NCOs are the backbone of the Army. This definitely holds true for aviation. There's a variety of occupational specialties that provide the necessary support behind the scenes support that make us successful, give us that ability to generate combat power. One particularly important specialty are our maintainers. Maintainers like Staff Sergeant Stephen Beasley, who was part of a ground unit previously, he was wounded in Iraq in 2005. Because of what he observed from the attack reconnaissance battalions during that deployment, it drew him to our mission. He wanted to become a part of the South Carolina National Guard's 1st to 151st ARB. He was the corrections officer at the time. He continues to serve today in South Carolina, performing his duties as a 15 Romeo crew chief with distinction. There are many success stories I want to share with you one more. Sergeant Lauren Rhodes, 2006, she was a senior in high school. She was drawn again to the South Carolina National Guard in the 1st to 151st because of the mission, because of the prestige of the of the unit, what we had accomplished, and she wanted to be a part of bigger team, something greater than herself. As soon as she graduated high school, she went off to basic and AIT and as soon as an opportunity became available, she volunteered to deploy with another unit because she wanted to give back. She came back to our unit and as a very young enlisted soldier was leading a phase team, which is an aviation maintenance is a pretty big deal. 11 soldiers performing phased inspections on aircraft, which basically you strip that aircraft down and you rebuild it again. She and 11 soldiers could take that aircraft, rebuild it and get it back in the fight in about two weeks time, which was a phenomenal accomplishment. She continues to serve today while she's pursuing her higher education was even recognized as our NCO of the year. When our unit completed operation new dawn at the end of 2011, we led the final convoys out of Iraq at the time we were hoping that would be the last time we had to go back there. But we transitioned to Kuwait. We still had time to left to serve on our mobilization. And we were presented with a very unique challenge and completely different mission set from what we had trained for and flown and conducted the previous eight months. We were tasked to become part of the Army's over water operation, you know, in conjunction with the US Navy and the Air Force, which would require us to operate our helicopters day and night over the northern Arabian Gulf and land on the back of littoral combat ships. We conducted this mission change in about 30 days time. We went we were given the resources. We were given enough time. And we transitioned to the entirely new mission set and completed the remainder of that mobilization and employment with distinction. And then we passed that knowledge and that skill set along to the rest of the Apache community and we're still doing that today. The soldiers and aviators that I mentioned are they're they're community based, you know, they're our neighbors, our sons and daughters, their police officers, their students, airline pilots, their varsity football coaches. This force is phenomenal. The experience that resides in our reserve component, you can't put a price tag on that. In my unit alone, instructor pilots average 16 years of experience. Our maintenance test pilots more than 20. Our senior NCOs average 23 years of experience working on Apache helicopters. As part of the total force, I would put my unit up against any adversary in the world today. In my opinion, ARI trashes this experience. And it makes an irreversible and permanent move to a temporary problem. With that, I'd like to hand over to CW five, Ken Jones. He is one of the most experienced, if not the most experienced attack pilot currently serving today with more than 10,000 hours in the attack mission and more than 22 hours in combat. Chief Jones. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Stephanie. Thank you for those introduction. 2200 hours of combat time. Even I have 22 hours of combat time. I have a little more than that. That's fine. Anyway, thank you for those introductions. And good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I'm honored to be here. I am a proud member of the US Army and the Utah Army National Guard. Our commander chief is Governor Gary Herbert and our adjutant general is Major General Jefferson Burton. And I've been fortunate enough to have longevity in this job. And I've learned a lot over the years. And so I'm approaching 35 years of military service. And my first 12 years were in the active duty. And I'll come back to that in just a little bit. The last 22 years have been in the Utah and Army National Guard. So my passion for flying started when I was about six years old when John Glenn was orbiting the Earth. And I said, you know, that's pretty neat. I'd like to maybe be one of those military aviators. So it led me down the course that I'm at right now. And it kind of has driven a lot of my actions since that young age. The going back to my years on active duty, I was in the Six Cab Brigade. We had AH-1 Cobra's. And from that combat unit, I transitioned to Fort Rucker to start teaching young aviators how to be Cobra pilots. So I became a AH-1 Cobra instructor pilot. The AH-64 patches were online now. And I'm not at the beginning, but I was near the beginning of the transition to make AH-64 instructor pilots. And so I had that opportunity to teach young guys and new aviators how to fly the AH-64. And from that job, I went on to be in the 101st and attack helicopter recon battalion. I had a different name back then for them. But essentially, it's another combat unit. And I enjoyed those years on service. But in 1992, this military is doing exactly what's happening now, which is downsizing. And I was looking for a home. And I took that passion for flying attack helicopters to the Utah Army National Guard, where I've been for the last 22 years doing essentially the same job. So there's a lot of continuity. And I've grown a lot over the years, too. I've learned many things. And we're able to, there are other guys in our unit, too, that have the same kind of experience that I have. There's at least 10 or more guys that came from active duty attack missions