More and more from the administration and former administration bunglers we’re hearing the line that the problem was insufficient power to use the military in a domestic natural disaster.
Certainly, the military has a role to play in a major natural disaster. State National Guard troops are almost always deployed. And in catastrophic cases, only the regular military has the ability to organize major transports of resources, execute certain rescue missions, perhaps even handle a sort of para-law enforcement in extreme cases.
But a simple look at the <$Ad$> facts of what actually happened almost a month ago in Louisiana shows no evidence that anything that went wrong went wrong because the federal government lacked sufficient authority or because the US military was given too small a role.
It’s simply not true.
In almost every case, the culprits were fully-empowered civilian officials who proved incompetent at executing their given tasks.
Response to a major natural disaster is basically a civilian mission. It went poorly in this case because because the federal government let the civilian disaster relief infrastructure decay dramatically over the last four years; because there was little thought given in advance to how the federal and state and local authorities should interact in a crisis; because the president and his chief advisors ignored the issue for a critical few days; and because the plans in place at a local level were themselves inadequate to the scale of catastrophe that could have been and was predicted.
Blame it on the locals or blame it on the Feds — neither storyline requires you or even allows you to claim that things went wrong because the military lacked power to intervene.
As I wrote a couple weeks ago, you don’t repair disorganized or incompetent government by granting it more power. You fix it by making it more organized and more competent. Just so here — the move to militarize government’s domestic responsibilities rather than improve them is a dangerous trend. And it suggests that, functionally, there’s little left of conservatism today other than a warped big-government authoritarianism.
Governmental incompetence solved — or rather papered over — by militarization has a long history. And authoritarianism’s hand is usually as clumsy as it is heavy.
I’m curious to see whether Andrew Bacevich has had anything to say about this.
