NYS DMNA: National Guard’s 383rd Birthday Speech

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The modern National Guard, direct descendant of the militias of the 13 original English colonies, celebrates its 383rd birthday on December 13. On that day in 1636, the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony ordered the formation of the colony's militia into the North, South, and East Regiments.

Although their names have been changed and individual companies have come and gone, the three regiments still exist in the Massachusetts National Guard. Not only are they the oldest units in the National Guard, they are the oldest continuously serving units in the United States Army. In fact, they are among the oldest units in ANY army in the world!

The National Guard is not only the oldest component of the Armed Forces of the United States, it is also one of our country's oldest and longest-enduring traditions. I can think of only four institutions which predate the formation of the Guard's oldest regiments: the cultivation of tobacco in Virginia, the celebration of Thanksgiving, the Congregational Church (today known as the United Church of Christ) and Harvard University, which is 6 months older than the Guard.

Through it all, from before the American Revolution to the modern day, the Guard has remained essential to our national defense. It has fought in every major American war, from the Pequot War to today's Global War on Terror.

In the American Revolution, it was the New England militia alone which fought the first battles at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill. The militia later provided the units for the first regiments of Washington's Continental Army.
In the War of 1812, the Maryland militia saved Ft. McHenry and Baltimore, and Louisiana militia helped Andrew Jackson defeat the British at the Battle of New Orleans.
In the Civil War, the militia made up the majority of the troops who answered Lincoln's call for volunteers, and the manpower draft in the Civil War was based on the legal obligation to serve in the militia.
In the Spanish-American War, citizen-soldiers from the National Guard charged up San Juan Hill and sailed to the Far East to secure the Philippines.
In the First World War, the mobilization of the Guard instantly doubled the size of the U.S. Army. Eighteen National Guard divisions made up 40% of the combat divisions of the American Expeditionary Force in France.
The mobilization of more than 300,000 Guardsmen in 1940-41 once again doubled the size of the U.S. Army before our entry into World War II. The National Guard was in the first wave at Normandy and again fought in Europe, as they did in every other theater of the war.
Thousands of Guardsmen, both Army and Air, served in Korea. Some served again in Vietnam, and during the First Gulf War almost 100,000 were called. Today, even more Guardmembers are on active duty, in the biggest call-up since World War II.

The National Guard's role as primary combat reserve of the Army and the Air Force in times of war should not obscure the Guard's other major role in our society: homeland defense and homeland security. Britain did not send troops to protect its infant colonies in North America, and so the first colonists had to provide for their own defense. In the decades following initial settlement, they refined the militia tradition which they had brought with them from Britain and adapted it to conditions in the New World. In the early decades of settlement in both Virginia and New England, universal military service in the militia was the norm, with men from all classes and occupations gathering for military training in order to serve when needed.

Serving both its local community and its colony and state have always been part of the National Guard's mission. The Guard has always been ready, reliable, essential and accessible to the governors in their hour of need. September 11 was a graphic illustration. Even before the World Trade Center towers collapsed, Guard members in New York City had left their civilian jobs and were on their way to their armories. Some put on their uniforms and rushed straight to the site of the disaster.

These citizen-soldiers did not wait to be called. They knew the Guard's history, and that history has shown that when disaster strikes, the Guard is always there, the first line of defense against natural or man-made disaster. America's appreciation for the Guard's service here at home was rekindled in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the largest and most rapid mobilization in the history of the world for a domestic disaster. Guard members from every one of the 54 states, territories, and the District of Columbia, responded to the call of the governors of the Gulf States. They flooded the region, with over 50,000 responding in the first week after the hurricane made landfall. More than 17,000 American lives were saved as a direct result of Guard rescues, and more than 70,000 grateful citizens evacuated from the stricken region.

For more than three and one half centuries, even before there was a United States, Americans have relied on their National Guard. September 11th and Hurricane Katrina serve as grim reminders to the American people that we live in an oftentimes perilous world. But it also showed the American people that when they were needed -- whether to man the barricades surrounding the remains of the World Trade Center, to guard the nation's borders, airports and skies, to keep the peace in Kosovo, or to patrol the grounds of the United States Capitol, and to fight our wars and train our allies in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other nations -- the men and women of the National Guard are ready. For 383 years, the National Guard has re-affirmed its heritage as the essential force of citizen-soldiers: Always Ready, Always There!