Demands facing a state National Guard already heavily committed to combat in Iraq and Afghanistan could soon be growing.

Maj. Gen. Robert G.F. Lee, head of the Hawai'i National Guard, plans to send up to 150 mostly Air Guard members to the Gulf Coast to spell other Hurricane Katrina aid providers, and helicopter crews also may go.

He wants Hawai'i to join the Emergency Management Assistance Compact, an organization to which 48 states already belong, so that in the event of a disaster here, the state can get help faster from other states.

Already, approximately 45 percent of the state's 5,500 Army Guard and Air Guard citizen soldiers are deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait.

Wars have stretched thin the nation's reserve forces while Katrina has raised questions about homeland needs and security, and recruiting remains a big challenge.

It's safe to say that the National Guard, Hawai'i's included, is in a major state of flux.

"I think it just illustrates rather plainly that today's state homeland security plan covers the entire spectrum," Lee said.

It's against that backdrop that approximately 3,500 members of the National Guard Association of the United States are meeting at the Hawai'i Convention Center for their annual conference.

Key issues include legislative priorities, such as opening Tricare, the military's healthcare system, to the Guard and Reserve, and lowering the age at which retired Guard members can receive pension benefits from 60 to something less — possibly 55.

But the hot-button issues of deployments, Katrina aid — and repayment for that assistance — and recruiting woes are likely to be high on the discussion list.

"What affects Hawai'i maybe to a lesser or greater extent is felt by the Guard throughout," Lee said.

The National Guard association, which lobbies on behalf of 45,000 current and former Army and Air National Guard officers, was formed in 1878 with the goal of obtaining better equipment, standardizing training, and creating a more combat-ready force by petitioning Congress for resources.

The conference, which has a defense exhibitor floor with armored Humvees, a 155 mm howitzer, trucks, and several-foot-long models of Predator drones, C-130 aircraft and tanks, began Thursday and runs through tomorrow.

Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, was to be the keynote speaker today for the association's 127th conference, but disaster relief duties kept him away, and he instead made a video presentation.

In that address yesterday, Blum joined Lee and Hawai'i Gov. Linda Lingle in noting the extra sacrifice made by Guard members from the affected states of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi.

"A special note of appreciation and admiration goes out from National Guard leadership to those soldiers who, even though they lost their own homes and their own families are displaced, they are still serving (and) helping others — they put others ahead of themselves," Blum said.

"These are truly American heroes."

Although the destruction from Katrina also resulted in a minimal showing from the Louisiana National Guard, Brig. Gen. Robert Taylor, chairman of the association, dismissed any notion of canceling the conference.

"I think it is probably wise that we are together meeting right now because of the war on terror, and this disaster we had down in the Gulf is all the more reason we should get together and talk about and develop a legislative package that assists the men and women of the Guard in the future," Taylor said.

The Katrina damage resulted in the deployment of about 46,000 National Guard troops and 22,000 active-duty personnel to Louisiana and Mississippi.

The heavy use of the National Guard in Iraq and Afghanistan raised the question of whether the deployments hindered the initial storm response, but Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld rejected such a claim as "flat wrong," saying, "We can and will do both."

Lee said he plans to send to the Gulf between 50 and 150 Guard members who are part of a medical squadron and work in communications, and helicopter crews — minus the helicopters — may be called upon.

Lee said he is "absolutely (confident) that we're ready and we're able to work with our partners" in the event of a disaster here.

Even with the Army Guard's war deployments, Lee said the Air Guard has "the right skills, the medics, the (communications)" for emergency response.

Paul McHale, assistant secretary of defense for Homeland Security, found Hawai'i's emergency preparedness best in the nation in 2003, Lee said, and improvements continue to be made. Hawai'i has one of 12 satellite communications systems in the nation capable of connecting cell phones with emergency walkie-talkies.

Hawai'i's active-duty military presence adds significantly to that preparedness, and interaction like the response to damage caused by Manoa flooding last year has helped refine readiness.

When it was discovered there weren't enough generators to power the University of Hawai'i, "the Army Corps of Engineers came in," Lee said.

State legislation permitting membership in an emergency response compact to which all states except Hawai'i and California belong is expected to be sought in the 2006 session, meanwhile.

The Emergency Management Assistance Compact sets up assistance agreements so that individual memorandums of agreement don't have to be forged with other states when disaster strikes.

Lee said recruiting "is tough with the shooting war going on," and recruiters now have to spend three times the effort to sign a recruit, but for the fiscal year ending this month, the Army Guard needed up to 350 recruits to maintain its 2,975-member strength, and was 11 short with 12 possible candidates.

Benefits like a tax-free $15,000 bonus for re-signing in a war zone are being touted to retain Guard members, along with the goal of deployments only once every five or six years.

Maj. Rafael Bueno, 40, a member of the Puerto Rico National Guard attending the conference, said lowering the age for Guard members to receive retirement pay is "very important."

"It's no longer a part-time job for the National Guard in terms of being mobilized," he said as justification for such an increased benefit. "I've been mobilized twice in the past three years."

Reach William Cole at wcole@honoluluadvertiser.com.