Douglas Kern argues that We Need Two National Guards. In the process, he mocks armchair disaster “experts”:
Soldiers trained to kill people and break things aren’t necessarily prepared to save people and fix things in a crisis.Yet National Guardsmen possess certain undeniable advantages. They’re physically and mentally tough, capable of going into dangerous places and fighting bad guys — two abilities absolutely necessary when restoring order, and two abilities that bureaucrats can’t replicate. Moreover, the military has mastered the skill of creating and maintaining logistics chains — a skill much overlooked among the many loud-mouthed disaster ‘experts’ clogging the Web with their ill-informed solutions. I have lost count of the number of outraged Internet postings and articles from armchair generals who just can’t fathom why trucks and helicopters and superheroes weren’t all protecting and rebuilding New Orleans, thirty minutes after the levees broke. Memo to Internet geniuses: amateurs talk strategies, but professionals talk logistics. Who’s gonna drive those trucks? How will they be fueled? Where will they be serviced? How will they communicate with each other? Who will protect them against armed looters? Where ought they to go in New Orleans? Given that the bridges are washed out, how will they get into the city? How should they be modified to prevent flooding to the engines? Even obvious strategies require a long, long logistical chain to be effective. The military excels at creating such chains. Befuddled bureaucrats don’t.