the military in times of crisis

Tyler Cowen writes here about a trial balloon floated recently by President Bush: perhaps the military should have a stronger role in dealing with large-scale disasters. From the New York Times:

President Bush said today that he was working to prepare the United States for a possibly deadly outbreak of avian flu. He said he had weighed whether to quarantine parts of the country and also whether to employ the military for the difficult task of enforcing such a quarantine.

"It's one thing to shut down your airplanes, it's another thing to prevent people from coming in to get exposed to the avian flu," he said. Doing so, Mr. Bush said, might even involve using "a military that's able to plan and move."

The president had already raised, in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the delicate question of giving the military a larger role in responding to domestic disasters. His comment today appeared to presage a concerted push to change laws that limit military activities in domestic affairs.

The initial media coverage of Katrina painted a uniformly negative picture of FEMA, provoking responses that showed serious breakdowns in leadership at the state and local level. The only institution that came out of Katrina with its reputation enhanced was the American military. Bush may be able to score some political points by pushing some responsibility for disaster recovery management onto the military, but I believe this is a bad idea for three reasons:

1. Practically speaking, our military's primary role is to defend our interests from external military threats. Our military is engaged in a global war against terror, deeply committed to nation building efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, poised to deal with rogue states in the Middle East such as Syria and Iran and committed to the defense of allies who are threatened by the potential belligerence of nations like China and North Korea--we are already stretching our military resources thin. We still maintain the capacity to stretch further and fight another war, but we are increasingly running up against smaller margins for error. Why push our military into a role that is only marginally connected to its primary purpose and is likely to further deplete its capacity to respond to external threats?


2. Not only would such a decision have an effect on our military, it would also have an impact on those state and local officials who are best situated to understand the unique risks and requirements facing their communities. If the military is tasked with taking control during times of crisis, local governments will have reduced incentives to plan for disasters and will allocate resources towards projects with more immediate political payback. Overall quality of disaster preparation could easily be lower if local officials begin to assume that the military alone is capable of handling crisis situations.


3. Philosphically speaking, this proposal takes us one more step down the road away from a truly federalist system. Our founding fathers were deeply concerned about the potential for abuse by a domineering central government and implemented a system which strictly limited the powers of the national government. Ever since, these limits have been eroding, with the Civil War being only the bloodiest instance in which our Federal government has wrested power from the states. In light of this steady accrual of power, it may seem a small thing to remove the restrictions that exist on our military as it operates within our own borders. However, the fact that we enjoy a military that does not get involved in domestic affairs is probably one of the key differences between our history of political stability and the political instability seen in so many other countries. Assuming 100 years of prominent domestic involvement by our military, could we have gotten through the 2000 election stalemate without the military getting involved? Perhaps, even probably, we would have resolved the situation in much the same manner that we did. But why risk it? Why build up a culture in our military that supports the idea that military leaders should step in to resolve problems that our political leaders have lost control of?

Could the response to Katrina have been more prompt and effective at all levels of government? Perhaps, but I don't think that we should jump at the military as a quick fix for what went wrong.

Anyway, so what went wrong with FEMA's response? Not nearly as much as you might think. Much of the media slammed FEMA for not having troops into New Orleans immediately to begin rescue operations, but those criticisms over look the fact that the logistics that are involved in this scale of operation are staggering.