From AP 1/27/2000:
Part 1: No longer 'weekwend warriors,' Air Guard protects nation every day
No longer "weekend warriors," Air National Guard members protect the nation's skies around the clock, seven days a week. It took some legal maneuvering, however, to turn what essentially are state militia troops into "everyday warriors" when the 1st Air Force became the military's only nationwide all-Guard unit two years ago. "It's a very demanding mission. It doesn't ever shut down," said Airman 1st Class Cynthia Mercer, 33, originally from Miami. "I get to show my patriotism and I get to do something really cool."
A Florida Guard member, the single mother of three monitors radar scopes at this Panhandle base when not in class as a full-time college student. Most 1st Air Force personnel are full-time Guard members, but part-timers such as Mercer can work when they are available and needed, not just on weekends. The 1st Air Force protects the continental United States against air attack and tracks aircraft approaching U.S. borders, scrambling jets to intercept "unknowns," including drug smuggling planes. It is part of the Air Combat Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, based at Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. NORAD has two other regions, Canada and Alaska, and there are plans also to make the latter a Guard operation. After years of preparation, Guard members took over the 1st Air Force from active-duty airmen on Oct. 1, 1997, retaining a few civilians and military personnel from other services and Canada. The plan had been endorsed in the early 1990s by Maj. Gen. Philip G. Killey, then-director of the Air Guard, and Gen. Merrill A. McPeak, Air Force chief of staff at the time. McPeak agreed "guarding America is a Minuteman sort of responsibility," said Maj. Gen. Larry K. Arnold, 1st Air Force commander and Texas Air Guard member. The transition also was in keeping with a post-Cold War reduction in active-duty forces and a post-draft policy of relying more on reserves. Guard units already provided aircraft, pilots and ground crews for alert duty, ready to scramble at a moment's notice. All seven 1st Air Force alert sites now are operated by Guard units that also deploy overseas and for drug surveillance duty in Curacao. The transition mainly affected about 1,000 positions at 1st Air Force headquarters here and three radar-monitoring air defense sectors at Tyndall, Rome, N.Y., and McChord Air Force Base, Wash. A fourth sector at March Air Force Base, Calif., was closed. The jobs were filled by guardsmen from many states and airmen who left active duty and joined the Maryland Guard, which agreed to take first-time members. "Probably the biggest obstacle was getting buy-in from our active-duty counterparts that the Guard could in fact do the thing," said Florida Air Guard Col. Ted Kraemer, commander of the Southeast Air Defense Sector here. "That was a bit of a challenge, but one we met easily in the end." The legal issue was more complex. Guard personnel work for state governors but do a federal mission for the 1st Air Force. Constitutionally, they must get permission from their governors and the secretary of the Air Force for that mission. "At the pointy end of the spear, we had already solved the problem of the pilots," Arnold said. Pilots are under federal orders while on 24-hour alert duty, two at a time at each site. Ground crews, however, remain under state command. Arnold, his staff of about 200 and sector commanders are always on federal duty to keep an unbroken chain of command up to the president. Other sector airmen switch between state and federal duty, often several times daily. When monitoring a radar scope, a Guard member is doing a federal job. "When he gets up and leaves that scope and he goes to do some other kind of training or job, then he reverts back to being a (state) guardsman," Arnold said. Getting approval every time would be impossible, so each Guard member signs an agreement with his or her governor and Arnold on behalf of the secretary, allowing them to switch as needed. "We were able to get the right attorneys to agree to that," Arnold said. Arnold's staff and 75 percent of the 865 airmen at the sectors are full-time Guard members. The others are traditional, part-time members. "Years ago, you'd go to a Guard unit and you'd train, but the full-time people are doing the job and the part-timers almost got in the way," Kraemer said. "But these people ... do the job instead of training." The transition has resulted in a stable, experienced work force, Arnold said. Regulars usually move every two to four years, but Guard members stay four and often longer. Arnold said the part-timers and fewer transfers save $10 million annually at his headquarters and the sectors. Together they have an $18.3 million budget. "I think it's spectacular," said retired Army Lt. Col. Piers Wood of the Center for Defense Information, a Washington, D.C., think-tank. "Why don't we do this with the ground forces where we can save some real money?" He estimated converting five Army divisions would save $20 billion a year. Lt. Col. Frank Stokes, commander of a Minnesota Guard squadron that keeps F-16 Fighting Falcons on alert at Tyndall, said he left active-duty after tiring of frequent transfers and deployments. "The Guard is much better quality of life," said Stokes, who lives in Duluth. "You see your wife and kids at night.
