AUGUSTA, Maine — A scheduled deployment to Kuwait in the spring of 2016 for members of the Maine National Guard’s 136th Engineer Company has been canceled, according to Brig. Gen. Gerard Bolduc, the interim adjutant general of Maine.
The cancellation is a direct result of a planned change in troop management that this week cost former Guard Adjutant Gen. James Campbell his job. Campbell was fired Tuesday by Gov. Paul LePage over his controversial plan to transform Maine’s 133rd Engineer Battalion into an infantry unit.
The cancellation notice by the National Guard Bureau indicates the plan to change the 133rd Engineer Battalion and other units into the 1st Battalion, 103rd Infantry Regiment, is well under way. The 136th is part of the Portland-based 133rd.
LePage has vowed to keep the 133rd in Maine and is meeting with Maine Guard officials on Wednesday to discuss the matter, Capt. Norm Stickney, spokesman for the Maine National Guard, said Friday.
“The governor and [Bolduc] are meeting next week and that is where we will learn if this can be stopped,” Stickney said. “We know that the Maine National Guard leadership and [National Guard Bureau] are talking, and it looks like it’s still a possibility.
“Timing is everything. The decision by the Army National Guard Bureau to cancel the 136th deployment was made before the governor [fired Campbell] and before Governor LePage said he would stop the engineers from moving,” Stickney said.
A message left with the governor’s office was not immediately returned.
The 133rd, with about 560 soldiers, is made up of personnel from the 136th Engineer Company in Skowhegan and Lewiston, 185th Engineer Support Company from Caribou, 251st Engineer Company of Norway, the Forward Support Company in Portland, Headquarters Support Company, the 262nd Engineer Company based in Belfast and Westbrook, and the 1035th Survey and Design Team of Gardiner.
The units that would be transitioned to infantry include the 136th, 262nd, 251st, Forward Support Company, which are all part of the 133rd, and Bravo Company, 172nd Mountain Infantry unit based in Brewer, according to information released as part of a Freedom of Information Act request for Campbell’s emails and texts released Wednesday.
Units listed to be “turned in” as part of the planned transition include the 1035th Survey and Design Team, the 1968th Contingency Contracting Team and the 121st Public Affairs Department based in Augusta, states a March 28, 2014, email to Campbell from Col. Jack Mosher, his chief of staff.
Maine’s 133rd is the oldest unit in the state and has a distinguished reputation. The 103rd is the name the 133rd went by in the 1960s, when it was a combat unit. The engineer unit is available to respond to natural disasters and completes community outreach projects every year.
The 136th was sourced to deploy to Iraq in 2009, but the deployment was canceled. Then the unit was notified by the National Guard Bureau in December that all 160 members of the 136th would be heading to Kuwait in support of the drawdown of U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
“The deployment cancellation is not a complete surprise due to transformation timelines,” Bolduc said. “The Maine Army National Guard staff will ensure that we support our soldiers and their families throughout the deployment cancellation process.”
Much of the federal military restructuring plan is based on post-war economics, according to a Congressional Research Service report released in February 2014 by the Federation of American Scientists titled “Army Drawdown and Restructuring: Background and Issues for Congress.”
All 50 states and the country’s territories are facing “dramatic cuts” under the Army’s budget, which has a goal of eliminating 45,000 guard jobs nationwide in the coming years, Stickney said.
The projected Maine Army Guard decrease is set to go into effect Sept. 1, 2016, according to Stickney, who stressed that nothing is set in stone.
While discussions are under way and steps forward have been taken, no final decisions have been made about force structure in Maine, according to Rick Breitenfeldt, a National Guard Bureau spokesman based in Arlington, Virginia.
“The Army is reducing force structure across all three components [Active, Guard and Reserve] and working to balance force structure mix in order to meet current and anticipated future demands,” Breitenfeldt said in an email Wednesday. “At this time, no force structure decisions have been made by the chief of staff or the secretary of the Army.”
“We anticipate a decision to be published in late summer of 2015,” Maj. Earl Brown, another spokesman for the National Guard Bureau, said in a Friday afternoon email.
While nothing is official, change is on the horizon, Stickney said.
“The numbers are constantly in flux,” the captain said. “The National Guard is working on those numbers now. What will Maine’s impact be? We don’t know right now. We expect state [Guard units] will be smaller, but the exact impact for Maine is unknown.”
When Maine Army Guard leaders learned that 200-plus jobs out of the state’s 2,100-member force might be lost, they started drafting a proposal to convert the 133rd into an infantry battalion, according to guard officials.
“By restructuring [units in] the state of Maine, by expanding the infantry or transforming units to the infantry, it better meets the operational needs of the Department of the Army at this time,” Stickney said in February.
With the planned restructuring from engineers to infantry, the 2016 budget calls for only a small cut — about 20 soldiers in Maine — compared with losing “upwards of 200” jobs without the change, Stickney said.
If the governor is successful in keeping the 133rd in Maine, those 200 jobs may be at risk.
“Yes,” Stickney said. “That’s a possibility.”