Five questions for Maj. Gen. Bob Livingston, S.C. Adjutant General-elect

Veteran combat commander, Maj. Gen. Bob Livingston, will becomeSouth Carolina’s next Adjutant General – overseeing the 11,000-memberS.C. Military Department, composed of the S.C. Army National Guard, theS.C. Air National Guard, the S.C. State Guard, the Joint ServicesDetachment, and the Emergency Management Division – and is the onlyelected Adjutant General, nationwide.

Livingston – who commanded approximately 9,000 troops inAfghanistan (including S.C. National Guard forces and troops from 18different coalition nations) and ultimately served on Gen. DavidPetraeus staff as Director of the Coalition Coordination Center – hasactionable experience as a conventional warfighter as well as in globalcounterterrorism and disaster relief operations.

Recently, Livingston discussed with UpstateBizSC.com his plans for the S.C. Military Dept.

 

UpstateBizSC:
How is your combat experience going to enhance the leadership of the S.C. Military Department?

Maj. Gen. Bob Livingston:
First, as a combatveteran, I have an understanding of what we are asking our soldiers andairmen to do when they enter a combat zone. So that will continue toenhance our preparation. I think we’ve done a very good job in the pastin terms of preparing our soldiers and airmen to go to war, but havingactually been there and experienced the demands of a combat zone,allows me to further refine troop preparation.

More importantly, my family – especially my wife, Barbara, who hasso many times reached out to families as a commander’s wife –understands the effect that deployments, especially combat deployments,have on the troops and their families. So it gives us an appreciationfor the issues that we as the military create for our troops andfamilies, and the need to address those issues.

So [the experience] will not only help us in the preparation to dothe actual combat piece, but we also understand how to mitigate certainissues that are created through family separation and the experience ofcombat.

UpstateBizSC:
In what ways do you see themission of the Army and the Air National Guard evolving? Morespecifically, how will overall training and operations change underyour command?

Gen. Livingston: 
Very good question, becauseI think we stand at a crossroads in our national defense. From a bigpicture standpoint, we cannot spend $800-$900 billion on Defense. Soour Congress, which has the responsibility of raising our nationaldefense, is going to have to look and see at how our forces are arrayedand structured. And I hope we take a business approach as well as abureaucratic approach to the formulation of our government goingforward. So a lot depends on how we look at ourselves.

Overall, given the critical role our National Guard has played inour national defense – sometimes representing over 50 percent of thecombat forces in a theater, and given the capability and the rapidnature in which we can employ our forces – I can only see that we willcontinue to occupy a prominent role in our national defense, and I seethat role expanding. That to me is an appropriate role given the uniquenature of our military and the origins of our National Guard and ournational defense.

I believe our federal role will continue to expand. We certainlyhave looked at new missions in the Homeland Defense arena. We willcontinue to prepare for those missions along with our stateconsequence-management missions. So I see us actually increasing thepace of our operations, and I envision a multi-role force out therethat is very cost-effective and flexible in its response.

And nowadays our responses to overseas contingency operations are –in a great sense – similar to some of our homeland issues, especiallywhen dealing with consequence management (a fancy term for disasterrelief).

We’re not just going out and defeating somebody else’s military,because we have no peers militarily to defeat. We’re working onconsequence management that improves the lives of other people so thatterrorist organizations cannot effectively recruit from othercommunities.

UpstateBizSC:
In the current economicenvironment, do you plan to expand the roles of the S.C. State Guard,to include the other volunteer service organization, the Joint ServicesDetachment? If so, how?

Gen. Livingston:
As we look at our budgetshortfalls, we’re going to have to look at reaching out to manydifferent organizations for many different issues. Certainly the StateGuard is a very flexible organization that really presents us with alot of opportunities to expand their role in the state mission, whetherit be a security role, whether it be working with engineers in anactual cleanup role, or working with the Highway Patrol in trafficmanagement. [There are] so many different roles that they can play, andwhat we really need to do is troop-to-task analysis, and really plotout what the State Guard and other volunteer organizations can do; pairthem up with the units they’ll be operating with – whether it beNational Guard units or other state entities – and to really rehearsethose things.

But it goes way beyond that. We’re going to have to look atpartnerships and alliances [with other agencies, businesses, privateand semi-private organizations] throughout our state. And we’ve done agood job on some of this. That’s the way of the future.

UpstateBizSC:
What specifically might you change – if anything – about the S.C. Emergency Management Division?

Gen. Livingston:
Emergency Management in S.C.has done an excellent job in terms of preparation. One of the shiningmoments in S.C. history was when Hurricane Hugo came through in 1989,and we saw our rapid recovery from Hugo. We learned a lot of thingsfrom that period and we have constantly applied them and continued toperform exercises. I will be very involved personally with theEmergency Management Division, and I will work with the other agenciesto make sure that we truly support their preparation for stateemergencies. I will look carefully at the detail of our exercises andmake sure we don’t just stop at the governmental level, but that –again – we reach out to private industry, that we have written into ourplan, but we never have really, thoroughly exercised that link.

The detail of the exercises is one thing I would change: Theinterface with the governor’s office and really making that a seamlesspiece where the governor really sees EMD as his or her staff during anactual emergency, and that the agency heads then provide proper counselto the governor. In my case, I will be the military advisor to thegovernor in the event of a state disaster or the employment of theEmergency Management Division.

The other thing I will emphasize with Emergency Management iscontinuing to expand the outreach to the community, the partnershipswith the community, and putting our resources out to the communitiesand not to a centralized area. They’ve done that well so far. We justwant to accelerate that effort.

UpstateBizSC:
What is the media missing interms of the S.C. Military Department, more specifically about theimportance of the S.C. Military Department in terms of both federaldeployments and state homeland defense?

Gen. Livingston:
Because of the nature ofmedia – very short news segments – it’s difficult for people tounderstand the great contributions of the men, women, and familiesassociated with the military department, whether it be the missionoverseas, the state mission, or the homeland security mission, such asthe Army Air and Missile Defense Command up in Anderson. So the mediais missing the details of S.C.’s military involvement in the defense ofour nation and the defense and support of our community. So many goodthings happen, but they are in the background. In fact, they are oftenso successful, nobody notices them.

Furthermore, we as a state and nation have – to a certain extent –lost the understanding of the origins of our national defense, whichstarted as the precursor to the National Guard back in 1636 and thenthe S.C. National Guard back in 1670, and how the National Guard iswoven into the fabric of our nation and community.