hey, no hard feelings, mushroom. It's just politics.

That said, I notice none of your posts seem to mention Katrina at all. Subject successfully changed, eh? And that was my point originally: obfuscation to distract from a subject that's causing the right immense difficulty at the moment.

hey, no hard feelings, mushroom. It's just politics.

That said, I notice none of your posts seem to mention Katrina at all. Subject successfully changed, eh? And that was my point originally: obfuscation to distract from a subject that's causing the right immense difficulty at the moment.


Scrolls back through the previous several posts made:

OK, and then what is the problem with how slow the Military responded to Katrina?  According to your line of reasoning, the Military had no right to be in there in the first place.
...

National Guard:  These are troops who work through 2 chains of command.  Their first one is the State leval.  They are commanded and comissioned through the respective Governor of the state they are stationed in.  All pay comes from their home State.  They are trained by the US Army and US Air Force.  For the most part, they are activated by the states Governor, and respond to Domestic issues (floods, riots, hurricanes, etc).  In this way, they are the "shotgun" of the Governor.  They can also be "Nationalized".  This happens for many reasons, like during Hurricane Katrina, when they were Nationalized to help take the financial strain off of the States, and shift it to the Federal level, which had more funds to pay the costs associated with them.

...

The posse comitatus statue you list is not quite right.  The Federal Government is not allowed to move troops into a state without the permission of the Governor of the state.  And this also covers troops from the Texas National Guard who need to enter Mississippi for a hurricane.  The Governors of the 2 states have to sign formal agreements before this can take place.  The Governor also has to give permission to the Federal Government to move in any troops who are not stationed in that state.

And there are ways around that.  One reason that Naval personnel (Navy and Marine Corps) can enter an area without this permission is that there are already agreements in place for ships and troops at sea.  This is why after a hurricane in the mid 1990's (I forget which one), the first Federal Troops on the ground was a Regiment of US Marines, and their Navy support.  The unit was on the way back from a Deployment, and instead of landing in Virginia, landed in Florida to help the cleanup and recovery.  Because they were at sea, the already standing agreements for "Troops Afloat" was used, and no other permission was needed.

*****

That was from my very first post.  And ironically, in a response you listed the first line.  And you claim I never mentioned Katrina?  I mentioned Katrina, and several other disasters.

Not mention Katrina?  Hardly.  Want to bring up the truth?  Naturally.

It is interesting that you claim I did not mention it, while I mentioned it (and other similar events) several times in that post.  And yet you claim I tried to change the subject?

Now once again, how did I "obfuscation to distract from a subject that's causing the right immense difficulty at the moment"?  If anything, I have been trying to clarify things.  As I stated, most civilians really do not understand the Military.  I do not mean that as an insult or a put-down, it is simply a fact.  I doubt that more then 20% of people without a Military background can explain the differences between a Battalion, a Regiment, or a Division, let alone a Corps or an Army.  And most have no idea how the various Guard, Reserve, and Active Duty components work.  As I said, I was simply explaining how they worked, and giving some examples.  And as you should be able to see, I gave several examples.

i meant your following posts. Frankly I didn't read that first one. It was too long, and I read abstruse organizational stuff all day long for work. I was noticing though that as your posts went on, slowly the subject was being changed from Katrina to esoteric facts about the NG hierarchy, and pulling the whole false-appeal-to-authority I-was-a-veteran-and-you-weren't-so-nyaah-nyaah thing. And that's what I'm referring to, this effort whenever the subject of Katrina comes up for the right to change the subject and make the conversation needlessly complex, to avoid the obvious fact that the federal government was responsible for responding competently to Katrina, and it fell down on the job, and we know why -- it was because incompetents were appointed to FEMA and DHS, based on their personal connections with bush and his pals. No amount of elaborate esoterica about the national guard hierarchy is going to account for that, sorry.

It isn't the parents' fault that they are too worried about their kids to let them enlist. Should the status of the military be more important to them than the lives of their children? This is the fault of the federal government's abuse of the military over the last 40 years. People lost their trust for the government when it came to the military in Vietnam, they're losing it even more now with the second Iraq war. If anyone should have the blame for a dwindling military, it is the warhawks in Washington who have abused the privelege of a good military, not an apprehensive mom and pop in San Francisco.


Sure, the parents have a right to be worried about their kids.  And luckily, there is no draft, so they also have the right to influence their kids not to join.  But regardless of whether the parents believe in the Iraq war, or whether they believed in World War I, or whether they believe in the Revolutionary War, the fact still remains that without people joining the military, one of two things will happen.  Either the military will become insufficient, or there will be a draft.  Both of these scenarios would be a direct result of the lack of recruitment.  If the parents are willing to accept responsibility for these consequences, by all means, they have no obligation to enlist their kids.  But you and I both know that they won't... it will be somebody else's fault, as always.

I do appreciate, however, your comment about the Federal government's abuse of the military over the last 40 years.  I appreciate the fact that you are holding past governments equally accountable, including the Democrats.

i meant your following posts. Frankly I didn't read that first one. It was too long, and I read abstruse organizational stuff all day long for work. I was noticing though that as your posts went on, slowly the subject was being changed from Katrina to esoteric facts about the NG hierarchy, and pulling the whole false-appeal-to-authority I-was-a-veteran-and-you-weren't-so-nyaah-nyaah thing. And that's what I'm referring to, this effort whenever the subject of Katrina comes up for the right to change the subject and make the conversation needlessly complex, to avoid the obvious fact that the federal government was responsible for responding competently to Katrina, and it fell down on the job, and we know why -- it was because incompetents were appointed to FEMA and DHS, based on their personal connections with bush and his pals. No amount of elaborate esoterica about the national guard hierarchy is going to account for that, sorry.


I was long-winded.  I was wrong.  I do not know what I am talking about.  I was off-topic.

And you did not even read it.

And the topic here was Military recruiting in High Schools.  Not how FEMA (or the military in general) responded to Katrina.

You go on about these shadow conspiracy theories.  But to you, facts do not matter.  You have your mind made up, and no amount of facts are ever going to make you change your mind that Military and Bush are wrong, and you are right.

I am sorry that I am unable to over-simplify the truth of the matter.  Some things are simply unable to be explained in simple 1-2 phrase explanations.  I was simply trying to help you to understand how the military works.  But since the facts get in the way of your beliefs, I guess it really is unimportant.