Comments on: Army as Border Patrol

By: floyd

floyd — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 18:10:05 +0000

When a nation is in the middle of an intentional and organized invasion by a foreign power, it is wholly appropriate to use military power to repell those forces.

By: yetanotherjohn

yetanotherjohn — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 22:19:46 +0000

Dave Schuler,

While you can certainly raise a good debate about the uses of the corps of engineers and DARPA funds, securing the borders is 'historically' one of the key roles for the military.

By: Dave Schuler

Dave Schuler — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 21:27:35 +0000

There's a practical political reality that needs to be acknowledged in this discussion: historically, we've tended to pile practically everything into Defense from building highways to educating our children. We shouldn't be too surprised if the strategy for improving border enforcement lies through Defense, too.

By: Wayne

Wayne — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 18:14:13 +0000

Training trade offs are usually hard to decide on. If you increase in one area another may get neglected. It depends on what the future holds for a unit. Even with known deployment overseas, the future is unpredictable. However, I can see very good opportunities for training by pulling these border security missions. The devil of course is in the details.

Border security is in part a law enforcement issue but also is very much a national security issue. One in which we have neglected for decades. It is hypocritical of us to ask Iraq to secure its borders when we don’t secure ours. A large number of country use their military to help secure their borders including Mexico. Where did we in the US get the idea that border security is only a civilian law enforcement function is beyond me?

By: yetanotherjohn

yetanotherjohn — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 18:00:00 +0000

I agree that the military vs civil line is a bit trickier. The fact that they are deployed on our countries border should ease this. We have been a very fortunate country in that for the most part our borders have been relatively peaceful. Certainly compared to Europe, they have been down right sedate.

Consider Pershing on the border about 100 years ago. We have been here before, so there should be some reasonable sign posts.

As to wear and tear on the equipment, again, what is the alternatives. If the helicopter is going to just sit there, then I would worry about the pilots training. Think about a helicopter pilot who is going to patrol the Iranian border. Can you really say that this sort of training is just "everything is training"? Whatever nighttime flying he would be doing to train for Iran, is this really so far different? And having a bunch of motivated evaders using human cunning to surprise you is hard to reproduce in a "controlled" training environment.

Again, I am willing to be convinced that this is "additional strain", but on the face of it this seems reasonable. Much more information would be needed to say it doesn't make sense.

Or to put it another way, the command authority has made this an option for troop training. There are plausible real world correlation between the border search and their potential deployment. So second guessing with out facts is beneficial how?

By: James Joyner

James Joyner — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 17:22:54 +0000

In some sense, everything is training. And I can see where some of these missions are mutually reinforcing.

I'm more concerned with the political implications of this than the impact on opstempo, but I do think the latter is worrisome. Flying border patrol missions puts additional strain on both the troops and their equipment.

By: yetanotherjohn

yetanotherjohn — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 17:09:59 +0000

Getting the troops out of the barracks and into the field is part of training. Being able to give them a mission that is real I suspect helps make the training more effective. How well the coordinate as a team, being able to detect people at night who are actively trying to evade them. All of this makes sense to me. If this was the only training, I would agree. But making this a part of a couple of weeks seems reasonable to me. If I knew my unit was going to be on the Iranian or Syrian border, I would insist on this sort of training. If I was going to be stationed in Baghdad, not so much.

I guess to know, we would need first understand the other training options and see what sort of effectiveness there has been by units who uses this as a training point vs others. Remember, units spend a lot of time, for most units as much or more, out of Iraq/Afghanistan than they spend in it.