No “Active Duty Lite”

The Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve continue to provide indispensible contributions to the nation, and remain a fantastic return on investment, say Heritage Foundation policy analyst Mackenzie Eaglen and Col. Samuel Mahaney, a Reserve pilot and national security fellow at Harvard. In a Heritage release issued on June 2, they call on the White House to refrain from making “dramatic and disproportionate” cuts to the Guard and Reserve budgets in the next federal budget round (i.e, Fiscal 2010). If anything, reserve component funding should be boosted, they argue. The last thing the country needs is a diminution of USAF’s reserve components into an “active duty lite,” they write. Yet that may be exactly how some policymakers are interpreting the January recommendations of the Commission on the National Guard and Reserve, they warn.