AUGUSTA — The Army National Guard is planning to change the role of Maine’s oldest and largest military force in order to save as many jobs as possible amid federal defense belt-tightening, according to officials.
Under the plan, the 133rd Engineer Battalion and other units would become the 1st Battalion, 103rd Infantry Regiment. The plan has been submitted to the Department of Defense, but it is not set in stone, Brig. Gen. James D. Campbell said Wednesday.
“This is not a done deal. That is the worst-case scenario,” Campbell, adjutant general of the Maine National Guard, said. “We are fighting this.”
The transformation plan was drafted by the National Guard Bureau in Washington, D.C., to address a reduction in National Guard forces proposed in the Pentagon’s 2016 budget request.
When Maine Army Guard leaders learned last year that 200-plus jobs out of the state’s 2,100-member force were on the chopping block, they started drafting a proposal to convert the 133rd — a five-company battalion with roughly 560 soldiers — into an infantry battalion.
“By restructuring [units in] the state of Maine, by expanding the infantry or transforming units to the infantry, it better meets the operational needs of the Department of the Army at this time,” Capt. Norman Stickney, spokesman for the Maine National Guard, said Wednesday.
The 2016 budget calls for only a small cut for Maine thanks to the planned restructuring, Stickney said.
“We are going to effectively lose approximately 20 soldiers based on today’s force strength,” the captain said of the projected Maine Army Guard decrease set to go into effect Sept. 1, 2016. “Had we not taken efforts to restructure, it would have been upwards of 200 (jobs lost).
“The impact would have been much more significant,” Stickney said.
Gov. Paul LePage, commander in chief of the Maine National Guard, made mention of the plan to decrease the number of citizen soldiers in Maine during his State of the State address on Tuesday.
Governors across the nation, including LePage, and every state’s adjutant general have thrown their support behind maintaining the Guard’s force levels. In addition, Congressional leaders in December established the National Commission on the Future Structure of the Army to examine the sweeping force structure changes, Campbell said.
As part of the act to create the independent commission, “there will be no reduction to the National Guard until the commission’s report is out next February,” he said.
Until then, the fight to keep Guard jobs in Maine continues, Campbell said.
“We need to put the brakes on this,” Campbell said. “We should not be cutting the Guard right now.”
Historically, post-wartime, “we’ve reduced the regular Army and increased the Guard,” Campbell said. “We’re asking to either retain the strength of the Guard nationwide or to have it grow. I do not think the National Guard should be cut. We don’t have the money to maintain a large regular Army, and the Guard is a great alternative.”
The Maine Air National Guard, with around 1,120 members, also is struggling to balance the costs of readiness with fewer budget dollars, but has benefitted by taking a traditional post-war stance, Campbell said.
The budget cuts do not have the same impact, “largely because the Air Force has chosen to rely more on the Guard as a cost-effective alternative,” he said.
Both Guard branches are doing whatever they can now to reduce costs, Campbell said.
If the plan is enacted, the soldiers in the 133rd — the oldest and largest unit in the state — will continue to have Guard jobs in Maine. And many may be with the newly formed 1st Battalion, 103rd Infantry Regiment.
The 103rd is the name the 133rd went by in the 1960s, when it was a combat unit, Campbell said.
“It was an infantry regiment from 1760 all the way up to the 1960s,” the state’s adjutant general said.
“The 133rd Engineer Battalion headquarters [based in Portland] isn’t being transferred anywhere,” Stickney stressed. “That is one of those things that need to be clarified.”
The confusion lies in draft reports created last spring that called for the 133rd, which has roots in the state dating back to the early 1800s, to move to Pennsylvania to save the Army money and be replaced by a smaller infantry unit.
Much of the federal restructuring plan is based on post-war economics, according to a Congressional Research Service report release in February 2014 by the Federation of American Scientists titled “Army Drawdown and Restructuring: Background and Issues for Congress.”
All 50 states and the country’s territories all are facing “dramatic cuts” under the Army’s budget that has a goal of eliminating 45,000 Guard jobs nationwide in the coming years, Stickney said.
“When the president published his budget last week he reduced the number of National Guard soldiers from the current 350,200 to 342,000 in 2016,” Campbell said. “Their plan, in 2017, is to down it again to 335,000. In my opinion, one soldier loss is too many.”
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