and came to our unit. Those guys would not have had a home to pursue that passion if it weren't for the Utah Army National Guard or the South Carolina National Guard. And the other, there's eight states total. So it's been my good fortune to be able to continue in the attack business. Now, I've been deployed four times in the National Guard. The first time was in 2001. We went to Kuwait for Operation Desert Spring. And it formed a lot of learning experiences for me that we carried over into the next appointment. So I've had three deployments to Afghanistan. Oh, we have five, eight and 12. And we basically trained for full spectrum operations. The new name is called decisive action. Prior to my first Afghan deployment, we have not forgotten how to do full spectrum ops. We still practice full spectrum ops decisive actions. But we pivoted for OEF five to be able to do what we now call close combat attack or CCA. And in that first deployment, we learned quite a few things that we carried to the next deployment. But on the first deployment, we were on what they called the acronym is QRF, which stands for Quick Reaction Force Missions. We're on Strip Alert, essentially. And we need to be able to get airborne in a very short period of time and support the ground commander that was coming underneath attack. And basically, they call those ticks, troops, and contact. And we would get there as fast as we could, along with the Air Force, who would also help protect the ground troops. So we would do ground convoys, security. We would do air escort on air assault missions, carrying in special ops troops to capture high value targets. We would be providing the coverage on the infill. We would be providing overhead coverage during the execution of the mission to capture these high value targets. And we'd cover the X-fill of the CH-47s and the UH-60s. Or in the case of my last deployment, our unit had nightly direct support to a Tier 1 operator. And so there were little birds in that formation, CH-47s. There was a whole stack of aircraft that was participating in that fight. So it isn't a, it's a joint mission. And so we became very good at integrating with AC-130 or Ravens, UAVs, of other, you know, shadows, gray eagles. They're all out there. So the National Guard is certainly capable of handling the manned, unmanned teaming aspects. And we also, you know, provided basically coverage for other forces besides UAVs. The Germans were in country, the Belgians. There were a lot of organizations from a joint point of view that we were providing close combat attack to. So the, during these missions, we became very expert, I mean, expertise, our expertise level increased significantly for air ground interdiction. And we continue to train on air ground interdiction. This week, our unit helped the 19th Special Forces and the British JTACs, which are Joint Tactical Air Controllers, who controlled the firepower of both ATINs, F-16s, Apaches to just be able to put rounds on target and help the ground commander complete his mission. So there's, we're very well versed in every mission that the Army has asked us to do, and we can pivot to any new mission that they asked us to do in a very short period of time. Just give us the resources and we can train to that goal. The point is, we are capable of going within 30 to 60 days, anywhere where you ask us to go, whether that would be to Africa or to, you know, some other location, you just need to give us the resources to be able to meet those timelines. If we were to home station mode, like we did for our first deployment out of Kuwait, we can save a significant amount of time, and also a significant amount of dollars. So a way ahead would be to continue what we've done in the past. And now that we've completed UFTP, I think it would be very simple to home station mode our unit as would be South Carolina or anybody else. So our accessibility, I don't think is in question. It's just a matter of redirecting how we do business, and we should be able to meet any mission that the Army gives us, and I'm confident that the National Guard can do a good job with that. So what I'd like to do right now is just relate back to a mission that I was on when I was helping the Arizona National Guard on OEF 7 and 8. We were performing quick reaction QRF type of missions, and we got a call late one night. We have a Huey that went down. He was a single ship with some special operators on board, and so we launched out as fast as we could because we need to try to protect those soldiers. And when we arrive on station, we see that the Taliban has already destroyed the Huey, and we began a search pattern to try to find these five individuals. And there were UAVs or unmanned aerial vehicles overhead. In this particular case, it was a shadow. And the shadow found a target, and we got clearance of fire from a ground commander that was watching the live video feed from the UAV, and we engaged the enemy, and then we continued looking for the five individuals. Again, the UAV found the individuals. They informed us. But now we're up in the mountains. It's not going to be easy to get these guys out of there. The ground convoy is, there's a team coming to try to rescue these guys, but they're going to have an extremely difficult time getting up to where these guys are. And we're running low on fuel, so my wingmen and I make a decision. There's no way to get these guys out of here tonight. So we landed in the middle of the night in the mountains in a dusty area, and we took off our own survival vests and gave them to the individuals. They put them on. They strapped on the aircraft with carabiners. I put three of my aircraft. I put two on my wingman's aircraft when we flew them over to the ground convoy that was to pick them up. And then we headed on home. So the story that I'm trying to articulate here is that the National Guard Aviators are capable of thinking outside of the box. We are flexible. We are creative. We can do any mission that you ask us to do, and we can do it with the right kind of resources. So the one thing about the National Guard that is good is that we have continuity. You have older aviators like myself that make sure all the young aviators know how to do the mission. And so our turnover rate is very low. And so we have the opportunity for guys