Part 2: General in charge of air defense worries about terrorism from the sky
The general responsible for protecting the continental United States from air attack says he fears it is not matter of if, but when terrorists or a rogue nation try something. It may be a small plane or even a cruise missile carrying a biological or, perhaps, chemical weapon, said Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold, commander of the 1st Air Force. "I lay awake worrying," Arnold said. "It is one thing to put a truck inside the twin trade towers and blow it up. It is quite another to be able to fly a weapon across our borders. That is an attack, a direct attack, an unambiguous attack from outside our country."
Striking from the sky may be more difficult, but Arnold said the political impact could make it worth the effort in the mind of a terrorist. So far, nothing of the kind has happened, but Arnold's nationwide Air National Guard command scrambles jets about 200 times a year at seven alert sites from Portland, Ore., to South Florida. Most often they intercept drug smugglers and others who fail to file flight plans before entering U.S. airspace. In October, however, Oklahoma and North Dakota Air Guard fighters were called upon to track golfer Payne Stewart's business jet, which failed to respond to radio calls before crashing in South Dakota, killing Stewart and five others aboard. Air defense sectors at Tyndall, Rome, N.Y., and McChord Air Force Base, Wash., monitor ground radar shared with the Federal Aviation Administration throughout their regions. Airborne radar on balloons provides some, but not complete, low-altitude coverage to spot planes flying under the net cast by the ground radar. Air Guard F-16 Fighting Falcons and F-15 Eagles can be airborne in minutes, but they are stretched thin. Arnold, a Texas Guard member, used the example of terrorists taking off from Mexico in a small plane and giving an hour's notice before spraying sarin gas or anthrax over El Paso, Texas. The nearest alert jets are about 600 miles away near Houston and in California. "If we scrambled them immediately, they would not yet be there that one hour later," Arnold said. "I don't want to be an alarmist, but that is a thing you have to think about." Cruise missiles could exploit another chink in the air defense armor. "It is easy to afford and have the knowledge to put together a poor man's cruise missile," said Florida Air Guard Col. Ted Kraemer, commander of the Southeast Air Defense Sector at Tyndall. Whether as simple as a remote controlled ultralight plane or complex as a submarine-launched missile, such small objects are hard to detect. "Unless you're specifically looking, with the equipment that we've got today, it's just not as sensitive as we'd like," Kraemer said. The Cruise Missile Defense Initiative is designed to plug that gap, Arnold said. If funded, truck-mounted electronic gear would correlate data from Air Force, Army and Navy radar to enhance the chances of detecting such weapons and provide links to ships, aircraft and missile batteries that can shoot them down. Russian bombers stopped flying off U.S. coasts when the Cold War ended but remain a potential threat as evidenced by flights last year around Iceland and off Norway, Arnold said. The Florida Straits are a constant worry as Cuban-American groups fly there almost every weekend, looking for rafters trying to reach U.S. shores. Alert jets can be over the straits in a minutes but did not scramble when Cuban MiGs shot down two planes from the Cuban exile group Brothers to the Rescue over international waters, killing four men, in 1996. The North American Aerospace Defense Command, based at Cheyenne Mountain, Colo., decided it was not an "air sovereignty event," Arnold said. Florida Air Guard F-15s, however, did scramble Jan. 1 when another light plane returned after dropping anti-Castro leaflets over Cuba. A Cuban MiG also responded but did not attack the interloper nor fly north of the 24th parallel that both countries respect as a boundary for military flights. Lt. Col. Frank Stokes, of the Minnesota Guard, often has scrambled after "unknowns" from Tyndall, Panama before U.S. forces withdrew, and Curacao. "Most of them are on suspected drug guys," Stokes said. "They just want us to get no-kidding, human eyes on that guy and say what's his tail number, what kind of airplane and where he's headed." The information is radioed to law enforcement agencies that try to arrest suspects when they land. "They don't let us shoot them down," Stokes said. Instead, pilots snap photos with handheld cameras for use as evidence. The Minnesota jets also are the only F-16s with high-power spotlights in the nose of each plane for drug surveillance at night. "You put that baby out and then you can light that airplane up," Stokes said. "It's almost like a pull-over."