Officials at the Pentagon's Northern Command, whose brief includes domestic defense missions, are mulling the possibility of standing up an active-duty military force whose training and mission would be to help deal with disaster situations like Hurricane Katrina, The New York Times reports today.
Without addressing the implications of such a notion vis a vis the 1878 Posse Commitatus Act, which prohibits U.S. troops from law enforcement on American soil, a couple of questions pop immediately to mind here:
- From whence would these troops come? As it is, the Army (the logical source for such a force) is having trouble recruiting and is working as fast as it can to convert desk-bound soldiers into trigger pullers so as to expand the number of soldiers available for missions. It would seem surprising that they would happily hand over some significant number of soldiers for a purely domestic mission when they need all hands for what’s on their global plate. The answer is that we’re talking about hundreds of soldiers, the Times reports. But that raises this question:
- If this force came into existence, how long would it actually remain in the United States? According to the Times: “The new unit could include military communications technicians, logistics specialists, doctors and nurses, engineers and even infantry.” So .. the sort of skill-sets that are crucial for nation-building missions like are going on in Iraq?
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