Decius wrote:
There is a totally different tone that you take with domestic catastrophies versus enemies in war, even when people are rioting or shooting at rescue teams, and it is appropriate to have a rapid response capability that is properly trained to handle domestic threats.

Yesterday I listened to a talk on this subject by Robert D. Kaplan, a long-time military/international affairs writer for the Atlantic Monthly and author of ten books, including the just-released "Imperial Grunts". Kaplan says that you can't readily separate the humanitarian job from the combat job. To a large extent, he says, training and experience for the combat task makes the teams much better performers for the humanitarian task. And if you were to muster or draft a separate agency/department of first responders, using, say, the Marines, as a source of trained personnel, you would find that the Marines' high morale would fall off rapidly and dramatically after being assigned to the humanitarian-only role.

In his talk, Kaplan actually directly contradicts your argument above, based on first-hand experience embedded with the Army and Marines in Iraq, Afghanistan, and doing tsunamai relief.

RE: [Politech] How the Bush administration is eroding Posse Comitatus