Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [332]
As troubling as Blanco’s leadership was, I was concerned that invoking the Insurrection Act and federalizing the National Guard in the Gulf states against the Governor’s will could set an unfortunate precedent. The practical consequences were also worrisome. If the President invoked the Insurrection Act and ordered the Defense Department to use active-duty forces for law enforcement missions, we could have nineteen-year-old Marine lance corporals trained to fight in Iraq patrolling the streets of New Orleans as policemen. Because DHS, not DoD, was authorized by statute to deal with domestic problems, our military had not been organized, trained, or equipped to conduct law enforcement in American cities. A mistake or two could make a bad situation worse.
I sensed it was a close call for the President. He ultimately decided against invoking the act and against federalizing the National Guard. Though he was never much of a second-guesser, in the weeks and months After Katrina, he may well have wondered whether he should have taken those measures. From my vantage point, President Bush made the right call.
Without formally stripping Blanco of her authorities, the President had us send as many troops as rapidly as we could to the region to assist DHS. We sent forty-five hundred active-duty troops from the 82nd Airborne and Marines from the First and Second Marine Expeditionary Forces. General Blum effectively worked around state officials to restore order with National Guard troops. Instead of overruling the law on posse comitatus by performing law enforcement missions, thousands of active-duty troops could support the National Guard by delivering humanitarian aid and rescuing stranded victims.5 Their very presence had the effect of reducing crime and disorder.
From a military standpoint, the response to Katrina was considerably swifter than any previous response to a hurricane, and probably to any natural disaster in American history. During the Hurricane Andrew disaster in 1992, for example, it had taken five days to deploy roughly sixty-eight hundred troops. But within five days of Katrina’s landfall, more than thirty-four thousand ground forces from the Guard and active-duty were assisting in rescue efforts.6 At the peak of our operations, we had some forty-six thousand National Guard troops—citizen soldiers who in many cases were policemen, firefighters, emergency medical technicians, engineers, and municipal workers in their civilian jobs—on the scene.7 An additional twenty thousand active-duty forces were there as well. There were 350 helicopters and 21 ships conducting round-the-clock operations.8 Men and women in uniform were rescuing and evacuating thousands of displaced residents and assisting FEMA in reestablishing order in the hurricane’s Aftermath.9 They helped to evacuate eighty-eight thousand Gulf Coast residents and rescued another fifteen thousand. Hundreds of Coast Guard helicopter and boat rescue teams provided critical assistance in the effort.
From a headquarters in the New Orleans Superdome, the National Guard launched what amounted to the biggest rescue operation in American history. An active-duty Army three-star officer and gruff Cajun with ties to the region, Lieutenant General Russel Honoré, took charge of the active-duty forces in the region, bringing leadership, discipline, efficiency, and confidence to the