National Guard soldiers must be ready for combat, according to the new director of the Army National Guard, who said he is filled with a “profound sense of urgency” as global volatility grows.

In remarks Oct. 15 at the Association of the U.S. Army’s Annual Meeting and Exposition in Washington, D.C., Lt. Gen. Jonathan Stubbs, who is also acting vice chief of the National Guard Bureau, said that with fighting raging in parts of the world, the U.S. could easily be drawn into conflict.

“We hear our senior leaders talking that in their careers, they have never seen a world as volatile, as dangerous and on the precipice of global conflict as it is now,” Stubbs said. “And I agree,” he added.

His dire warning, he said, doesn’t mean war is guaranteed or predetermined, because “I believe we can deter it,” but he called on National Guard troops in the 54 states, territories and the District of Columbia to be ready.

“We've got to be ready for combat, we've got to be ready to fight, and we've got to be able to … fight in a large-scale combat operations environment, war,” Stubbs said. “I'm not talking episodic, nine-month deployments that are fought from a forward operating base. I'm talking about war, ferocious, violent war.”

Stubbs, who was sworn in on Aug. 5, was quickly tapped for a temporary assignment as acting chief of the National Guard Bureau following the Aug. 2 retirement of Gen. Daniel Hokanson. Air Force Gen. Steven Nordhaus took over as National Guard Bureau chief in an Oct. 15 ceremony, and Stubbs became his acting vice chief.

The time he’s spent as acting chief, then acting vice chief, he said, was an “incredible opportunity to come up here and to serve at the national level,” where he’s seen the National Guard’s mission through the lens of the Army’s “This We’ll Defend” motto.

Stubbs described the National Guard as “an indispensable force” and said his first priority is to grow combat-ready soldiers and units. This includes recruiting the right talent to meet the mission. Stubbs said that as the “Army’s combat reserve,” those units need to be lethal.

“We're going to build lethality through rigorous and challenging training,” he said, suggesting new initiatives to shake up the way the Guard trains now. “Bottom line, we’ve got to reimagine the way that we do collective training, not only for our close combat formations, but for our enablers, for functional and multifunctional brigades, and we're going to get after that.”

Invoking the theme of the 2024 AUSA Annual Meeting, “Transforming for a Complex World,” Stubbs said the National Guard must transform for the future along with the Regular Army.

“We've got to be forward leaning, and we've got to be mindful, we've got to be thoughtful and deliberate in the way that we do it because transformation for [the Army Reserve] and the Army National Guard is a little bit more different, a little bit more nuanced and complex than it is in [Regular Army], obviously,” he said.

— Gina Cavallaro