like myself and the other ones that came off of active duty to continually educate the young guys, the young aviators. And so we can do the same missions without as many resources because of experience and because of continuity. And we think it would be a travesty to get rid of that capability. And I think that if we can find a solution to continue with a one team, one fight, that would be very beneficial because the current little quote that is going around is, we need all hands on deck. Now is the time to be building up, being prepared for these unknown contingencies in this uncertain world that we live with, live within. That is all I have, sir. Thank you. I would like to thank our three panelists for offering their perspectives. I have a couple of questions as the moderator. I ask you guys to all prepare your questions for when I'm done with my few. The first one I have relates to something I mentioned in my opening remarks, which was that the National Defense Authorization Act for this current fiscal year created a commission. And the commission is supposed to look at the structure of the army going forward. And it has a special call out for looking at the aviation restructure initiative. I think that is a result in part because of the controversy that has come up over the last year that's been under discussion and some congressional concerns. I think also as the commissioners get seated on this commission, and that should happen in the next couple of weeks, they're going to be looking forward to their February 1, 2016 deadline and wondering how they can impact decisions that are already in the hopper or may have already been made. If I could turn to each of the three panelists and ask if a commissioner was to take you aside and ask you what is the one or two things that they need to know about the ARI, how would you reply? Sir? Well, first, I did fail to mention the commission, so thank you for bringing that up. The commission itself, and I'm going to provide a State's perspective on that, is that I think all of us as professional military officers first would prefer to be able to have many of these things resolved by military professionals. I think there's not a guy from any component that wouldn't agree with that. Understanding that, I do think that the uncertainty of the nature of the threat in the world mirrored against this very austere budget environment has made it very, very difficult to find the trade space to meet the nation's requirements. And so in my opinion, the first comment about ARI, if I were to talk to a commissioner, is that from a State's perspective, it is our opinion that the commission was formed to be a response to a problem. And it's not just ARI, it's the total structure of the Army, and that laying in what we'll call permanent and decisive decisions pending a resolution and a report back from the commission would be a mistake and contravert the reason that Congress asked for the commission. So from a State's perspective, understanding annual budget priorities and the rest, I would say that we would advocate from the State to hold on any permanent decisions as it pertains to further divestiture of attack aviation from the National Guard until the commission has an opportunity to report back to those that have asked for the report, and that would be the United States Congress. The only other comment that I would make to a commissioner about ARI specifically is that I would just like him to go out and meet some of the guys in the attack battalion in Arizona where they can go meet Chief Ken Jones. I mean, you got five Americans that can say they're alive today because of his actions. That's what I'd like the commissioners to do and ask him how he was able to maintain that level of readiness for 35 years and say to me yesterday in person that when he left the active component, he served proudly for 12 years, and that if we make a decision like this in ARI, I know no place for the new Ken Jones that's currently serving at Fort Hood, the land, if he makes a family decision to leave the active component. Certainly he can fly Black Hawks or Chinooks, but I'll be very frank with you. I'm a fighter pilot by trade, and we routinely do not take our mobility air forces pilots at 12 years of their life and try to make fighter pilots or vice versa. It's kind of a dyed in the wool combat arms capability, and so we cut off that opportunity when we remove that. So I would just want to make sure that the commissioners were aware of what hung in the balance, but it's somewhat disingenuous for me to be able to say I've done that mission. I've never served a day in my life in the United States Army, but I have served as a combat aviator, flew in the First Gulf War in 90 and 91, have seen guys get shot down less than five miles away from me, so I understand combat aviation. The mission is not germane to an individual service, so that's what I would want the commissioners to know, is both that I believe that they have an important duty to do in the most objective fashion possible, and that I think as a National Guardsman, I would say we want to run in the race fairly. We can demand no more. Colonel Davis. Thank you. First of all, I would state that this issue is not about the states. It's not about the eight states that have Apaches. It's about our nation's defense. It's what's right for the country. It's about having the strategic depth across a variety of missions and not putting all of your eggs in one basket. We also, in my remarks, I talked about the experience that resides. That needs to be recognized, and a price tag needs to be put on that. What are we truly losing if we make this decision? Our past mobilization timelines, they're really irrelevant. It's about what we can do in the future, and that needs to be the focus. As a former commander, I would have a really hard time looking at a soldier like Sergeant Rhodes in the face and say your nation really doesn't need your skill set anymore. Thank you. I would encourage the commission to go out and look at these National Guard Units. Get a firsthand look. Get a feel for what they're doing. Look at the value that they bring to the nation. Look at their experience. Look at their continuity. Look at how we resource them, and then how would we plan for mobilization? Let's take a deeper look