Blum: Unity of effort needed during disasters Published Sept. 25, 2009 By Army Staff Sgt. Jim Greenhill National Guard Bureau LEXINGTON, Va. -- In the wake of a natural or manmade disaster, unity of effort is required from federal, state and local governments and the military, the deputy combatant commander of U.S. Northern Command said here Sept. 18. "We need to move to a point where we have unity of effort of the inter-agencies, the intergovernmental organizations that are responding and of the military organizations that respond," said Lt. Gen. H Steven Blum, the first National Guard officer to serve as a deputy combatant commander, who previously served as the 25th chief of the National Guard Bureau. "That's what the American people expect. ... If you're going to help somebody, they're not going to look at your unit and say, 'No thank you, I'm not going to have you rescue me, I'm going to wait for my favorite unit to come.' That's not the way it works. They expect us all to work in a seamless fashion." But NORTHCOM, the joint force headquarters and NGB alone cannot do the entire job, Blum said. "It is unconscionable to me as an American taxpayer or as a military professional that we have ... a reserve of every active component that is not easily accessible and included in the disaster response plans for this nation," he said. "You may have a flood in ... Maryland, and you may have to drive by a Marine Corps Reserve engineer battalion that has exactly the equipment and exactly the skill set you need ... [and] go 120 miles further to get a National Guard engineer unit that has that same skill set and capability. "That's wrong, folks. We've got to find a way to get those units in the joint fight." Blum said the forces that Northern Command would need "in most of the places that we would have to respond" reside in the Reserve component. "You cannot go 25 minutes from any populated point in the United States of America and not pass a U.S. Army Reserve Center, a National Guard Readiness Center, a Marine Corps Reserve Training Center, a Naval Reserve Training Center - they're everywhere, about 5,300 of them, dots on the map, forward deployed, that have the greatest situational awareness and common operating picture and local knowledge of any armed force that we could ever send in there." In rare cases, control of a domestic response could be federal, Blum said at "The Citizen Soldier: Protector of the Homeland" conference here hosted by Virginia Military Institute. "There are some high-end, exceptional circumstances where the president of the United States, by our Constitution, has enough power and authority to deal with any contingency and can take control of every man and woman in uniform in the United States that fast," he said, citing examples from the Civil Rights era. In most domestic responses, though, authority lies with the affected governor, Blum said. "We shouldn't be worried about who's in charge, because that's all been sorted out for us by our founding fathers, there's no doubt about who's in charge - whether you like who's in charge or not is the subject of a different discussion, but who's in charge is not debatable - the governor of the state is in charge," he said. In the case of Hurricane Katrina, the response involved parallel command and control of state and federal troops, he said. Some 50,000 Citizen-Soldiers and -Airmen from every single state, territory and the District of Columbia were asked, not tasked, to respond under state emergency assistance compacts. They fell under the command of the adjutants general of Louisiana and Mississippi, who were reporting to their respective governors. Meanwhile, federal aid sent by the president included federal troops commanded by Army Lt. Gen. Russell Honore. Most important to a domestic response from Citizen-Soldiers and -Airmen, "You have to make sure they're trained, you have to make sure they're equipped and you have to make sure they're resourced reasonably so they can do this," Blum said.