We Don’t Need No Steeking Posse Comitatus
October 10th, 2008 by Syd
Call me paranoid, but there’s enough of a renegade in me that this stuff makes me a bit edgy:
Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1
3rd Infantry’s 1st BCT trains for a new dwell-time mission. Helping ‘people at home’ may become a permanent part of the active Army
By Gina Cavallaro - Staff writer
Posted : Tuesday Sep 30, 2008 16:16:12 EDTThe 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle, helping restore essential services and escorting supply convoys.
Now they’re training for the same mission — with a twist — at home.
Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.
It is not the first time an active-duty unit has been tapped to help at home. In August 2005, for example, when Hurricane Katrina unleashed hell in Mississippi and Louisiana, several active-duty units were pulled from various posts and mobilized to those areas.
But this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities…
…They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack.
Training for homeland scenarios has already begun at Fort Stewart and includes specialty tasks such as knowing how to use the “jaws of life” to extract a person from a mangled vehicle; extra medical training for a CBRNE incident; and working with U.S. Forestry Service experts on how to go in with chainsaws and cut and clear trees to clear a road or area.
The 1st BCT’s soldiers also will learn how to use “the first ever nonlethal package that the Army has fielded,” 1st BCT commander Col. Roger Cloutier said, referring to crowd and traffic control equipment and nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals without killing them…
Source: Army Times
Personally, I think these sorts of jobs are appropriate for the National Guard, not regular Army combat brigades. The deployment of permanent regular Army combat brigades for use within the United States under the authority the Department of Homeland Security strikes me as troubling.
It strikes me as more than troubling. Historically when the military takes on responsibility for civil enforcement of law or any damn thing else in the purview of civil authority, freedom dies. That dynamic has never resulted in any other outcome, anywhere.
Never! And with an all volunteer military many of these people do not have the concern of acceptance back in civilian life, since they are careerists. Careerists advance only by pleasing the hierarchy of the organization. Hence, we are in a very dangerous time.
I foresee a very dark future if this stands.