at home mobilization. Just go out there with an open mind, and maybe you might understand what these dedicated citizen soldiers are doing for our nation. I'm going to reserve my second question for later on, but I would like to open the floor to questions from you all. As a reminder, we've got folks with microphones. If you could wait to be recognized by me, wait for the microphone, and then state your name, affiliation, and a question. I can't emphasize that enough. We are looking to have these panelists here answer as many questions as possible, so please ask your question in the form of a question. If I can go to this young lady first, and then we'll go to General Swan second. Hi, Jen Judson with Politico, formerly inside the Army. I wanted to ask you about the CAPE study that I've actually seen in December. It came out on the side of the active Army and their plan, so I'm wondering what your thoughts are on that. Is CAPE wrong? How are they wrong, and how do you think that studies like this will influence the commission? I'll take that. I was in the outbrief with CAPE, and I think that the, if you look at cost alone, the Army got it right, that if you look at just dollars, it is 2% to 8% is more than the baseline number. There is a cost to that. But I believe there are some empirical numbers that you can't necessarily quantify just with dollars, be it experience, strategic depth, and most importantly, I'm an Air Force guy. I understand and I'll, any of the Army guys can correct me if I'm wrong here, but typically, the core unit is this brigade combat team. So we use attack and reconnaissance battalions to support brigade combat teams, typically in groups of two to four. And so if I do the math for what CAPE's number came up with, which is 20 battalions, and I look at the number of BCTs that they propose in the budget, there are BCTs that could be called into harm's way without that thing that they said is most important. So if you have 48 of them and you can cover two to four best case with a single A or B, why would you leave some of them uncovered? So if I am making a strategic choice and I have the opportunity to go up to 24 with this multi-compo or guard peer option, and the cost in dollars is an additional 2 to 8 percent, and it's difficult to quantify risk and strategic risk or budgetary risk. I just find that calculus to be, CAPE is right. If I just choose budget, that's a number. But I don't believe that the American citizens that were sworn to protect and defend believe that the only factor we should consider when making strategic choices for the country is money. And I think that's a lot of the narrative that you hear today about sequester and its impact on the military and that we have to get after making some of those tough choices. And I can't comment on where the offset would come for 2 to 8 percent, but it is a little bit more money. You are accurate about that. Yeah, Guy Swan from the Association of the U.S. Army. This is a total Army question and any one of you can answer it, but I think most of us agree, as General McGuire just said, sequestration, sequestration started all this, and some effort to relieve sequestration is going to be needed for all of us to get out of this. Given that, the Army has made a decision to reduce the number of aging airframes, one of which the one that's most significant here is not the Apache, but it's the OH58 series that's going out of the force that generated, in my mind, a suboptimal decision about how to use the Apache, not unlike what's going on in the Air Force with the A-10. So my question is, if that mission is still there for the Scout aircraft, and given that we push the armed reconnaissance helicopter to the right, how should the Army pick up that Scout mission? I understand that the Apache is not the right aircraft for that, but how should that mission continue? And maybe it's better for our two Army friends to answer that. Well, sir, I definitely agree that the OH58 is from a Scout observation perspective is a more capable aircraft. When we replaced the unit in Mosul in 2004, it was a 58D unit, and they could see and do things that our Apaches couldn't. And we figured that out along the way and started working with other units. We had a 58D troop assigned to us, and we began working in concert. The Army's going to have to utilize or leverage the capabilities that currently reside until a better and permanent solution is there. The unmanned aerial vehicles certainly provide more capability. In my opinion, it does not replace what the OH58 did. And I even had the opportunity to have an orientation flight in one in Iraq with one of the active duty units I was serving with, and I got to see it firsthand. I mean, I'd been flying over Kirkuk for more than a month, and in that one hour flight in an OH58, I saw things that, you know, after countless hours, you know, I'd flown over and never really recognized. The aviators that flew that aircraft, some of the most capable and bravest pilots I've ever served with, I'd take nothing away from them and the mission that they were given. Where we're at right now, we just have to leverage the resources that we have and then look toward the future. But in my opinion, it needs to be a total Army solution. It's got to be, it's got to reside throughout the force to give us the depth that we need. I used to fly scouts, so I understand the concept. Probably have 600 hours in one long time ago. It brings a valuable asset to the field. The Apache is a serious overkill for that mission, but it can do that mission. And the unmanned teaming with an Apache is a very smart move, a good way ahead. There is an interim solution, though. The Army dropped the OH58 Kaia Warrior because they wanted reduce the logistics trail, tail. There's still another aircraft that's out there. The 160S SOAR uses the AH6. There's an improved variant that's out there. I think it's called the H6S Phoenix that they could possibly use. And that might be something that gets them the way ahead. So there's options out there. We just need to explore what they are. And based on the financial constraints that they have, but I think if you were to be able to put an AH6 out there in some units, we could maintain ARBs maybe at a different MTO level. That's a whole other discussion. What is the