Military Support to Katrina

As USNORTHCOM moves in to set up a regional task force in Mississippi, it will be interesting to see this first big test of how the military works with DHS in response to this national catastrophy. The headquarters in Colorado has been watching and waiting for the formal go-ahead from DOD since Katrina came into town. National Guard troops from the affected and surrounding states are all mobilizing, and it's coming together, but slowly.

The Washington Post has this article commenting upon the impact of Iraqi operations on the states' ability to respond to this natural disaster. Basically, Mississippi's governor has had to mobilize every National Guards person they have.

"Missing the personnel is the big thing in this particular event. We need our people," said Lt. Andy Thaggard, a spokesman for the Mississippi National Guard, which has a brigade of more than 4,000 troops in central Iraq. Louisiana also has about 3,000 Guard troops in Baghdad.

Mississippi has about 40 percent of its Guard force deployed or preparing to deploy and has called up all remaining Guard units for hurricane relief, Thaggard said. Those include the Army band based in Jackson, Miss. "They are mustering transportation to move them south," he said. Soldiers who have lost their homes are exempt, he said.

Mississippi has requested troops and aircraft from about eight other states -- including military police and engineers from Alabama, helicopters and crews from Arkansas and Georgia, and aircraft-maintenance experts from Connecticut, who are filling in for a Mississippi maintenance unit that is heading to the Middle East.

Some right-of-center bloggers out there are, of course, casting stones at the WaPo for "blaming the Iraqi war" for the limited military response to Katrina. I'm not going to link to these sources, because I think they're just missing the point completely. When DOD develops its personnel strategy, it's based on national security policy. That strategy is "1-4-2-1" - defend the homeland, deter aggression in four contingencies overseas, swiftly defeat the efforts in two major conflicts and win decisively in one. We've known for at least four years that the manpower was not there to successfully execute this strategy - and yes, I fully grant that the manpower cutbacks started in the Clinton administration. Let's resist the temptation to blame Clinton for Bush's failures (again) and state that five years is surely enough to correct any former administration failings.

Bush did increase the National Guard authorizations from 200,000 in 2000 to 350,000 today, while the active Army and Reserves numbers stayed largely constant. That's probably one of the few reasons the affected states aren't absolutely screwed right now. But it is a fact that, between overseas operations and homeland defense/civil support, we don't have enough manpower. I hope the guys running the ongoing Quadrennial Defense Review recognize the need to pump up manpower and reduce acquisition efforts to redress this issue.

UPDATE: My numbers were wrong (meaning Bush's administration gets no credit). The Guard has shrunk from authorized strength of 434,700 in 1984 to 373,000 in 1996 and to 350,000 in 2002. And like everyone else, their recruiting numbers have been lower for the past two years.

Comments

[Molten Eagle]

Greetings,
You bring some excellent facts to your Military Support discussion. Would you agree that force size should ideally reflect the probability of need, at least in the homeland defense - natural disaster context? Or that that states are welcome to fund their own disaster agencies, and staff them as necessary?

Certainly, hurricane risks may have been underestimated, largely because our weather record (although among the most extensive in the world) hardly goes back beyond 1885.

The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale is a 1-5 rating based on the hurricane's present intensity. In my opinion, naturally occurring precedent's to the next Ice Age will require a rating of at least 6, well above the present 5. Forecasting is tough, when we do not have the historical weather records as a baseline. The interglacial period like the one we now enjoy before the last Ice Age was more than 110,000 years ago. Even Al Gore does not have wind speed records for dates like that.

[J.]

The whole issue of federal assistance to the states during disaster relief is very political and, of course, related to money. I think the answer to your first paragraph is yes, to both questions. The states do need to fund and staff their offices of emergency management (OEMs) adequately, plan and resource an inherent response capability. Too many of them do not and expect the federals to come galloping in with their checkbooks to help out. This allows the states to lower taxes and keep their elections moving. Then we see the lack of adequate response and chaos of New Orleans for example - a big city like that should have seen this coming and been better prepared, but it would rather point fingers at the slow federal response or lack of federal funds for its levees.

As for the military support, that's a policy issue. Certainly the military leadership has no illusions over what it can and cannot do. The National Guard worried alot after 9/11 that it was going to be relegated to a homeland defense function only - that it would be kept out of overseas operations, and therefore lose a good chunk of money and modern combat equipment for its (largely) combat brigades. Now it's stuck on its own petard, as it has to support OIF and this disaster.

NORTHCOM is still growing up, and I don't know for sure if it's ready to assume its homeland defense/civil support role. But when a combat operation drags on for longer than the optimistic plans called for, it will and has impacted the military's ability to support disaster relief. And so here we are.