WASHINGTON, May 18 (UPI) -- State governors may opt out of sending their National Guard troops to help with border control, according to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
"For example, if West Virginia decided they did not want to participate, they would not participate," said Rumsfeld at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing Wednesday.
U.S. President George W. Bush announced a plan Monday to deploy around 6,000 National Guard troops to the Mexican border to bolster the roughly 12,000 Border Patrol agents now on duty.
The intention on the part of each state is for their own National Guard troops to man the functions, which range from construction to helicopter repair and flight to surveillance and reconnaissance. They are not intended to include law enforcement or detention operations for captured illegal migrants, Pentagon officials said Tuesday.
But California, Arizona, Texas and New Mexico will almost certainly have to draw on other state National Guard troops. Most of the 6,000 soldiers will only deploy for two or three weeks, meaning some 150,000 will rotate through the border postings over the course of a year. That easily eclipses the number of soldiers available from each of those states, especially considering the fact that thousands of National Guard troops are already deployed in Iraq.
Moreover, the troops tapped for border duty will need specific skills, and it is not clear that the states will have enough in each specialty to meet the needs of each job.
There are now roughly 400 National Guard troops serving in positions that support the Border Patrol's counter-narcotics mission.
Additional forces will begin to deploy to the border in June, according to the Pentagon.
