The Army Times is reporting on a proposal to align National Guard units into division-sized units to provide deployable divisions to the US Army. This is nothing new. We've been doing this for years. During my career, I was variously assigned at one time or another to the below units.
90th Infantry Division - Comprised of various units from Texas and Oklahoma, it was first activated during WWI and has been serving ever since.
95th Infantry Division - Activated, but not deployed during WWWWI, the division saw combat in WWII and earned the nickname Iron Men of Metz. It is currently a training division of the US Army Reserve, headquartered at Fort Sill.
256th Infantry Brigade - probably the most storied unit of the Louisiana National Guard, it traces it's lineage back to the War of 1812, where it served Jackson at the battle of New Orleans (Washington Artillery). Various infantry units were combined during the Civil War and assigned to the Army of Northern Virginia. Known as Lee's Tigers, the unit has battle streamers colored both blue and gray. I am retired from this brigade. At the time, the brigade was a mechanized infantry brigade and I was assigned to 1st Battalion, 156th Infantry (Armor), a unit outfitted with M1A1 tanks. It is now designated as 2nd Squadron 108th Cavalry.
This same thing happened in virtually every sate in the union, and the point is that the Guard and Reserve formations have long been assigned to division level units.
Perhaps the most famous Guard divisions, the 28th (Pennsylvania) and the 29th (VA/MD).
ReplyDeleteI know Texas and California both had their own divisions, back in the Cold War when the Army was big.
Politically, the tricky part becomes deciding which state(s) get the HQs.