In Florida, about 3,000 of the state’s National Guard troops — nearly 30% — are currently deployed overseas.
Another 800 are on federal orders supporting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and “quite a few” are deployed to Washington, D.C., to support local law enforcement.
It all makes up more than three times the Guard’s true capacity, according to Maj. Gen. Robert Carruthers, assistant adjutant general of the Florida Guard. And that’s even after the activation in recent years of the Florida State Guard, a volunteer civilian military force, to support hurricane response and other state needs.
In a panel at the Association of the United States Army’s annual meeting on Tuesday, the message of other Guard leaders was clear: The demands are unsustainable — and they need to stop.
“The governor’s become quite addicted to the Guard and how useful they are since COVID,” Carruthers said, referring, presumably, to Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has been in office since 2019.
The effects are felt in equipment readiness and training, he said, particularly as funding has not followed the deployment of units and their gear.
“You’re going to have this cascading effect of breaking units downstream,” Carruthers said. “In the case of Florida, what are we going to lose first? Are we going to lose our transportation companies, which are critically important in hurricane [relief], or are we going to lose our aviation first? So it’s also important for us to plan for that aspect.”
The Florida Guard, Carruthers said, had ordered a “maintenance stand-down” to assess the status of infantry brigade combat team equipment sitting unused in motor pools. As a result of the assessment, he said, equipment readiness rates dropped from 90% to 27% within six weeks.
“It’s somewhere five degrees below combat-ineffective, right?” he said. “So that’s just the state of where we are, because the equipment sits … we are not funded to maintain it all the time.”
Maj. Gen. Jack James, commanding general of the New York-based 42nd Infantry Division, proposed a solution to push back on governors’ demands: a “broker” and a “traffic cop” to filter activation and employment requests and prioritize them.
“You hear what these guys are up against with their governors, right? And then what the warfighting commanders are up against with our, whether it’s the [U.S. Central Command] commander, [U.S. Pacific Command] commander, our Army components, right?” James said. “There’s inherent friction right there, so we need a brokering function. We need a traffic cop function. We need the arbiter of how those resource allocations are going to be made in a quick, timely manner, so we can get after it for the country.”
Carruthers acknowledged there would be “political pressure” and fallout as the Guard works to manage expectations and requirements in line with its actual capacity.
“There are probably homeland defense people who think they’re getting these dudes and dudettes, and all of the governors think they have all of their Guard because they’re not really led in war plans,” he said. “And the time of mobilization is not the time to adjudicate that. So that’s something we got to work now to include … trying to get our governor and our state leadership in on these plans at a classified level, so they understand.”
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, 2020 saw a historic mobilization of some 118,000 Guard troops at home and overseas.
And the start of President Donald Trump’s second term in 2025 kicked off a new wave of domestic deployments, both to quell unrest and support ICE enforcement actions in Democratic-controlled cities and to contribute to crime reduction in Washington, D.C. The D.C. deployments alone are expected to cost the country another $1.4 billion through January 2029.
While the increased role of National Guard troops in domestic affairs has been a point of concern for some time, Army National Guard Director Lt. Gen. Jonathan Stubbs said the current situation would force action, and even confrontation, within the next year.
“Hope is not a method in this case; there is no fail. We’ve got to figure this thing out,” Stubbs said.
“It’s going to require hard conversations between adjutants general and governors. There’s going to be a level of dialog, of informing and educating our state commanders and chiefs in terms of the prospect of … mobilization and what it could mean for their access to the respective National Guard service members when conflict comes,“ he continued. ”And then when conflict persists, as it expands and retracts, and at some point in time, what they’re going to have left inside the state.”
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