The Guard Remains

Regular Army and Air Force officers, who put efficiency above politics, have long hoped that some day the National Guard would be truly federalized. Last week they got a surprise.

A six-man interservice committee, under the chairmanship of the Army's Assistant Secretary Gordon Gray, recommended that the air and ground forces of the state-controlled National Guard be merged with the federally controlled Organized Reserve Corps into a single, federal reserve arm for each service. In place of the guard, each state would raise its own militia unit, as it did in wartime.

There was sound military reasoning behind the committee's recommendations. Organized under 51 separate state and territorial commands (though supported chiefly by federal funds), guard units have often suffered from spotty training; their top officers have often been kept on the job for political reasons. Even after the guard was called to federal service in 1940, it took nearly two years to get some units ready for combat. Next time, warned the Gray board, there might be no such breathing spell.

Oldtime National Guard officers would have none of such heresy. State control of the guard, cried the National Guard Association's 60-year-old Major General Ellard A. Walsh, "is practically the last bastion in the fortress of states' rights." He warned that the politically powerful association would carry the fight to Congress.

The protest was hardly necessary. The White House was aware of the report's explosive political contents. It had temporarily withdrawn the report after issuing it a fortnight ago. Last week Defense Secretary Forrestal dryly pointed out that the report was not "a pattern for legislative action . . . and does not, at this stage, constitute military establishment policy."

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