Governors say war has gutted Guard-States fear lack of disaster response

[babylonsister]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-070513govs-guard-story,1,3999163.story?coll=chi-news-hed

Governors say war has gutted Guard
States fear lack of disaster response

By Kirsten Scharnberg
Tribune national correspondent
Published May 13, 2007

As wildfires, floods and tornadoes batter the nation, the readiness of the National Guard to deal with those disasters, as well as potential terrorist assaults, is so depleted by deployments to foreign wars and equipment shortfalls that Congress is considering moves to curtail the president's powers over the Guard and require the Defense Department to analyze how prepared the country is for domestic emergencies.

The debate over the state of the National Guard has been intensifying for several years, but a powerful tornado in Kansas early this month has spun the topic back into the spotlight.

When the small farming community of Greensburg was effectively wiped off the map, leaving 11 people in the area dead and miles of rubble to be searched and cleared, Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius was direct in her explanation for why the response had not been faster: The policies of the federal government, she said, had left the Kansas National Guard understaffed and underequipped.

Her comments infuriated the Bush administration, which countered that the vast majority of her state's Guard members were available to be called up and that she would be provided any equipment she lacked as soon as she requested it.

The bitter exchange represented a familiar debate to governors across the U.S., many of whom have long feared and predicted that a catastrophic event could find their National Guard units woefully hard-pressed to react to mass casualties or chaos after four years of war in Iraq.

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[TexasLawyer]

1. National Guard is a very hard sell these days...

Nobody has to wonder why.

[indepat]

2. Does the neocon cabal really give a shit that NG units might be hard-pressed to respond

to a catastrophic event? The proof is in the pudding.

[babylonsister]

3. We can hope Congress might do something about it; then again,

maybe not.