Lions and tigers and soldiers oh my!

I think it's the schizophrenia that bemuses me the most.  How, depending on who's in office, which side is willing to believe the Services are setting themselves up to engage in Administration-directed oppression.

The military is one of the most admired institutions in the country, a trend that has held for several years, despite the ups and downs of the war.   Mind you, at the high end of late we just break 50% in the "have great confidence in" category, but only 16% won't trust us to direct traffic.  A fair number of them must blog - from both sides.  Regardless, that still leaves us much farther ahead in the eyes of the public than Congress (8% in the Feb 2008 Harris Poll) or the White House (15% in that same poll).  Our negatives just aren't that high, despite what the anti- wing of the blogosphere would have you believe.

I wonder what the blogospheric numbers are.   Anyone?

This comes up in the context of the recent meltdown of Glenn Greenwald at Salon and John Cole's rather less breathless reaction over at Balloon Juice, not to mention the *koff* what passes for analysis over at Daily Kos, All stemming from a badly written (or, perhaps, poorly interviewed) Army Times article.  In the blogger's defense, they didn't know just how significant an error of data conflation was made by the author of the article, Gina Cavallaro.  Shows how important it is for us to get our details right, though, eh campers?

Mind you, not all the left side of the 'sphere got um, stuck on something.  Jason over at Armchair Generalist and Rob Farley at Lawyers Guns and Money took a more informed, judicious view of the controversy.  I love Farley's cheezy title, btw.  They got mugged from the Left for doing so, too.  Read the commentariat over at Salon.  Nothing like straying off the reservation, even if you never really were on it.

At issue is NORTHCOM's (effective yesterday) actually having some ground forces assigned to it with specific mission tags, to perform their "Military Support to the Civil Authority" mission, one which NORTHCOM inherited from 1st and 5th Armies during the post-9/11 reorganizations.  I used to be them.  I was the Plans, Operations and Training Officer for the then WMD RTF-W, or Weapons of Mass Destruction Response Task Force - West.  The -East guys were 1st Army.  The Left got it's knickers in a twist because they just woke up to how DoD has been legally doing business for decades, under Democrat and Republican Presidents.  I did my time with 5th Army under the Clinton Administration.

The offending portion of the Army Times article by Gina Cavallaro that caused the angst is-

The 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.

Then you add in this kicker -

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.

The problem is...  Colonel Cloutier was talking about two separate things in the interview.  One, was the new mission with ARNORTH as a part of NORTHCOM in support of the Consequence Management mission.  The second was the fact that the Brigade was still going to have to train for its next deployment to Iraq in early 2010.  And the "nonlethal package" fielding - which will eventually be issued to all Army brigades - was a separate issue, tied in with training for their future deployment - and just happens to coincide with the mission assignment.  How do we know this?  After a few of us spent time fighting the meme on the lefty blogs, we went and asked DoD, who convened a Blogger's Roundtable, and our sense of the matter was confirmed by Lieutenant Colonel Robert Cunniff, Future Operations planner with NORTHCOM and Colonel Louis Vogler of ARNORTH's Future Ops division as they made clear yesterday in a Blogger's Roundtable. I'll link it when they post it.  CJ Grisham of a Soldier's Perspective started the ball rolling by asking OSD PA for the Roundtable, and Jason of Armchair Generalist (who was among the first to take on Greenwald) and Toby Nunn of Toby's Briefing Room showed up as well.

Back in my day, DoD provided resources only in response to a request from either FEMA (or other authorized Federal Agency) and/or the State Governor.  DoD wasn't authorized do anything on their own unless there was a war going on and the legislative authorizations to do so were in effect - or, if a specific installation was also a part of an immediate disaster.  Then that facility, cognizant of it's own mission requirements, could provide immediate local assistance, just as local communities do via mutual assistance compacts.  If the disaster got federalized, we sent in a DCE, or Defense Coordinating Element, to support the FEMA cell which is sent if the Governor asks for it.  When we got a validated requirement via the FCO,  we sent our requirements to the Directorate of Military Support (DOMS) at the Pentagon who would task out to appropriate owning commands (whom we would have been effecting coordination with laterally) the requirements to provide support, which we would then take operational control of - always in support of the Civil Authority, and within the limitations imposed by Posse Comitatus.  If someone was going to go in and swing batons, it would be done by National Guardsmen and locally-owned police forces, under state control, and not in federalized status - unless the Governor asked for help, as happened with the LA Riots, but even then, the federal forces went in as support to the National Guard and not the lead.

Nothing has changed with the new structure except the process has been streamlined in the wake of lessons learned post-9/11.  Instead of two Army headquarters running things, splitting the country at the Mississippi river, there is only one, a unified command, NORTHCOM.  What has changed is that instead of units being tagged ad-hoc for consequence management missions, a unit has been designated and assigned the mission with NORTHCOM having direct control.  With all the same political/legal safeguards in place that existed previously.

Nothing has really changed.

So, what was that about schizophrenia there, blogger-boy?

The fact that even though the military is generally held in high regard by the bulk of the population, the people closer to the fringes believe we're mindless automatons ready to trample the Constitution at the drop of a Presidential hat.  Those who defend us when we're off fighting under a Republican President weren't always so sure of us when we were sent off to fight under a Democrat President, and vice versa.  Those who would shoot us for disobeying an order of "their President" now and again encourage us to disobey the orders of "the other guy's President,"  and seemingly can reconcile the dichotomy without their heads exploding.  Apparently, we in the Services are capable of making these vast cultural reversals the day of the Inauguration.    Mind you, the Left is probably more consistent in their mistrust than the Right, but it's still there, and it's still bemusing.  Of course, the Left is more likely to view us as simple mercenaries, who will do anything for pay, so it's probably easier for them to reconcile the difference.

What they don't get is... we don't belong to either party.  We're not the Sturm Abteilungen of the National Socialists nor are we the Red Guards of the Weimar Communists.  We're a creature of the Constitution, and we serve that above the individuals who occupy the positions of authority from day-to-day.  I'm not a fool, we have politics, lord knows.

But it really isn't the kind of politics as practiced by the politicians and the parties.  But when you live and breathe politics, I guess it's hard to understand that.


Update: Greetings to the new visitors from Salon.  I've reopened the comments (they've been closed as a anti-spam measure).  Just keep it clean and on-topic is all I ask.  If all ya got is "Yer a poopy-head, "Move along, these are not the 'droids you are seeking."  Message, not messenger.  That applies to both sides, btw!