relative worth of aircraft? Sydney Friedberg, Breaking Defense. Two prong question. One is, in terms of why I address this, we talked about the capes, but given the budget constraints, how do you pay that bill and still get, still keep this capability? It sounds like the counter proposal to the ARI was basically to shift more capacity into the guard or into some kind of multi-compo format rather than pure AC. But I'd love to understand more of what your thoughts were and how one can cram that into the small bag of this budget. And the second is simply a procedural question. All of you, of course, are here in uniform. Are you here on state duty, on federal duty, on some other kind of exotic status? Because, of course, being able to speak to this more freely than AC folks is an advantage of the guard, but it gets very complicated which status you can be in and say what? I could say that they are in CSIS status at this point. Sir, do you want to? I'll address that. So, yes, I am here today on behalf of the Governor of the Great State of Arizona, and I'm serving currently as a Cabinet Secretary in Arizona, representing Arizona's equities, and that the Great State of Arizona and those taxpayers are paying for me to be here today. But the opinion I express is my personal opinion, and it is founded mostly as an American serviceman, certainly not a member of the Army. I'm not wearing that uniform. So that's how I'm here. These two gentlemen are here at the discretion of their Agents General, but ultimately we do understand that their resources come purely from the Federal Government, the resources from my position come by statute from the State Government. So I'd ask that they not engage in that kind of dialogue, but you can ask them questions about capability and that type of stuff. The first part of your question is about the CAPE study. So I'll go back to that. First of all, absolutely, it is the duty of the Army to determine where the offsets would be, but let me just make it as simple as I can. We know for certain that the military personnel costs for a drill status guardsman or an Apache battalion that has an MTO of 410 positions, plus or minus a few, is about 100 full-time folks that are funded by the Federal Government and 300 drill status guardsmen. So if I took two similar formations and I stood them and equipped them the same, the meter would constantly be running on pay allowance, retirement, health care, and the rest for the 411 if I stand them in the active component, but only when I call the extra 300 to duty. Now, I don't know how all that gets calculated in the Pentagon, but for me, one of the ways you increase capacity with a minimal increase in cost is to rotate requirements from your most expensive component, the active force, into your least expensive standing force, the National Guard. And if they can make the capabilities requirements, if they can actually meet the mission demands, in the timelines dictated, there is no degradation and capability, and it is to the Nation's financial advantage. So that is why I said that if you just do an apples-to-apples comparison, I would challenge anyone to say that if we are going to keep 24 battalions over 20, it obviously has to be a little bit more expensive for flying hours, logistics, all of the things that go with supporting the tail of that mission. But the primary driver, and you will hear many people quote this, the thing that is eating up most of the Department of Defense's allocation right now is the personnel accounts. Not that we don't love our soldiers and airmen, but the personnel accounts routinely have continued to grow up, or grow in percentage as to what a service chief has to deal with in his budget. I am sensitive to that. In my own accounts in the State, and I have 400, last check, 458 State employees in the Department of Emergency and Military Affairs, and they chew up over half of my State dollars that come to the State. I get it. If I have less of them, I have to spend less of those dollars, and I can spend more of it on emergency management or State match for Federal military missions. So I don't have an answer as to how they should find that offset, but the concept that you ask about is why we believe we can grow capacity at far less cost is that basically the cheapest component being the National Guard of that Reserve Component. And obviously, with the Guard before it, the same frequency? Sure. So let me talk about that, because that was something that struck me, and I will kind of link this back to General Swan's question. The comment about adapting missions and changing our tactics, techniques and procedures to use the Apache to do that, I have the entirety of my career, other than one year and the past 18 months, I have been a qualified F-16 instructor pilot deployed and been in combat. And for those of you that know anything about the Air Force, the joke is that the F-16 guys are the jack of all trades, masters of none. I like to say we are the jack of all trades, masters of all trades, but you know, some of my peers may argue with me about that. But truthfully, as you do those missions, you do have to be able to timeshare and, as the Chief mentioned, pivot to focus on a specific task. I think that how the Army develops these tactics, techniques and procedures for the Apaches is going to be a challenge. This is just an aside. I believe that's going to be challenging, and I'll tell you what, if I have to face that challenge and figuring out how to do it, I'd like a guy like Chief Jones to help me figure that out, rather than a guy who has three or four years in the Apache right out of the flight school, because he truly is going to be a master of all, a jack of all trades, master of none. The bog to dwell gets after that concept this way. The CAPE study said that if we move out with the plan for 20 battalions, an active Army aviator in all AMOSs, sorry, digress there to AFSCs, that's a military operation specialty, will deploy for one month and be home for 1.7 months. So just short of two months, they'll be home and then deploy again. Now, we don't string them together month to month, but I look at that from my own perspective as when I made the transition from the active component after 14 years to the guard, it was not because I did not want to serve. It was not because