Another Reason Not to Trust the Military

In my recent LRC article, “The Blame Game,” I made this statement:

If no actions of soldiers obeying orders should be criticized because “it is not a soldier’s job to determine the moral virtue of military policy,” then what are we to do if U.S. troops are used against American citizens? What will those who think that soldiers should always do as they are told do when these same soldiers are ordered to march through their neighborhood and break down their front doors while participating in the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on illegals, or the war on dissent? Will they still insist that “military service is morally neutral”? If so, then they are fools; if not, then they must believe that U.S. troops are not immune from criticism.

Now, in the Army Times we read:

Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st BCT [Brigade Combat Team] will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.

It is not the first time an active-duty unit has been tapped to help at home. In August 2005, for example, when Hurricane Katrina unleashed hell in Mississippi and Louisiana, several active-duty units were pulled from various posts and mobilized to those areas.

But this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities.

This is to include helping “with civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack.”

Those local high school kids ensnared by a military recruiter just may be the ones who point a gun in your face. Oh, but we don’t need to worry about them, they are just going to get some of our tax money for college. They would never turn on us.

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6:10 pm on October 6, 2008