http://www.armytimes.com/…

The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle, helping restore essential services and escorting supply convoys.

Now they’re training for the same mission — with a twist — at home.

Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.

It is not the first time an active-duty unit has been tapped to help at home. In August 2005, for example, when Hurricane Katrina unleashed hell in Mississippi and Louisiana, several active-duty units were pulled from various posts and mobilized to those areas.

Ah yes. After Hurricane Katrina. When they went around unconstitutionally taking people’s firearms and checking old women into walls.

As far as I understand using the military for policing was not legal. It had been made legal between 2006 and 2008 but due to the controversy it was repealed. Perhaps the Bush administration missed that.

http://www.nationalpost.com/…

Shortly before Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the U.S. Gulf Coast on the morning of Aug. 29, 2005, the chief executive officer of Wal-Mart, Lee Scott, gathered his subordinates and ordered a memorandum sent to every single regional and store manager in the imperiled area. His words were not especially exalted, but they ought to be mounted and framed on the wall of every chain retailer — and remembered as American business’s answer to the pre-battle oratory of George S. Patton or Henry V.”A lot of you are going to have to make decisions above your level,” was Scott’s message to his people. “Make the best decision that you can with the information that’s available to you at the time, and above all, do the right thing.”

This extraordinary delegation of authority — essentially promising unlimited support for the decision-making of employees who were earning, in many cases, less than $100,000 a year — saved countless lives in the ensuing chaos. The results are recounted in a new paper on the disaster written by Steven Horwitz, an Austrian-school economist at St. Lawrence University in New York.

Sure the study was done by an Austrian (I wonder if they would have mentioned that prior to the RPR?) but if you paid any attention to the debocal that was hurricane Katrina you’d know that the private businesses attempted to do a whole lot while FEMA told them to pound sand and sat on their hands. I don’t know that I’ll get around to reading the study but the info about the CEO’s deligation of power is very interesting and while I greatly dislike their collusion with government and fishy growth strategy this gives them a few bonus points in my book.