My guess is that the Trump administration WILL send in troops—but not until a couple of hundred thousand Puerto Ricans have died from preventable water-borne diseases and from violence inspired by severe lack of basic resources. When the headlines are filled with “mass slaughter of Puerto Ricans by Puerto Ricans, over fuel and food” stories, then Trump can declare that the island must be pacified via martial law, with land being confiscated, Puerto Ricans put into camps, etc.
I’d finger Bannon and Stephen Miller as the authors of the plot, with useful advice coming via Vlad whenever they can communicate privately. The Puerto Rico endeavor will be a valuable and instructive dry run, for the project of eventually ending that pesky US rule of law thing, altogether.
If only we had some military personnel who speak Spanish! Of course, “agua” and “comida” is going to cover a lot of bases. Don’t even have to ask where the train station is, because it isn’t!
*Just now getting over the tv, veterans groups volunteers, picking up boxes of food and supplies and carrying them to people who have no roads! That’s the flag I pledge allegiance to! That’s my America!
We “invaded” Puerto Rico right after the hurricane. (Cite)
Performing Defense Support to Civil Authorities is right there in NORTHCOM’s mission statement (Cite with my underline added) - “USNORTHCOM partners to conduct homeland defense, civil support and security cooperation to defend and secure the United States and its interests.” They “invaded” areas hit by Hurricane Irma (including in CONUS) and then added operations in areas affected by Maria (which included areas like the Virgin Islands.) DOD didn’t even need to invade. The Puerto Rico National Guard (authorized strength 8,400) was already “occupying” the area and was involved in the territory level planning to respond prior to landfall of the hurricane. Puerto Rico also has a territorial militia available, the Puerto Rico State Guard, that doesn’t share the NG’s territory/federal dual status.
As of last week (05OCT17) over 11,000 troops had been deployed to Puerto Rico with parts of the five Force Packages continuing to deploy. It was up to 13,229 DOD personnel as of 10OCT. Those numbers don’t include the State Guard. It’s not clear if they count the NG troops mobilized by the Governor under territorial authority or only federal assets when listing DOD personnel. troops on the island are only a part of the total invovled though. This story about setting up an incident support base at JBSA Lackland-Kelly is one example of troops not counted but committed to important sustaining operations.
There’s possible issues to rant about. The Governor wasn’t particularly aggressive in mobilizing the territorial forces (both NG and PRSG.) FEMA’s and/or the Governor’s estimates driving the initial request for support may have been bad, wrong, or both. (By law in DSCA operations DOD supports civil authorities. DOD is not in charge of the effort and can’t just dictate missions or forces committed to those civil authorities.) Support for other US citizens during a period with high demand for support may have interfered with the speed and effectiveness of the response. Still the military has been responding, doing exactly the kinds of things that a couple weeks later suddenly sounds like a good idea. Some of those are issues for the after action review to improve performance for the next time. There may or may not be specific issues where committing further forces, taking into account the associated lag time to get them there and operating effectively, might make sense. It’s most certainly not a case of simply not committing significant military support.
Puerto Rico is bad. Things could, and likely would, be much worse if the OP’s good idea wasn’t already happening.
What’s bizarre about that? The president is elected by the states, not by “the people”. Puerto Rico is not a state. Neither is Wash DC., and residents could not vote for president until the constitution was amended to allow them to do so (in 1961, with the passage of the 23rd amendment). The same applies to the other US Territories: US VI, Guam, etc.
Your quoted piece points out one of the issues in getting forces there in a timely fashion. The territorial government requested 200 MPs and communications equipment from the Federal government. As I pointed out the Governor also didn’t fully mobilize the National Guard either before or immediately after. Governors are really important in disaster response; they are in charge of it. The Federal Government supports state’s or territories in disaster response with most of the outside assets needed - personnel, money, etc. Sending troops to perform disaster response that the Governor doesn’t want is a big legal issue.
That doesn’t mean there weren’t balls dropped at the federal level. I don’t know if anybody at the federal level seriously looked at the territorial government request and asked the obvious hard question - “200 MPs and some commo…you gotta be fucking kidding me?!?” The interplay between all of the assets and between federal and state/territory in a complicated legal structure is also ripe for lots of friction to make even good plans fail. NORTHCOM planning issues while already engaged in one major incident may have contributed. I really haven’t seen any coverage that does more than scratch the surface level and dig into a very complicated legal, policy, and doctrinal framework to have an opinion on how many balls got dropped and by who.
The notion that we should suddenly decide to start committing military assets to hurricane response in the OP is still profoundly ignorant. Elucidator got his wish before the good idea fairy even whispered in his ear. We’ve been there and done that. We’ve committed sizeable military forces under multiple Governors’ control to support responses after back to back hurricanes. A big chunk of that support has been in Puerto Rico. In all but one of the areas we’ve managed to avoid the mess that is Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico is really ugly. It’s not about whether we should “invade” though. At best it’s a question of whether there’s something else the military can do, beyond what they are already doing, given federal and territorial and federal authority authorization, in a time frame that is useful to the people of Puerto Rico.
I wonder if the Republican party has considered just how many Puerto Ricans live in Florida and still have lots of family ties there. Trump might end up turning the Sunshine State solid blue.
You… you say that like it’s a bad thing… 