Bush Mulls More Work for the Troops

  • Share
  • Read Later
The President used the last day of his three-day hurricane tour to slam home a point a point he's been making more subtly recently: The nation should consider using the military in a greatly expanded role at home to combat natural disasters. At a meeting with the military's Joint Task Force Rita in San Antonio Sunday morning Bush asked, "is there a natural disaster of a certain size that would enable the Defense Department to become the lead agency in coordinating and leading the response effort? That's going to be a very important consideration for Congress to think about." If reporters in the room didn't get the message, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan reinforced it later aboard Air Force One as the president winged home from his trip to Colorado, Texas and Louisiana.

Bush actually said much the same thing in his speech to the nation from New Orleans' Jackson Square two weeks ago. But the line about an expanded role for the military received little attention compared to tremendous interest in the President's plans for rebuilding the ravaged city of New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf coast brutalized by Hurricane Katrina.

It's a bold and risky move. At a time when the nation has extensive commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, the White House is pushing the idea of giving the military a more important domestic role. Bush might have chosen a more modest approach like talking up FEMA reforms. But he's gone a much more adventuresome route, one that could well involve revisiting century-old statutes restricting the use of troops at home. To be sure, McClellan indicated that the president is thinking of a lead role for the Department of Defense in disaster relief only when the chaos is of the order of magnitude of a Katrina. But that's still a big new assignment. And McClellan insists that the Pentagon is not overextended. "The military has said otherwise," he told reporters Sunday. Don't be surprised if before too long there's a whole new assignment for American troops.