Topeka ? She’s been talking about the shortage of National Guard equipment for at least two years. She’s written letters, answered reporters’ questions, even chatted up the president on a trip through the Flint Hills.

But it took a devastating tornado May 4 that leveled Greensburg for people to notice what Gov. Kathleen Sebelius was trying to say.

“It’s one of my favorite topics,” Sebelius said last week.

She and other governors have tried to put the issue high on the radar for President Bush and the past two secretaries of defense. The reality is that the more the National Guard is sent to Iraq, Afghanistan and – in the case of Kansas – Kosovo, the more gear sent with the soldiers isn’t coming home.

The day after the tornado hit Greensburg, Sebelius said those gaps were evident in recovery efforts.

“I don’t think there is any question if you are missing trucks, Humvees and helicopters that the response is going to be slower,” Sebelius said in Greensburg. “We’re going to borrow, beg and steal it from wherever you can.”

After her comments and the resulting well-publicized spat with the White House, governors from across the country chimed in their support. And they weren’t all Democrats, either.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, said the shortage of equipment left states in a precarious position for the next hurricane, wildfire or terrorist attack.

Coincidentally, the United States saw all of those events last week, from the foiled plot on soldiers at Fort Dix, N.J., wildfires near Los Angeles and the season’s first tropical storm off the Georgia coast.

In January, the Government Accountability Office gave a report to a House committee making several recommendations on how the National Guard is used and equipped. Among the findings was that no one is planning for how the National Guard would respond if a disaster involved multiple states.

Also, the report found, the Department of Defense doesn’t “routinely measure or report to Congress the equipment readiness of nondeployed National Guard forces for domestic missions.” In short, federal officials don’t know what they’ve got until it’s gone.

And for most states, more than half of the National Guard’s equipment is gone, a problem when they were supplied to only about 60 percent to 70 percent of what they needed before the Iraq war started. The Pentagon has a multiyear plan to replace the equipment, but that is expected to take states to only 90 percent of what they had over five or six years. That also doesn’t assume more deployments and more gear sent to Iraq.

Maj. Gen. Melvyn Montano, former New Mexico adjutant general, said the only way to reset the National Guard is to put the United States on a war footing, mobilizing industry to generate the levels of equipment needed to sustain all forces.