Soldier On The Beat

Most Americans in the service don't join up to guard downtown Minneapolis or serve in, say, the Pennsylvania theater. But they may have to change their outlook. Last week the Pentagon made it clear it wants to make a senior military officer responsible for the defense of the nation.

404 Not Found

nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu)

This may seem like an obvious idea when the Pentagon seems so involved in every aspect of American life right now. Since Sept. 11 its warplanes have been patrolling U.S. skies, and thousands of military troops have been guarding U.S. airports and key bridges, ports and dams. But these forces are being commanded by very different parts of the military: the airplanes are controlled by the North American Aerospace Defense Command, and ports are being looked after by both the Coast Guard and the Pentagon's Joint Forces Command. The National Guard troops, meanwhile, are guarded by the nation's Governors. In other words, it's a bureaucratic mess, if not a logistical one.

So now the military wants to assign a single four-star officer to protect American territory, just as four others are responsible for the European, Central, Pacific and Southern commands. These regional commanders in chief are called CINCs. Although CINCs have been around since World War II, there's never been such a high-ranking officer in charge of defending the U.S. It's likely that the mission will be assigned to either the Norfolk-based Joint Forces Command, which oversees 80% of U.S. forces based inside the U.S., or NORAD, based in Colorado Springs, Colo. The homeland-defense commander would support, not supplant, the new White House Office of Homeland Security run by Tom Ridge, with all those problematic details on who outranks whom still to be worked out.

While the concept of a domestic commander may seem natural in a post-September world, it is actually a radical departure for the military. The Pentagon has mostly stayed away from the job of defending American cities and suburbs, leaving it to local cops, fire fighters and haz-mat teams. That tradition has its roots in a law known as the Posse Comitatus (Latin for power of the county) Act of 1878, which bars military personnel from searching, seizing or arresting people in the U.S. Congress passed it after President Ulysses S. Grant ordered troops to serve as federal marshals at the polls in former Confederate states during the hotly contested 1876 presidential elections; Southerners then complained bitterly that Grant was "protecting" his party's candidates. "There comes a time when we've got to re-examine the old laws of the 1800s in light of this extraordinary series of challenges that we're faced with today," says Senator John Warner of Virginia, the senior Republican on the Armed Services Committee.

But the idea of fiddling with the Posse Comitatus Act worries civil libertarians. While F-16s patrolling over New York City and Washington may reassure some, the notion of soldiers in fatigues carrying M-16s at the Mall of America may not have the same effect. Tim Edgar, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, says soldiers shouldn't be used for police work because they are not trained for it: using overwhelming force to compel compliance by an enemy is different, he says, from the kind of negotiations engaged in regularly by most law-enforcement agencies. Military traditionalists have a problem with the idea too: they are worried that an overemphasis on homeland defense will dilute U.S. ability to wage war overseas.

That's partly why the White House backs the idea of an "Americas Command" but wants it limited to managing the Pentagon bureaucracy. If there is a catastrophic attack, that management will allow quick action, but the Administration is concerned about assigning any standing military force to missions now handled by police and other law- enforcement and emergency agencies. Governors argue that they know better than the momentarily garrisoned how to patrol their own backyard and protect their neighbors. Soldiers should be used only as "the last resort," Ridge says. Some of his "Governor friends"--Ridge is the former Pennsylvania Governor--are grumbling that their constituents are more comfortable with the police they've grown up with, and that officials who answer to the Pentagon can't easily be worked into state plans.

Bush is expected to approve the new CINC early next year, and Pentagon officials believe the change will be permanent. "The good news is that most of the elements to be successful are already there," says General Jim Jones, who as commandant of the Marine Corps is a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "It's more about reorganizing than it is about increasing troop levels by tens of thousands of people." It's one more way that American Airlines Flight 77--which crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11--has shaken the Defense Department.