Guard Association Says Compromise With Army Possible

[unhappycamper]

http://breakingdefense.com/2014/03/guard-association-says-compromise-with-army-possible/



A Michigan National Guard soldier patrols in Afghanistan alongside an Afghan soldier and a Latvian ally.

Guard Association Says Compromise With Army Possible
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. on March 25, 2014 at 9:35 PM

After more than two months of escalating conflict, the powerful National Guard Association of the US downshifted today and took a markedly more conciliatory tone towards the Army leaders it had been savaging just last week. As Army Sec. John McHugh and Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno testified before the House Armed Services Committee, NGAUS president Gus Hargett, a retired general himself, issued a supportive statement headlined “NGAUS, Army Leaders Agree on Most Issues.” The statement still ended by criticizing the active-duty Army for not heeding the Guard’s needs during the internal Pentagon budget process, but even this passive-aggressive note was a long way from the just plain aggressive, even inflammatory rhetoric of the past ten weeks.

Is this shift just tactical? Or, I asked NGAUS spokesman John Goheen on Tuesday evening, does this new, conciliatory tone signal a new, conciliatory strategy?

There’s “no shift in strategy,” Goheen said. “Our top priority,” he said, is still convincing Congress to put the Pentagon’s planned cuts to the Army Guard on hold and create an independent commission to resolve the issue.

That said, “we want people to know there’s broad agreement between us and the Army on a lot of things,” Goheen went on. “We’ve been very focused on the issues that divide us, (but) we’re not at loggerheads on everything.”