Brig. Gen. John Hoefert, Arizona’s Joint Task Force commander, was sitting in a meeting with Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan of U.S. Army North and Mexican military representatives on a Wednesday in early April. Such meetings were commonplace and nonpolitical, Hoefert told Homeland411, and were a great opportunity for information sharing and working through any border issues with their Mexican counterparts.
All of a sudden, their phones woke up and they learned that President Donald Trump had ordered troops to the border. Despite any lingering irony about when and where Hoefert learned of the president’s plans, the announcement quickly set into motion events quite familiar to the National Guard.
“So, Thursday and Friday we started looking [at] what we knew and didn’t know,” Hoefert said, “and by Monday we had our first 125 folks assembled here and ready to go out and do this.”
The deployment will include up to 4,000 National Guard troops to provide support to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas. Guard personnel are activated under Title 32 status, which means Guard personnel are full time and remain under command of the state, but federal dollars fund the activation.
In recent years, Guard border deployment hasn’t necessarily become commonplace, but it’s also not unusual. From mid-2006 to mid-2008, President George W. Bush deployed about 6,000 National Guard troops to secure the southern border in Operation Jump Start. President Barack Obama initially ordered 1,200 troops to the border in 2010 to support CBP in Operation Phalanx. Though scaled back in subsequent years, the mission lasted until 2016.
As with any recent border action, political opinions continue to run high regarding the Guard’s mission and purpose. But as the mission continues, Homeland411 wanted to get an on-the-ground perspective from the Guard about what they’re doing or not doing at the border and what the future of the mission might hold.
Hoefert said he would frame the current mission in the context of Jump Start.
“[I]n Operation Jump Start, the primary reason for sending the Guard to the border was to push badges back to the border, meaning take sworn agents who were doing other tasks, like monitoring cameras, turning wrenches on vehicles, doing maintenance, doing engineering tasks, providing them with a workforce that would do all those administrative behind-the-scenes-type jobs and allow the Border Patrol engine to get back to the field,” Hoefert said. “So, if you fast-forward to where we are now on this mission: [It’s] similar, but I think that the construct really is to provide the Border Patrol with more situational awareness.”
He said since Jump Start, however, CBP has really improved in the areas of cameras and sensors, allowing the Guard to work with that technology and freeing up CBP personnel to work in the field.
“We are just monitoring the cameras right now and the sensors; where those cameras and sensors point isn’t up to us,” Hoefert said. “They maneuver them around, but we’re not out there on entry identification teams.”
He added that another piece to the mission will be the addition of an aviation component to the mix.
“We’re not there 100 percent yet, but we here in Arizona are operating and looking at this as a whole of government or whole of community approach,” Hoefert said.
Mission Challenges
Some of the challenges, Hoefert said, include the narrative at the national level, as well as the funding for the mission.
“The Guard’s been funding this out of internal training dollars, and we went back to National Guard Bureau and said we’re not going to put our training at risk right now and pay for this out of hide, so you’re going to have to cash flow us this money,” he said. “So, they’ve agreed to cash flow us to do this in 30-day increments, and until Congress can re-appropriate the money, we’re not able to cut orders out to, say, 30 September.”
Hoefert added, however, that he’s confident the mission will continue, and soldiers and airmen are definitely being paid and supported for the mission. Despite the national narrative and the debate surrounding it, when it comes to on-the-ground execution, it’s a mission tailor made for the Guard. A lot of it, he said, is based on the Guard’s longstanding Counterdrug Program, as well as the life experiences of Guard personnel.
“We have folks with civilian capacities, civilian careers, but they can quickly hop into a job as defined by the Department of Homeland Security and wrap their arms around the problem very quickly … without having any military occupational specialty tied to it,” Hoefert said. “We’ll have an infantry man who happens to be a carpenter, we will have a cook who might be a lawyer … I am an armor officer who happens to be an airline pilot who’s running a border mission.”
Crucial to the Guard’s success in executing such a mission is the connection Guard personnel have to their communities. Hoefert noted regularly meeting with his Guard counterparts in California, New Mexico, and Texas to discuss border issues, as well as the longstanding bond they have as border states to address common border issues.
The ongoing relationship among these four states in particular has given the Guard a local perspective that is imperative when addressing the mission at hand, Hoefert said. And though border protection is a federal responsibility, border protection is still a local issue.
Mission Structure
Though the mission is still voluntary, with the governor and adjutant general of each state determining the length of deployments, mission length for an individual can vary. Hoefert said that short deployments for something like 30 days are really not workable, just because of the effort and training required to get an individual ready. He said he’s asking for lengths such as 90 days, but an optimum time length at this point would be getting individuals to participate through Sept. 30.
One way to break down missions is into the aviation set, engineering mission– which Hoefert said is still being defined and refined—and an administrative piece.
“The administrative support is definitely going to be the longer-term piece of this,” he said. “The engineering piece though, I’m confident that we can get an engineering unit from another state to come down and work a project for three or four weeks, and that’s probably what we’re going to be getting after.”
Aviation, he said, would be similar, and it would be optimal to be able to plug an aviation unit into a two-month rotation. “We’re really working on the sourcing of that piece right now because of the use of the Lakota [helicopter] is the aircraft of choice for this at this point,” he said.
The aviation piece is also a tremendous training opportunity.
“It is an awesome readiness enhancer for pilots to come out here, because everything mission-planning wise, flying actual operational missions, and interacting with the joint interagency environment … that’s where you get the big bang for the buck on this,” Hoefert said, adding that most of the aviation piece of the mission will come from units outside of Arizona.
Hoefert said all indications are that the mission will continue into fiscal year 2019, but a lot depends on decisions coming out of Washington about future efforts.
“We knew, generally, based on our relationships what we were going to be asked to do, but again we’re trying to plan off of press releases and soundbites,” Hoefert said. “We got the problem set addressed; we pushed our initial folks out and then the media narrative started with, ‘What’s going on?’ ‘Why aren’t you there?’”
A lot of this is just a matter of understanding what is actually involved to get individual Guard personnel prepared to perform new tasks at the border. There’s training, processing, and even background checks necessary in many cases.
“The narrative in some circles was that the 82nd Airborne was going to parachute in here and they were going to lock arms across the border and look south,” Hoefert said. “They could have done that, but they would’ve been standing outside of the Border Patrol station just as we were waiting to get into the station until all the checks were done and everything else.”
But there are a lot of things a Title 10 active-duty military personnel can’t do that state-activated Guard personnel can.
“The Guard is the right group to do this mission, based on the fact that, yes, border security is national security,” Hoefert said, “but we have the local relationships that are enduring over time, regardless of when the people move out.”
© 2018 Homeland411
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