How much of our National Guard is currently serving overseas? (re: arsons in my town)

[bbernardini]

In the town where I live, there has been a rash of arsons dating back to late 2007. Between 2008 and today, there have been 30 arson incidents, 15 of them in the last three weeks. Last night, 15 homes were destroyed in an arson attack. A lot of people in the "Sound Off" section of the local paper are suggesting that the National Guard be called in to help patrol the city (well, city in classification only), and I can't say I disagree with them at this point. I'm wondering though, now many of our National Guard troops are currently serving in Iraq and other places when they could be here helping out with situations like this?

[bbernardini]

1. Kick!

[Statistical]

2. A lot

I did two tours one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan (my enlistment ends in Nov).

NG troops make up about 40% of combat force in Iraq (not sure about Afghanistan) so that is about 60,000 or so.

The reality is worse. When national guard deploy for a year in Iraq they need to "mob" (pronounced moab) or mobilize. Training, Equipping, and Prepping at the mob-site takes 2-3 months depending on the duty assignment. Then travel time (round-trip) plus down-processing on the way back is another month. So 1 year in Iraq = 15-16 months active duty time.

Deployable force is reduced even more. You can't send soldiers back to back from one deployment to another. I doubt you would want soldiers patrolling your streets that just came back from firefights in Iraq.

So figure if 60,000 National Guard are deployed another 20,000-30,000 are in processing/out processing. Add to that that another 160,000 or so are non-deployable because they just came off a deployment going with VA ARNG policy of 1 up, 2 down (1 year deployed, 2 years not).

So at any given point maybe 60,000 troops are in Iraq but it reduces the deployment strength for natural disasters or law and order ops by 250,000 or so.

Given the National Guard is only 1 million soldiers a ballpark figure is that about 1/4 are involved in the Iraq conflict in some fashion.