I've blogged here repeatedly about what a bad idea it is for the 3rd Infantry Division, or any other military unit, to be given a domestic mission that could possibly involve law enforcement, crowd control, or fighting the drug/border/terror war de jure . There are just so many things wrong with the concept from a Constitutional point of view that... ... don't, however, justify Jacob Hornberger's complete failure to understand the difference between legal and illegal orders, or his strange idea that American volunteer citizen-soldiers would cheerfully obey all orders no matter how horrible. Here's Hornberger : However, let’s not forget that ever since 9/11, the Pentagon has considered the domestic United States to be part of the worldwide battleground in the war on terrorism, which has empowered the military to round up Americans as enemy eombatants and treat them accordingly, as they did with American citizen Jose Padilla — that is, with torture and the possibility of...

I'd write a post breaking the news that the Pentagon (read SecDef Gates of both the current and soon-to-be administrations) is looking more an more seriously at employing American soldiers under Federal control in domestic law enforcement, peace-keeping, and disaster-relief rolls, like my friends at Anti-war.com or Delawareliberal , except.... That I first posted on the issue almost exactly three months ago, and followed it up several days ago . The steady erosion of posse comitatus restrictions on national military forces has been under way since the 1980s, primarily through the vehicles of the war on drugs and the war on brown people without papers . It's a done deal. The 3rd Infantry Division is not only being assigned the duty under Northcom, it's being expanded into the Army's largest division (at 25,000 troops with five brigades) to handle the task. So the question to ask now is, "What is President Obama going to do about it?" Does he support the us...

Reading between the paragraphs is a fun exercise, but I think that people too often don't have the resources to do it. So, for fun, when I read this WaPo article by Ann Scott Tyson at Anti-war.com , I thought I'd give it a try. After all, the devil is in the details, and--far too often-- people who take the time to read the papers and journals think they are getting the whole story : The Army needs to add at least 30,000 active-duty soldiers to its ranks to fulfill its responsibilities around the world without becoming stretched dangerously thin, senior Army officials warn. Its responsibilities around the world? This is code for maintaining our foreign network of over 750 military bases in other nations, which provide the logistical framework to be able to project American troops unilaterally into virtually any region on the planet. "You can't do what we've been tasked to do with the number of people we have," Undersecretary of the Army Nelson Ford said in...