RENO, Nev. - During his hour-long address, Gen. Joseph Lengyel, chief of the National Guard Bureau, encapsulated the theme of the 46th annual Enlisted Association of the National Guard of the United State conference in Reno this week with one statistic: 850,000.
That's the number of National Guard overseas deployments since 9/11, which nearly doubles all American wars combined going back to World War II.
That statistic highlights the National Guard's evolution from a strategic reserve to an operational force component, Lengyel said during his speech before about 800 Soldiers, Airmen, retirees, vendors and civilians who attended the three-day conference at the Reno Events Center this week.
"As a member of the joint chiefs, my advice to our leadership…whatever we do going forward, whatever force we build — which this association represents the biggest part — we would not want to build a force that doesn't come to rely on this force as an operational force," said Lengyel, who advises the president as the most senior National Guard uniformed officer on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "We will never go back to being the strategic reserve we once were."
The conference including 74 vendors and various speakers in addition to Lengyel, including Lt. Gen. L. Scott Rice, director of the Air National Guard, Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval and former White House aide Sebastian Gorka.
"Everything went fantastic," said Frank Yoakum, retired sergeant major and EANGUS executive director. "We encountered a few schedule changes, but we were flexible and everything has worked just fine."
Yoakum commended the Nevada National Guard and the city of Reno for hospitality, conference facilities and security.
EANGUS represents more 414,000 enlisted Airmen, Soldiers, family members and retirees from all 50 states and territories. The association, headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia, maintains a full-time staff to represent the interests of enlisted Guard members concerning legislative matters at the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill.
While Lengyel emphasized the National Guard's operational capabilities overseas, Hurricane Harvey this week in Texas and Louisiana has displayed the National Guard's ability to respond as an operational force in the homeland.
"We are 20 percent of the joint force in our nation," Lengyel said. "When you add up the 2 million people who are in uniform, 450,000 of them are National Guard. And we are in every state and territory, including the District of Columbia. We're battling violent extremism around the world. And when we're not there, when we're training to be there, we're going to be in places like Texas and Houston helping people recover."
Lengyel, who arrived from Texas to address EANGUS members in Reno on Tuesday, said more than 12,000 Guardsmen were on activation status in Texas for the floods and added: "This could easily exceed the response we had to (Hurricane) Katrina (in 2005)."
Sgt. Maj. Christopher Kepner, sergeant major of the Army National Guard, echoed the operational force theme.
"If you were to talk to someone before 9/11 and you were to say to them, ‘In four years, you will be a traditional airman or soldier with four combat deployments,' they would have said, ‘There is no way you can do that because you are going to break the Guard.' That's what they would have said before 9/11…But you know what? We did it," Kepner said. "In 2005, more than 50 percent of the forces in Iraq were Army and Air National Guard forces. And we did it because we had to and we've done it for the last 15 years."