I was less patriotic. It was not because I did not feel strongly compelled to continue to serve a higher calling. It was simply a decision that I made that I thought was best in that faith family duty paradigm that some of my family requirements outweighed the requirements to continue to move around. I have to imagine that while the world is unpredictable going forward, the lives of the servicemen will remain predictable in their unpredictability and that that puts stress on families and that if we demand of these young patriots that have chosen to serve and the only place they can serve in attack aviation is in the active component, we're going to suffer tremendous rates of attrition at that bog to dwell. Your comment about, well, what does the guard do for us? When we go multi-compo and we add some guard peer battalions, Cape did run those numbers and that the deploy to dwell went to one to three. So for one month deployed, three months home for an active duty guy. So we bought him back a month and a week, strung out over a career, that's significant. For the guard soldiers, it drove us to a deploy to dwell of less than one to four, which is fairly demanding, but it is still an attainable objective and I think that these guys would tell you they don't have a soldier in their formation and I haven't found one in Arizona that has been asked to deploy and meet the nation's needs and mission that has said no, I can't do it. I'm willing to walk away from my civilian job and take nine months to deploy forward and that they've said no. Do I think we could reach a breaking point sometime down the road? It's possible, but I don't see that happening with the current threat situation in the world. Our soldiers believe that the freedoms and liberty they're sworn to protect and defend are under attack. They believe they're under attack. If you open the paper today, they truly believe there are people that wish to do harm to the citizens of this country and they want to stand in the way. So that's how I would answer that. If indeed they ever reach the point where those two lines cross, the mode to dwell matches and they're exactly the same, then I would buy that argument. But even buying back those active duty guys a month and a week and asking the guard to pick up an extra month, I believe that's an attainable objective as a commander of guard forces. They're producing the same numbers. Producing more battalions for the COCOMs. That produces more total available battalions. The Army's plan is for 20 ARBs to go one to 1.7. The CAPE analysis study was to produce 24 battalions where the active pure battalions would go 1 to just short of 3, and the active component would be 1 to I think it was 3.6, a little bit less than that, a little bit more than that. And the other piece of that that's critical for those that have not served is this multi-compost construct is very much how the Air Force bridged the gap to getting into some of these missions through associations like the F-35, like the KC-46. So I come from a service where it is not a foreign concept to have active guard reserve all at the same location. In my tour as a wing commander of the largest fighter wing in the Air National Guard, we have had a permanent detachment of 10 active duty instructor pilots at Tucson International Airport in the 162nd fighter wing since the early 90s. And you can't tell the difference when they're walking around the installation. Thanks for that. As just a reminder, we are being live streamed on the web, so if you have a follow-up question, just if you could wait for the microphone so that the folks, I'm getting a couple of complaints over email about folks who are watching not being able to hear the questions. So just let us know. Any other questions? Stephanie, could I add? Oh, of course. Sorry about that. Sidney, just very briefly, two points that I wanted to your question on how do we make the mission happen with budget constraints? One of the areas that would be a potential cost savings is the number of aircraft in the units. Right now, an attack reconnaissance battalion should have 24 patches. Back during the 90s, we had considerably less than that. We trained with the number of aircraft and it fluctuates. And it's due to availability. It's due to the remanufacturer line. And you can still build that capacity when you need it with fewer aircraft. And that's one potential area where we could bridge that gap, so to speak, until it makes it reversible. ARI, you put it all into one component and that's it when you're out, you're out. And very briefly, with regards to the bogged to dwell time, that's a matter of policy. We're all in. If the nation needs the National Guard, we will do what we're called to do. Thank you. I'd like to speak to the point in regards to the MTO. So over my career, I've seen attack battalions go from 18 aircraft to 21, to 24, back to 21. And so it's a dynamic thing. So to be hard set, we must have exactly 24 right now. Isn't with the historical. And so we can flex the MTO to meet this temporary problem that we have. And when the budget gets under control, we can then increase those numbers of aircraft as the budget would allow. But I would say maintain the force structure because it's hard to grow an attack recon battalion where you can grow a pilot or produce an aircraft a lot quicker than that. So a relook at exactly what we need to get us out of this temporary situation. Any other questions in the back, please. One area that I believe is lacking in this public debate about the composition of the active component in the National Guard is the fact that we're a nation of about 320 million people. Less than 1% of our entire nation serve in uniform. And the nation as a whole does not believe that we are as a country at war. They believe that our military is at war. The strongest connection that we have to our community and our citizenry is through the Guard and Reserve and the armories that are in those communities. And I believe that is lacking. That point of view is lacking in the public debate. Comments, please. I agree with you. I had a conversation recently about the idea that the perception that maybe just the military is at war I'm not going to comment on that, but I'll tell you this. We have survived a 13 year protracted engagement without having