Head of National Guard: Iraq "arguably" cost national guard response 1 extra day

Heck, who needs their national guard at home when we can have it in Iraq?
(emphasis mine, but all of this is pretty harsh)

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/09/katrina.natguard.ap/index.html

Iraq hurt Katrina response, general says
Pentagon says it can handle both the disaster and Iraq war

Friday, September 9, 2005; Posted: 6:25 p.m. EDT (22:25 GMT)

BAY ST. LOUIS, Mississippi (AP) -- The deployment of thousands of National Guard troops from Mississippi and Louisiana in Iraq when Hurricane Katrina struck hindered those states' initial storm response, military and civilian officials said Friday.

Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, said that "arguably" a day or so of response time was lost due to the absence of the Mississippi National Guard's 155th Infantry Brigade and Louisiana's 256th Infantry Brigade, each with thousands of troops in Iraq.

"Had that brigade been at home and not in Iraq, their expertise and capabilities could have been brought to bear," said Blum.

Blum said that to replace those units' command and control equipment, he dispatched personnel from Guard division headquarters from Kansas and Minnesota shortly after the storm struck.

Blum also said that in a worst-case scenario up to 50,000 additional Guardsmen per month will be needed in Louisiana or Mississippi over the next four months to continue providing relief, law enforcement and other post-hurricane services.

Those 200,000 troops, if needed, would represent nearly two-thirds of the approximately 319,000 Guard troops available nationwide. Blum said his staff has almost completed a plan for 30-day rotations of Guard units so that no one will have to serve in the Gulf Coast for more than a month.

There are about 30,000 Guardsmen in Iraq and a smaller number in Afghanistan, Kosovo and elsewhere overseas.

Democratic Rep. Gene Taylor of Mississippi, whose waterfront home in Bay St. Louis was washed away in the storm, told reporters the absence of the deployed Mississippi Guard units made it harder for local officials to coordinate their initial response.

"What you lost was a lot of local knowledge," Taylor said, as well as equipment that could have been used in recovery operations.

"The best equipment went with them, for obvious reasons," especially communications equipment, he added.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said this week the Pentagon has the ability to cope with both Katrina and the Iraq war: "We can and will do both."

Asked Tuesday about critics who said the commitment of large numbers of troops to the Iraq conflict hindered the military's response to Hurricane Katrina, Rumsfeld said, "Anyone who's saying that doesn't understand the situation."

Blum said that overall the Iraq mission for Guard units across the nation is not limiting the military's ability to expand and continue the rescue and recovery operations in storm-battered states.

"Iraq and other overseas commitments do not inhibit our ability to sustain this effort here at home," Blum said in an interview with three reporters who flew to Bay St. Louis with him Friday from Washington.

Blum and Taylor toured the heavily damaged areas around Bay St. Louis.

They also met with Guardsmen and other troops helping clean up and provide emergency assistance to those displaced by the wall of water that wiped out many homes and flooded a widespread area miles north of the coastline.

Blum also flew to New Orleans, where he met with troops and commanders and was given an extensive aerial tour of flooded portions of the city.

Afterward he flew to Baton Rouge and met with Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, commander of the military relief and recovery effort in the region.

Mildly interesting, but it doesn't diminish the need to reform the Mideast, at most all it does is demonstrate that the military is stretched more thin than they are letting on, but that's not surprising. I don't think it means they no longer have the ability to do their job though.

It's nothing more than "bad luck". It sounds like if the Kansas and Minnesota personnel had been deployed in Iraq rather than the Mississippi and Louisiana, it wouldn't matter. So I don't see the point...unless it is "How dare the National Guard not predict the future and realize that those personnel would be needed to recover from an unpredictable hurricane."

Sounds like just yet another grasp at straws to make the military look bad and push a certain political point of view.

