After 20 years of war followed by an unprecedented level of activity at home, the Army National Guard is more integrated than ever with the Total Army and ready to support the joint force, said Lt. Gen. Jon Jensen, director of the Army National Guard.

Fighting overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan, then responding to the COVID-19 pandemic and widespread civil unrest during one of the most challenging times in recent U.S. history, the National Guard has become more than a traditional strategic reserve, Jensen said.

The active and reserve components have “come a lot closer, and it’s no longer truly a discussion about strategic reserve and operational reserve, which existed for a long time,” said Jensen, a former adjutant general of Minnesota who has been the 22nd director of the Army National Guard since August 2020.

As head of the nearly 325,000-strong Army National Guard, Jensen has captured the component’s contributions to the joint force and its place in the Army by focusing on the term “integrated reserve,” which he said reflects the fact that the Army National Guard is integrated at every echelon in the Army, and every soldier and every unit is contributing to the readiness of the joint force.

“There’s not one headquarters in the Army that you can go to and not find a Guardsman,” he said, pointing out that National Guard soldiers and units are integrated into every Army mission and training exercise, whether they’re in the European or Indo-Pacific theaters, the Middle East or the United States.

During his tenure as director, a four-year term set to conclude in August 2024, Jensen said, “I’ve personally grown, professionally grown, but I also feel like this headquarters has grown” through the crucible that was the COVID-19 pandemic response, a mission for which there was no playbook.

In summer 2020, more than 100,000 soldiers were mobilized in communities across the country in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the civil unrest that continued through the presidential election and inauguration in 2021. “Coming out of that, I think we’ve been able to expand our horizons again as an intermediate headquarters” that interfaces with the National Guard Bureau and Army senior leaders to execute “our core mission, which is to enable readiness through our adjutants general,” Jensen said.

As of late August, there were some 39,000 citizen-soldiers mobilized, almost 15,000 of them on duty in the U.S., Jensen said.

Much to Do

With a return to a more traditional pace of operations, most National Guard soldiers are back to a drill cycle of 39 days a year—one weekend a month and two weeks of annual training in the summer—with some exceptions driven by the Army’s modernization strategy.

Training days may increase depending on what type of unit soldiers are in. For example, if an infantry or armor unit receives a new vehicle, there will be a training period, but not necessarily for the entire unit, only the soldiers who are the mechanics, operators and drivers, Jensen said.

If a unit receives a new weapon system or night-vision equipment, items everyone would use in combat, training days could increase for the entire unit, he said, adding that for many soldiers, “it also depends on where you are in your training cycle.”

“If you’re doing a combat training center rotation, that’s about a 30-day training event, not for every soldier in that brigade, but for many of them,” Jensen said, pointing out that even those rotations, which take place at five-year intervals, are more predictable now.

To build in that predictability, Jensen said, training planners meet twice a year to “look over the horizon” and adjust the calendar if, for example, National Guard units in a particular state are mobilizing for a national security event such as a political convention.

Modernization Mandate

A deeper level of integration also comes with the responsibility to build long-term readiness in preparation for what is expected to be large-scale combat operations on a multidomain battlefield.

“It takes a whole career to get ready to successfully execute war like what we see in Ukraine,” Jensen said. He pointed out that preparing for future combat through predictable and repetitive training is something the Army National Guard is doing right now.

But a challenge affecting the Total Army is filling the ranks during a tough recruiting environment brought on by a low national unemployment rate, private-sector competition and a lack of willingness or eligibility among young people to serve in uniform.

Last year, the Regular Army missed its recruiting goal of 60,000 new soldiers by about 15,000 and was on track again this year to miss its goal of bringing in 65,000 new soldiers. But the Army National Guard, which missed its recruiting goal last year by about 14,000 new soldiers, was on track to meet or exceed its goal of roughly 31,000 recruits this year, Jensen said.

“We’re not declaring victory yet,” Jensen said in early July, explaining then that the National Guard recruiting mission was at about 98%. “I feel really good about us getting to our recruiting mission.”

The key to the Army National Guard’s success is community-based recruiting, “the ability to connect with young men and women and their centers of influence. This is still a trust-based business,” Jensen said. He predicted with increases in end strength goals for the next two years, there will be “a glide slope back up where we were … routinely recruiting between 40,000 and 43,000” people. The fiscal 2023 end strength goal for the Army National Guard was 325,000 soldiers.

With readiness centers and armories in more than 2,500 communities, the Army National Guard has a presence at approachable, permanent facilities. Now that the pandemic is over, “we’re just able to get out and truly reconnect with young men and women,” Jensen said. “A lot of focus has gone into this effort.”

Making recruiting even more attainable is a hunger to deploy among new and serving National Guard soldiers, Jensen said. “They want to have operational experience where they go somewhere and contribute to the big team. That desire is still out there, and it’s very strong,” he said.

According to Jensen, they won’t be disappointed. There were some 27,000 National Guard soldiers deployed as of July, a number he described as a “very manageable number” inside the Army National Guard. “It feels steady state,” he said.

“Thirty years ago, 27,000 would have been unprecedented, but now it’s almost like, OK, this is the sustainable effort, we can do this,” he said.

Versatile Force

As he looks ahead to completing his tenure as director of the Army National Guard, Jensen said his mind turns first to how the component handled the “monumental” task of responding to the pandemic and how “you’re never really sure about what your organization can do until you ask them to do something,” he said.

National Guard soldiers responded to the pandemic over the course of more than two years in communities and cities across the country. They provided support to testing and vaccine centers, helped with logistics and traffic control, delivered meals and water, staffed call-center phones, helped mortuary officials manage casualties and, in some cases, filled in as teachers at schools where they also performed sanitization duties.

While pandemic response dominated the first two years of his tenure, Jensen is satisfied that citizen-soldiers were all in on their role in a national crisis and were able to also respond to requests from governors and the Army, overseas and in the United States.

“We never said no,” Jensen said.

When the Army National Guard’s next director starts next August, it will be “in a different environment than when I came in,” he said, when most of the staff were working remotely and everyone wore masks.

“We won’t have that [pandemic] crisis hanging over us, but that’s not to say a year from now there won’t be something else that will be equally catastrophic and equally demanding,” he said.