While I was in DC for the recent DSL meetup, I ended up wandering around north of the Capitol building, and stumbled across a museum I hadn't even known was there. The National Guard Foundation has a museum charting the history of the National Guard and its predecessor state militia units about a block west of Union Station. And while it's not one of DC's superstar museums, it's certainly a nice enough place to spend half an hour or so, and an excellent companion to the Post Office Museum1 across the street.
First, for those who are confused, the US Army and Air Force are broken up into three components: Active, Reserve and Guard. The Active force is what it sounds like, full-time soldiers or airmen who do the job professionally. The Reserve is also pretty much what you'd expect, people who do one weekend a month and two weeks a year, but can be called up as needed. The National Guard is like the Reserves, but instead of being controlled by the Federal government, they are controlled by the states. Sort of.
In theory, each state's governor is in charge of the state's National Guard, and they are frequently called up when the state needs a lot of trained bodies for things like disaster relief or backing up the police when there's civil unrest. But if the President thinks he needs to, he can "Federalize" the Guard, placing it under his control. This can be for anything from sending it overseas because there's a war on to stopping the governor from interfering with school integration. It's an extremely weird hybrid, but the fact that each state Guard can talk directly to its governor and Congressional delegation means that the Guard as a whole has lots and lots of political pull. That in turn has lots of weird downstream effects. The Governor of Missouri theoretically has stealth bombers at his disposal. If the Governor of Pennsylvania wanted to invade Maryland, he could send his infantry division. And the National Guard Association has a much nicer museum than you might expect.2
Getting into the museum is a tiny bit of a pain. Find the doors with "National Guard Memorial" above them (this is in the basement of a larger building), and look for the intercom to the right. You'll have to buzz in, and leave any backpacks with the guy at the desk. But assuming they're open, they'll let you in, and you'll be given directions downstairs to the museum. There are cases showing state militia uniforms and various Air National Guard planes on either side of the stairs, which are fun for a few minutes.
The museum itself traces the history of American militia from the earliest colonial days, when it was basically "all of the men in the community need to show up with their guns in case the Indians attack" through their service in the Revolution and the Civil War to WWII and the present. It's quite well-done, although it falls very much on the "museum as history book with some objects" side rather than "museum as collection of objects". That's not to say that there aren't some artifacts, but it's mostly pretty basic stuff. More interesting are the artifact theaters, which combine equipment, pictures and pre-recorded audio to tell the story of a period in the Guard's history. It worked reasonably well3 but seemed like it would have failed catastrophically in the face of even moderate crowds. One of the staff confirmed that most attendees were state Guard delegations and the like. There was also a cool interactive display looking at the mobilization and deployment of Guard units during WWII, including the 45th Infantry Division, which seems designed to produce bottlenecks.
One of the object theaters in action
To be clear, these aren't really criticisms. We didn't see anyone else during our visit, and the curator we talked to admitted that they don't get very much traffic at all, so they can do cool stuff which wouldn't work if you tried it at, say, American History or Air & Space, and to that extent, I'm glad they didn't just slavishly copy the bigger museums. The only serious reason not to go to this museum (assuming you're interested in military museums, which I think is reasonable given that you're reading my museum reviews) is that it's in DC, home to a whole array of great museums, and this one is merely good. So I wouldn't skip out on any interesting Smithsonians for this if you're crunched for time, but it could be a nice change of pace and a break from the crowds that otherwise tend to dominate museums in DC.
1 It's a very good museum, certainly worth considering going to if you're in DC, although a full review is out of scope because this is Naval Gazing, and the only mail we care about comes on buoys. ⇑
2 The Navy and Marines only have Active and Reserve units, because the state naval militias, some of which still exist, were never brought under the Federal umbrella like the regular (land) militias were. The Air National Guard exists because state Guards started to add air units when land-based aviation was still under the Army. There are currently ANG units supporting Space Force, and there are discussions of setting up a dedicated Space Guard. These discussions are stupid, but entirely predictable. ⇑
3 I should note that the history is generally in the most favorable light to the Guard and (particularly) its predecessors. The militia in the Revolution were not an unmitigated success, and there's a reason they focus on Cowpens as opposed to a lot of other battles. ⇑
Comments
I am sure the details of this are classified, but at a high level is custody of the bombs under a separate chain of command than control of the bombers? (Or I suppose - how far up do you have to go for the chains of command to merge?)
I mean, I am pretty sure that if he told the 131st Bomb Wing to go and flatten Chicago (as any true Missourian would want to, but I digress), they would tell him no, and be federalized almost immediately. There's a reason I used the world "theoretically" there. In practice, I don't really understand why the ANG exists, except for maybe air-defense units and C-130s, because they won't really be of any use to the governor.
Even the C-130s can be a weird fit. My hometown ANG unit, the 109th Airlift Wing out of Schenectady, NY, has for I think half a century been the nation's only operator of ski-equipped LC-130s. Notwithstanding New York's winters, nor all the Perfidious Canadians lurking to the North, I do not believe that this offers a meaningful contribution to the defense of New York.
For a while, it provided a useful contribution to the nation by flying men & supplies to the DEW line radar stations in Greenland and Northern Canada. When those went away at the end of the cold war, they took over from the Navy in supporting operations in Antarctica.
So, the New York Air National Guard is more or less permanently federalized and tasked with supporting (and I believe largely funded by) the National Science Foundation. Flying to Antarctica and the South Pole, with a home base just inside the 49th parallel.
I will completely grant that the 109th is a weird unit that doesn't fit in the Guard's theoretical mission, and it's far from the only C-130 unit where this is true, the 193rd SOW (PAANG) being another good example. My point was more that a regular non-prefix C-130 is the sort of thing that a governor might be able to make meaningful use of. Kathy Hochul could ask for an airlift of relief supplies if there's a natural disaster somewhere in New York and the roads are blocked, or to fight forest fires or whatever. But I cannot see any circumstance where Mike Parsons could ask for "his" stealth bombers to do something and have that make sense.
(Also, the 109th isn't the whole of the NYANG.)