What the President should say about immigration but won't - Part 1 - Troops

My Way News:
"The president is expected to outline immigration reform proposals, including deployment of several thousand National Guard troops in a support role along the 2,000-mile border, but less than the 10,000 that had been talked about at the Pentagon, a U.S. official said on Sunday."

We tried putting troops on the border a few years ago - just a few, as I recall, as an experiment. Naturally, the military way to do things is to stress OpSec, so they didn't bother to tell people what they were doing or where. The result was that a teenage boy guarding his family's sheep from four-legged coyotes and other predators was shot and killed by one of his country's own troops. That tragedy ended the program.

Sending soldiers out on patrol on their own is a recipe for disaster. However, there is one thing that needs doing on the border which only the military can do and a few things where they might be useful. Sending troops to take over manning the dispatch system and the cellblocks so that trained Border Patrol agents can work directly on interdiction might help, as would using them to help with transporting detainees to jails or back to the border. Allowing troops to go on patrol under the command of career Border Patrol agents might also be useful.

Now, the one thing where the assistance of the military is essential is in dealing with border incursions by the Mexican Army and police agencies. Officially, these are dismissed as honest mistakes in navigation unless the drug runners they escort are actually caught and then they are dismissed as aberrations. Our government finds it impolite to acknowledge that rampant corruption pervades every level of government in Mexico. As I noted recently on this blog, such incurions have been averaging once every seventeen days over the last several years. These typically include a squad or two troops with Humvees and automatic weapons, but at least one recent case in Arizona involved a helicopter.

A combination of helicopter gunships and close support fixed-wing aircraft maintained on alert at locations along the border with forward observers assigned to the Border Patrol would go a long way toward seeing that some of these incursions end with the offenders in custody. At present, the Department of Homeland Security's official guidance in the event of an armed invasion of US territory is to withdraw from the area and not confront the invaders.

If these smugglers of drugs and who knows what else were met by forces with superior firepower capable of wrecking their vehicles, and even killing them if they resist detention, they might decide the money offered by the smugglers wasn't worth the risk.