to draft a single American. That's pretty impressive. And I would contend that the way we deploy units from these little communities in rural areas all over the country, 50 states, 3 territories in the District of Columbia, every single one of them having some of their hometown sons and daughters deploy forward is one of the things that has made it so that when I walk through the airport, people say thanks for your service. And if we walk away from that, if we look at our National Guard and our reserve forces as forces that cannot be counted on in times of duress, we drive further and further towards the potential to make the active component more isolated from the citizens they're sworn to protect and defend. That was one of the cruxes of my op-ed about why this is so important to civil liberties. We are all sworn to the same oath to protect and defend the Constitution. It's not a piece of paper. It's not an individually elected official. It's every citizen regardless of race, religious preference, gender, wandering the streets of America today. That's what we're sworn to protect and defend. And the way we can do that mission when it does involve, unfortunately, loss of American lives is that we engage all of America, and the only way we can engage all of America is through the only tie that DOD has to every State, Territory and District of Columbia is through the National Guard. There are many States that have no active installations, that have no active component from any service in them. And how we keep those people that we're sworn to protect and defend in the nation's interest, I think it's through the National Guard. Any other questions? All right. I mentioned before that I had two questions. The follow-up question that I had for you gentlemen is about the Lakotas and training. If you could talk a little bit about training platforms, I know it's a little bit nuts and bolts, and we've spent a lot of time talking about Apaches and Scouts, but if you could talk a little bit about the training piece of AI and how it may impact what you all do operationally and how you get folks trained up. I'll refer to the instructor pilot. If we're talking AI goes through, there probably wouldn't be any training because the units wouldn't exist, but if we can come up with a compromise where we maintain whether that is six in the Guard, whether it's pure or multi-compo, it's not an issue. We have the experience. We have the continuity. We can do the job for less. We can take our experience and just be able to, like I said earlier, take the more experienced guys, educate the younger guys quicker because we say, don't do this, do that. If you make this mistake, that might get you hurt, and this is how we want to support the ground commander. If you check in with the ground commander a certain way, we can prevent fratricide. If you ask the right questions, you will not have civilian casualties. If you do the training properly, you will not have any mishaps or aircraft accidents. We can still do the job. It's just a matter of give us the resources, give us the aircraft, and let us show you the value that the National Guard can bring to the nation. Chief, let me clarify. I think your question is about changing the trainer, divesting the TH-67, and the impact of initial training now using the Lakota, correct? Okay. So as a senior instructor pilot, Chief, what is your thought about that element, that change in aviation? Because I want to make it clear that if ARI goes through, as presented, we will still have aviation elements in the National Guard. We do Chinook mission, exactly. We will not have attack, and that's a big problem, but we're still going to continue to train. I'd like your comment, I think, on Lakota. Okay. The Lakota is certainly a more advanced aircraft. It would allow the guys to learn how as we call it, push the buttons a little quicker. That may not be the most important thing when they're learning how to fly because we may want them to be more oriented on stick and rudder type of performance because we can bring them up on button pushing later. So it's a contentious point, whether we stick with a OH-58 or we put them in a Lakota. Lakota has two engines. It's certainly a more expensive aircraft that can, there's things called the mashed moment that can be easily exceeded in that aircraft, which you might not have that problem with an OH-58. So with the advanced capability comes some negatives, some disadvantages, which is they're going to have to take a little longer. Maybe they're inside the cockpit more, and maybe we need to teach them to be outside the cockpit more, use an old school method. So there's a lot of pros and cons either way. I just think right now that's an expensive element to our expensive piece of equipment to be training our guys on. I think that resonates with what I've been hearing in terms of not only is it a bit more expensive, but it's not necessarily a platform you would choose to basic, you know, basic Hilo training on. And as you mentioned, you know, rudder and stick versus button pushing, at the basic level when you're bringing people up to speed, initially, you know, what kind of airframe do you want? Not that it's not a great airframe, it's just a matter of what do you want as a basic trainer. Yeah, one of the biggest limitations of flying a Lakota for training is touchdown autorotations. When I went through flight school in 1995, I mean, I had the fortunate opportunity to balance a TH-67 off the runway many times. And I mean, that's an experience, you know, that I think a young aviator needs. And that's one of the biggest trade-offs. And the TH-67 is very forgiving. The Lakota is not. Do we have any other comments or questions from the group here? Sir, if you could just wait for the microphone real quick. Thanks. Andrew Smith from Noetic Corporation. I've been following this debate for a little while. I just want to relate it back to a study which Stephanie you participated in, which was a larger one, which looked more broadly at the question of regular reserve guard balance across the force. If I recall correctly, and I may have it wrong, that one of the problems that you encountered with that study was that there was no agreed baseline. There was no way to really say what a dollar spent on active duty will buy you in