history of the national guard at war

President Bush is far from the first president to send National Guard troops into combat overseas. A Google search of "national guard overseas deployment history" gives links to plenty of National Guard unit websites detailing their overseas service and also one from the offical National Guard site which says, "In World War I, which the U.S. entered in 1917, the National Guard made up 40% of the U.S. combat divisions in France; in World War II, National Guard units were among the first to deploy overseas and the first to fight."

-- source: dave_lister correcting a bit of mistaken history on my part.

However, I would note that involvement in both wars was out of a necessity from the lack of a strong standing army at the time, relative to the threat. The world wars were certainly of a much larger scale than the skirmishes with Mexico and Spain had been in the latter half of the previous century. Mobilizing a new standing army takes time.

That the current administration has (my opinion) spread our forces too thin, and in a way "used up" our standing army (having to send troops home on rotation to avoid a major riot among their dependents), to the point that he's deploying National Guard troops to where they (again, my opinion) do not belong, that's different.

Because of said deployment, many states say that they likely won't have enough NG troops to deal with any major natural disaster, man-made catastraphy (terrorist or otherwise), or large-scale civil unrest (a-la the LA riots of '92).