To be fair, the complaint isn't about the prognostic deficiencies of the National Guard. It's about the use of the National Guard as a surrogate for the main branches of the armed forces, in opposition to the traditional role of the National Guard as a defender of the homeland. The fault does not lie with Bush alone, as the National Guard has been activated for international deployment many times throughout the last four decades. The problem is that the National Guard is being relied upon to an extent never before being seen, and a major disaster just happened to coincide with major deployment elsewhere. If a major hurricane had destroyed New Orleans while the Guard was away in the Persian Gulf back last decade, I think there would have been just as much outrage.

I think it's just something we have to deal with. Maybe the National Guard should be downsized greatly and more focus should go into the army. Or the army should just be made bigger somehow. The military may not be stretched so thin that they can't handle things, (if you believe what the DoD is saying, which atm I do), but having to tap into the National Guard for overseas duty IMO is the definition of the beginning of being stretched too thin. If in the near future there is a real need for some massive troop presence, say NK invades SK or something... given what we're seeing now with tapping into the NG I think it's obvious we'd have major personnel shortages.

But this is probably going to be a problem for as long as we have a volunteer only military. There's not much that can be done about it other than to rename the National Guard to something else.

I vote "Storm Troopers". At any rate, what if a catagory 5 hurricane or two smaller ones were to hit florida, and a magnitude 8-9+ earthquake were to hit either the west coast or off the west coast (typhoon). Do we have the remaining capacity to deal with any further disaster? Do we have any reserve left should a terrorist actually decide to infect a major city's water supply with a dangerous disease or the like?

Or are we completely and totally incapacitated as far as helping ourselves go at the moment, beyond what we're doing now.

Easy on the FUD there, Siro.

I've lived in South Florida since about the time I was born, so I can speak to this issue. Currently, storm insurance is sickeningly expensive, mostly because of the (unnecessary) kickbacks spread across the state and disaster relief to mid-Florida last year. The folks, who also live down here, have a $10,000 (!) deductable.

I've also had the (mis)fortune of living through a category five hurricane once in my life, as well as eye wall of Katrina when it was a category 1. The local services were actually pretty good with cleanup, and while there's still a few downed trees lying around here, power and utilities were back for most people within 72 hours, and roughly everyone within the week.

Andrew, on the other hand, was about a week or two before normalcy was restored, and the better part of a year before all the cleanup was complete.

Here's the rub. We're in the midst of a population boom down here, and the result has been a huge demand for cheap housing. If South Florida was hit with a major hurricane tomorrow (knock on wood), most of the buildings and people in them would be devastated.

Here's what Homestead looked like after Andrew in '92.
http://www.sptimes.com/2002/webspecials02/andrew/



But the fact of the matter is, both cities (Miami and SF) are still better prepared for these disasters because, for many people, they're a common occurance.



Statistic for Andrew:

What happened with New Orleans is a completely different animal, and there's not yet an official count for the number of dead other than "thousands."

New Orleans was hit so hard because the resounding opinion was "ehh, it won't happen this year." The city and its people just didn't know how to properly handle a storm of this magnitude, and the result has been... well, we already know that part.





But here's what really gets to me about this whole ordeal. Hurricanes are not a sudden event. You can see the damned things coming a week in advance. That's more than adequate warning to get people mobilized, and believe you me, consumers alone go nuts down here when there's even a remote chance of a storm making landfall.

Having the government folks arrive to New Orleans five days late is flat-out inexcusable. I don't care about who's pointing fingers at whom - there is just nothing good enough to justify what's happening down there.

It's so bad down there that civilian boaters have been called on to rescue people. We can debate the blame game 'til the cows come home, but the real fact is: these people need our help.

Odd... the Govenor of Mississippi called the Govenor of Maryland and had 1400 national guard troops the day after Katrina hit... I know because my friend was deployed.

The national Guard and FEMA have warned for the past decade that respnce time to disasters could be from 48-96 hours and that the state should do its best to prepare for whatever disaster and make arrangements asap for federal help.

The only thing people want to do now is point fingers.....The American way I guess....have to find someone to blame.