terms of readiness compared to what the same dollar spent on a part-time force component would buy you in terms of readiness. From the CAPE study, has that been addressed? Do we have a means of knowing exactly what we get in terms of readiness per dollar spent? I'll comment on that. I don't know what has happened inside the Pentagon with the budget in terms of, for lack of a better term, force leveling what a dollar will buy you. I would direct that question to the Pentagon. What I can tell you is this, though, there is something I think that gets lost on this discussion about readiness. We can surge readiness. As a country, we can purchase more readiness. If the will of the people is to purchase more readiness, we have to have capacity and capability to do that. So, ARI puts us in a situation where we have truly less capacity. We have less battalions. And so it doesn't matter how much money I pour into readiness. If I only have 20 battalions and I've got 48 BCTs, I tell the BCT commanders, that's what I got. You can always surge readiness. You cannot surge capacity. So, readiness to me is an important factor as we prep our soldiers to go to war. But arguing about what one dollar will buy you in readiness versus an active component versus a guard guy, I'll tell you what it's like as an F-16 guy. When I take off for a 4v4, nobody on the receiving end of that training mission or employment of that lethal force knows if I'm in the guard or the active or the reserve. They don't know. They just hopefully don't accomplish their objective, and we do. And I bring all my guys home. You can surge readiness. You cannot surge capacity. Those are two different concepts. Cape study that we asked for when we went to the Council of Governors was to study the idea of some additional capacity. How much does that additional capacity cost us in dollars? And it was worst case, 8 percent, best case, 2 percent. That gets to arguing over why is it 2 versus 8, and everything in between. Ask 1,000 accountants how to calculate a DOD problem. You get 1,000 different answers. But worst case, it was 8 percent. So we can always surge readiness. So I think in the public discord about readiness, that's an important factor. Readiness can be surged. Capacity cannot. And if I can add, as was mentioned, CSI has put out a report last May called Citizen Soldier in a Time of Transition, the future of the U.S. Army National Guard. And at that point, one of the recommendations was that an outside entity outside of DOD and CAPE come up with what a common cost model might be. There is cost of an airman. Is there a cost of a soldier? How do you count training days? How do you count readiness levels? All of that so that we were talking apples and apples. Because as many of you know, Headquarters Department of the Army may have a different way of costing or counting things than, say, the National Guard Bureau or other entities. And so the idea behind that recommendation from the study was to maybe give the Congressional Budget Office or some outside DOD entity the authority, or at least the gravitas, to come up with what does a soldier cost and then talk about the different components. To my knowledge, that has not yet happened. There is no common counting between the two components or among the three elements of the two components. So that is a long-winded answer to your question. So it's not happened yet, to my knowledge. And we had another question up here. Okay. I'm back. To get across to you another way, to keep or even expand the attack aviation capability capacity in the Army Guard, what are other things in the Guard you are willing to give up? I mean, ATENs, Guard Division Headquarters, are there things that are relics of past missions or past ways of mobilizing in the Guard infrastructure that we can cut in order to gain efficiencies that leave room for more tooth, in this case, the Apaches? So first, either the Guard counterproposal or ARI both result in less shooting battalions. Remember the preamble that we have or had 37 battalions between the Kiowa Warrior and the Apache and the Army's ARI takes us to 20, the Guard counterproposal took us to 24. So for the record, either proposal takes us less than what we have today. And that's a reality. Now, to your point about what trade space is there, that really would have to go back to the Army. I think it's very important that we stick to the principle and I'll say this this way. I can say this as an adjunct general wearing a blue uniform. I don't see any reasonable way to allow the Army to divorce the Army Guard. I don't see that as a possibility. I don't see that the country has any appetite for that. So they're going to have to get after how they fix that going forward. And what trade space there is, that's why you remember I mentioned that for 2 to 8 percent, there has to be an offset. I think if you recorded this, I said that at some point. That means that someone in the Pentagon has to work collectively with the Federal Advocate for the National Guard, who is the National Guard Bureau, and work with the Army to come up with a plan to find an offset. I certainly would be way out of my lane to say that division headquarters or a transportation battalion or some other MTOE structure is not required. That is not my area of expertise. So I can't give you an answer as to where the offset would be. That would have to be a discussion between the Pentagon and the Army, all Army leadership, Guard, Reserve and Active. Just to add on to that, I can't really speak to other branches of the service, but from an aviation perspective, modernization is a good thing. Divesting legacy airframes for modernized aircraft is certainly, especially in these austere times, is the right answer for all components. Even the older, modernized airframes, we have some aircraft in our fleet more than 20 years old. It is time to look at replacing those across all components. It has to be a smaller number, but the more modernized we can be the better. So with that, I want to thank our panelists for joining us today on a what is now a mild DC day. So thank you for bringing good weather with you. It's not Arizona. But please, everyone, if you wouldn't mind joining me in a round of applause for our panelists, thank you so much. Thank you all for coming and have a good weekend.