No National Guard in the Northern Mariana Islands

The Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands and American Samoa are the only permanently inhabited U.S. territories without a National Guard. Congress has been asked more than once to authorize one, starting with H.R. 3128 in the 107th Congress in October 2001 and again with H.R. 3649 in the 114th, and none of those bills became law. A Commonwealth National Guard remains a proposal. This is in the catalog because of what it takes away. Every benefit in this catalog that runs through a state or territorial Guard is unavailable here: Guard tuition assistance, Guard-specific education waivers, state active duty pay protections, and the state Guard route into federal programmes that assume one exists. A guide written for a state will list several of these. None of them exist in the Commonwealth. What residents do instead is join the Guam National Guard. U.S. Indo-Pacific Command reported that Guam Guard soldiers from the Northern Marianas rose from three in 2022 to seventy-five in 2024. That route has a catch worth spelling out, because it is the kind of thing that only shows up when someone applies. Guam's own veteran benefits are generally gated on Guam residency. The Guam Veterans Higher Education Benefits Act, enacted in February 2026, defines a Qualifying Veteran to include a current member in good standing or an honorably discharged former member of the Guam National Guard regardless of active duty time served, which sounds as though it reaches a Commonwealth resident in the Guam Guard. But the same definition requires the person to have been a resident of Guam at the time of entry into the armed forces, to have declared Guam as their home of record, and to be a legal resident of Guam when applying. A Saipan resident serving in the Guam Guard does not meet those tests. So the practical position is that a Commonwealth resident can serve in a Guard, and can earn the federal benefits that come with Guard service, and is outside the territorial benefits that either Guard's home jurisdiction attaches to it. Federal benefits are unaffected. Guard and reserve service counts toward the Post-9/11 GI Bill on the ordinary federal rules, toward VA home loan eligibility, and toward VA health care and disability compensation where the service and the injury qualify. The Commonwealth's own veterans provisions, the cemetery, the license plates, the civil service preference and the anti-discrimination section, none of them turn on Guard membership. If a Commonwealth National Guard is ever authorized, this entry will need rewriting. Until then, treat any guide that lists Guard tuition assistance for the Northern Mariana Islands as describing something that does not exist.