"Security Moms" take note

Two news items today highlight how the Bush administration is risking the safety and security of the American people through its mismanagement of the reserve component of the U.S. military:

Florida was hit Sunday with an unprecedented fourth hurricane in six weeks, and the Washington Post reports the following:

"The Federal Emergency Management Agency, still engaged in relief work for hurricanes Charley, Frances and Ivan, launched what Director Michael D. Brown called the largest disaster recovery effort in its history."

"Convoys of trucks bearing water and ice surged north from staging grounds south of Miami. They had been placed there after the hard lessons of Frances, when relief supplies stored north of the storm's biggest impact were held up for days by flooded roads."

"Almost as vexing as the complications of finding food and shelter for storm-weary residents are the millions of tons of debris from the hurricanes that have yet to be removed."

"'The volumes are so large, I'm not sure how we're going to handle that,' the governor said."

With five weeks to go before election day, the Department of Homeland Security is warning that terrorists may still plan to disrupt the election with attacks, a la "4/11" in Madrid. Also from the Washington Post:

"Agencies across the federal government are launching an aggressive and unusually open offensive aimed at thwarting terrorist plots before and during the presidential election in November."

"Numerous law enforcement and counterterrorism officials also warned last week that a heightened threat of terrorist attack will persist through the January inauguration."

At the same time governors need their state National Guard units to respond to natural disasters and to secure communities from terrorism, those very units are being sent overseas at an unprecedented rate. Moreover, many, many Guard and Reserve soldiers work in law enforcement, fire fighting, and emergency medical services in their civilian lives. As units deploy overseas, communities across the nation are left without the first responders needed to protect us -- and our polling places -- from the terrorists whom we are now being told want to target us here (not in Iraq) in the coming weeks.

Last week, I attended a conference on Guard and Reserve transformation at Georgetown University. The conference was hosted by the Association of the United States Army, the Center for American Progress, and Georgetown's Center for Peace and Security Studies. The consensus among defense policy experts from across the political spectrum was that the Bush administration's massive and unprecedented National Guard and Reserve deployments to the war in Iraq have pushed the reserve component to the breaking point. Moreover, band-aide policies like stop-loss (the so-called "back door draft" that prevents soldiers from leaving the "all volunteer" service once their voluntary terms are up) and the practice of sending Guard and Reserve soldier into combat with inadequate training and equipment have driven reserve component retention to historic lows. (The Army Research Institute found that only 27 percent of Guard and Reserve soldiers plan to reenlist, and the Army National Guard projects it will fall 5,000 soldiers short of this year's recruiting goal.)