• Clements was in the Scowcroft Institute Army Fellow Program; the program, in The Bush School of Government and Public Service, hosts and provides additional support for mid-career military personnel attending the U.S. Army War College

• “LTC Clements has done the nation a service with his research. It’s top-notch work and we here at the Bush School are proud to have supported him in examining such an important issue.” – John B. Sherman ’92, Bush School dean

The scene is familiar to anyone who watches television news: an anchor, framed by footage of a fire or flood or other disaster, explains that the governor has dispatched National Guard troops to help deal with the situation.

But what if those troops are fighting overseas?

Lt. Col. Dallas Clements, a Tennessee National Guard member and recent Scowcroft Institute Army fellow, spent 11 months gathering and analyzing data to answer that question. His conclusion: the nation has grown increasingly reliant on troops who may be unavailable to respond to domestic disasters during a war. His study is the first of its kind and recently won a prestigious Army War College Foundation award – the second year in a row that an Army fellow studying at the Bush School has won a prestigious award for in-depth research. Clements’ report grew out of a straightforward question, he said: “What are we asking, as a nation, our guardsmen and guardswomen to do?”

A lot, is the short answer. So much that “the increasing reliance on the military to support emergency response will likely lead to critical response shortfalls” should the United States find itself in a military conflict. Clements’ overarching conclusion is that the nation should begin preparing for that possibility now. Otherwise, civil authorities – governors, mayors, police and fire chiefs – may be left to handle life-and-death demands that are probably beyond them. Clements’ recommendations range from adding drones to response units to working with volunteer organizations to ensure they can shoulder more of the work following a domestic disaster.

“The obvious reality is that the main obligation of the nation’s military is winning the nation’s wars,” said Bert Tussing, an Army War College professor who advised Clements in his research. In the near future, Tussing said, “we may have to deal with the quintessential man-made disaster, war, coming to us … so what happens (in a domestic emergency) when we need to pull the handle, but the handle has already been pulled?”

MORE DISASTERS, MORE DEPLOYMENTS

One fact underpins Clements’s report, titled “Disaster Demand Signal: US Military Civil Support Trends 2015-2024”:

“Disasters in the United States are becoming more frequent and destructive.”

That trend is placing more strain on the nation’s National Guard units. Per the report: “The average annual number of disaster declarations in the last 10 years has increased 150 percent … Nine of the 10 most destructive hurricanes in our nation’s history have occurred in the last 20 years. Billion-dollar damage events, once exceedingly rare, now occur frequently. Over the last five years, the United States has averaged 23 disasters a year that exceed one billion dollars in damages. In response to these events, leaders increasingly turn to the military to assist as local capacity becomes overwhelmed.”

Clements said that National Guard units are usually the right people for the job. Guard organizations are the descendants of state militias, after all, Clements noted, and are positioned for effective large-scale responses in a way that city and county governments usually cannot afford.

Yet, Clements cautions in the report, “the trendline for National Guard personnel days (on domestic deployments) is on track to nearly double over the next 10 years.” That is the case even after the enormous federal response during the COVID-19 pandemic was removed from the data, according to the study. (Which also included the active-duty troops whom presidents occasionally deploy for domestic purposes.) This, despite the reality that the military will almost certainly have fewer troops available for domestic missions during a war.

“There are now new pressures on the National Guard to participate in policing cities and the possibility of having to be mobilized because of potential conflict with Russia and China,” in addition to responding to natural disasters, said Andrew Natsios, Clements’s Bush School adviser. “These three missions require very different skill sets. It is not clear that the National Guard has enough support, or troops, to meet the demand of policymakers. … Lt. Col. Clements’s research is very timely.”

GOT A CHOPPER? ADD A HOIST

Clements decided to study the U.S. military’s “civil support trends” because of his background with disaster response. He originally chose that field because his first mission after joining the Guard was a deployment in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Seven months later, he was part of the response when an EF3 tornado (winds capable of flattening forests and knocking over buildings) hit a town northeast of Nashville. Disaster response was an obvious way to serve his country.

His report is based on a decade’s worth of federal and state data. It includes nine recommendations. The top one is so straightforward that it might seem dissonant with a large-scale report using enormous data sets to analyze complex systemic issues:

Send more helicopters during disasters – particularly helicopters with hoists.

The best way to achieve that? Pay companies to attach hoists to their helicopters.

Helicopters with hoists are the most sought-after resource during a disaster, said Clements, who has spent more than two decades in the disaster-response profession. When people are trapped, a helicopter with a hoist is usually the best way to rescue them. Cue scenes of people on rooftops watching floodwater rise, or huddling in momentarily safe pockets as wildfires rage around them.

