Military wary of disaster role

It is a move that military leaders have resisted in the past. The issue is not so much Posse Comitatus itself, which legal experts say has many loopholes, but what Posse Comitatus represents. It is part of a doctrine that sees the American military primarily as a war-fighting force. It shields the armed forces from the burden of additional domestic duties - and the possibility of being involved in an incident like Kent State, where National Guard soldiers killed four antiwar protesters in 1970.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Gen. Thomas White told Congress that Posse Comitatus "is fine the way it sits."

Today, any move to amend Posse Comitatus, say military analysts, would represent not only a move in the wrong direction, but also a misapprehension of the situation.

For one, it is unnecessary, they say. The active-duty military can already support disaster relief in a variety of ways that are in accord with Posse Comitatus - providing logistics and humanitarian aid, for example, as has happened in the Gulf Coast region. For law enforcement, emergency officials have the National Guard - and if one state's Guard is depleted by overseas deployments, it can ask for help from other states through their network of Emergency Management Assistance Compacts.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld suggested as much in a Pentagon briefing this week, noting that some 300,000 Guard members were available across the country even at the peak of the Katrina deployment. "And of course the Guard, as opposed to the active force, tends to have a higher proportion of people who do things that are appropriate in a domestic setting," he added.

Moreover, if a disaster is deemed too great even for the National Guard, the president has the authority to federalize the response, which would bring in active-duty troops as law enforcement - something that occurred in 1992 during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles.

But federalizing disaster response can be a tricky prospect, fraught with tensions between Washington and state officials. Those tensions were apparent Tuesday, when Michael Brown, former Federal Emergency Management Agency director, blamed local officials for the ineffectual response to Katrina.

With no concrete plans in place, Secretary Rumsfeld said Tuesday that it is too early to pass judgment on the president's comments. But some observers wonder whether the current push to increase military involvement is simply a way for the administration to avoid the tough choices.

The military can help with logistics and planning and response, but "the important decisions that need to be made are political," says retired Col. Randall Larsen, founder of the Institute for Homeland Security. "It's not a four-star general who should be making them."

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