Many companies with helicopters – think private and nonprofit air-ambulance services – might see little reason for a hoist. But if the federal government entices companies to add a hoist, a helicopter becomes a potential rescue vehicle that could be called upon if military helicopters need additional support or are simply not available.

Tennessee’s National Guard is the only organization in the state with helicopters that have both a hoist and a paramedic, Clements said. Those helicopters are called in about eight times a year just for the hoist, he said. They recently needed three hoist rescues in three weeks. They are in demand.

“If Florida asks Tennessee for help,” Clements said, “it’s probably going to be asking for a helicopter.”

Tussing, Clements’ Army War College faculty adviser, said the report offers ample evidence that the nation needs difficult conversations about who can and should take responsibility for tasks the military has been handling. The military’s response capabilities are not unique, he said; it can simply bring more resources to bear.

“They’re not the only ones who can do this,” Tussing said. But even a federally created strategy will have to be fleshed out, then carried out, at the state and community levels. “So I think we should be asking, what can we, as Americans, and in civil society generally, do?”

THE GUARD’S BIGGEST COMMITMENT

In analyzing why governors activate National Guard troops (and why presidents occasionally deploy active-duty troops within the United States), Clements expected either floods or wildfires to be the top reason. He was surprised to find that another task that dwarfed all others: law enforcement.

He joked that he should have seen the conclusion coming. That first Guard deployment, the post-Katrina mission, was to Gulfport, Miss., where his unit helped police maintain public safety. (His was, coincidentally, one of the military-police companies that has spent time patrolling Washington, D.C.)

Clements found that law enforcement missions, plus similar counter-drug and asset-protection missions, accounted for 57% of the total personnel days spent on domestic missions. Wildfire-, hurricane- and flood-response accounted for 16% of those days combined.

The scale of the commitments is not new, despite recent attention on recent missions such as the National Guard presence in the nation’s capital, Clements said. He said the law-enforcement missions are nonetheless worth considering in light of the other strains on National Guard resources. Planners must take law enforcement into account when determining the resources that governors and Guard leaders can bring to bear on other situations.

For perspective: Hurricane Helene drew about 6,000 troops, primarily in North Carolina, with most troops staying three to four weeks, Clements said. Meanwhile, Operation Lone Star, Texas’s border-protection effort, “has had that many troops every day of the year, for years.”

SUBSTANTIATED CONCERNS, A HIGH HONOR

No one had previously gathered these sorts of insights on domestic deployments in a publicly available format. The trends for domestic response by active-duty troops were likewise little studied. 

Tussing, Clements’ war college advisor, said that when they started discussing the project last year, the assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense and hemispheric affairs was already quietly wondering how the nation would respond to disasters in wartime. Clements’ work substantiated those concerns, Tussing said.

Clements had the time and resources to dig thanks to a pair of opportunities for mid-career military personnel. He was accepted into the U.S. Army War College, the Army’s highest level of military education, and was awarded a fellowship as part of a partnership between the war college and the Bush School’s Scowcroft Institute of International Affairs. The fellowship provides officers such as Clements with a range of academic support, from lectures to mentorship, as they complete an in-depth research project of strategic significance.

Last year, Scowcroft Army fellow Col. Fin P. Carey wrote a report on disinformation and malinformation by U.S. adversaries that judges deemed significant enough to merit a U.S. Army War College Commandant’s Award for Distinction in Research. Clements’ report won a 2025 U.S. Army War College Foundation Award for Outstanding Research Project, one of seven reports honored by the foundation.

Clements said the following Bush School faculty and staff members were particularly helpful:

• Natsios, his Scowcroft Institute faculty advisor;
• Tom Haase, Ph.D., who helped edit the report and taught an Emergency Management/Homeland Security class that Clements audited;
• Michael Reilly, a retired Marine Corps colonel whose Homeland Security/Homeland Defense class Clements audited;
• Danny Davis, Ph.D., whose domestic-terrorism class Clements audited;
• Brenda Kent, a Bush School writing consultant who helped focus numerous observations into a concise narrative.

The report concludes by citing Hurricane Katrina. More than 77,000 Guard and active-duty troops assisted in the recovery, the largest domestic deployment since the Civil War. They delivered food and water in the wake of large-scale power outages; patrolled neighborhoods, looking for survivors and marking houses in which the occupants were dead; rescued people from rooftops and escorted them to shelters; and performed many other tasks.

The report cites a Department of Defense warning about such situations in today’s world: overreliance on the military “creates strategic vulnerabilities which competitors may target and exploit to undermine national security.”