A couple of months ago, Barack Obama stated that he wanted to create a “national security force” equal in size and funding to the military.
A longer clip of his full Call To Service speech in Colorado Springs , July 2, 2008, with the pertinent quote at approx. 16:42, can be found here. What does this mean?
Only conservative sites seem to question this statement, calling it Stalinesque, but I’m not so sure. I don’t know what the heck to make of it. The fact that these statements do not appear in the prepared text does concern me however. Why not? The Chicago Tribune did report on the statement:
“We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set,” he said Wednesday. “We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.”
True, the initial red flag was thrown by World Net Daily, then followed up by Hot Air.com, but Savage Politics and No Quarter, along with such diverse sites as Real Rap Talk and Cops Online have weighed in, too. There doesn’t seem to be any real consensus as to the exact nature and meaning of “civilian national security force” or of it’s implications.
Obama provides more insights himself, however in a July 2 interview with Military Times, (video here) printed on it’s website July 8:
I mean, we still have a national security apparatus on the civilian side in the way the State Department is structured and [Agency for International Development] and all these various agencies. That hearkens back to the Cold War. And we need that wing of our national security apparatus to carry its weight. When we talk about reinventing our military, we should reinvent that apparatus as well. We need to be able to deploy teams that combine agricultural specialists and engineers and linguists and cultural specialists who are prepared to go into some of the most dangerous areas alongside our military.
Q: What Secretary Gates has called soft power.
A: Absolutely, but the only problem with soft power is the term itself makes people think it’s not as strong as hard power. And my point is that if we’ve got a State Department or personnel that have been trained just to be behind walls, and they have not been equipped to get out there alongside our military and engage, then we don’t have the kind of national security apparatus that is needed. That has to be planned for; it has to be paid for. Those personnel have to be trained. And they all have to be integrated and that is something that we have not accomplished yet, but that’s going to be what’s increasingly important in our future to make sure that our military has the support that it needs to do what it does the best, which is fight wars.
Is this really what he means by “civilian defense?” If so, why does it need to be funded equally with the military? If he wants to increase the size of the military and raise salaries of servicemen and women (he does) then will his proposed civilian defense budget be on par with the old military budget or the new?
I think that, given the responsibilities that they have, doing a better job of making sure they’re keeping pace with inflation, and their overall pay package allows them to care for their families, I think we can do a much better job than we’re doing right now.
Expand to Meet Military Needs on the Ground: Barack Obama supports plans to increase the size of the Army by 65,000 soldiers and the Marines by 27,000 troops. Increasing our end strength will help units retrain and re-equip properly between deployments and decrease the strain on military families.
Obama also mentions civilian participation:
Integrate Military and Civilian Efforts: An Obama administration will build up the capacity of each non-Pentagon agency to deploy personnel and area experts where they are needed, to help move soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines out of civilian roles.
Create a Civilian Assistance Corps (CAC): An Obama administration will set a goal of creating a national CAC of 25,000 personnel. This corps of civilian volunteers with special skill, sets (doctors, lawyers, engineers, city planners, agriculture specialists, police, etc.) would be organized to provide each federal agency with a pool of volunteer experts willing to deploy in times of need at home and abroad.
If this is what Obama is referring to in his Call To Service speech, why scrub the prepared text? Even if there is no Socialist/Communist implication, as the right-wingers seem to suggest, why don’t we hear more about these plans? If there is to be a reliance on volunteers, why the proposed funding?
I’ll be honest, I don’t have a clue as to what all this means. It troubles me that there seems to be an element of subterfuge at work here; whether that is an accurate reflection of Camp O’s motives or a result of right-wing hysteria requires more information in order to decide. For me, the bottom line is, do we really need or want the kind of military/civilian participation Obama’s proposing? And finally, what exactly is he proposing?
Any information, or opinion, or even educated guesses would be appreciated.
Check out the comments of Michelle Obama about 7:33 into this speech at UCLA:
“Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zone . . . Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual – uninvolved, uninformed.”
PUMA
Just Say No Deal
Isn’t the National Guard a civilian security force? I think this is simply a re-branding of the old Civil Defense System or Federal Emergency Management Association. It seems to me that Obama may be revitalizing the CD — a facet of WW 2 and the Cold War paranoia that prompted folks like my father to attend classes and learn emergency management techniques (in the early 70s…I remember him bringing home the Civil Defense helmet with the triangle logo on it–everyone was going to traning on it). CD has been fashioned into FEMA, and Obama appears to perhaps put a new name or something on it. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Defense for the history of Civil Defense/Minutemen in America.
The bottom line is that this is nothing new. It’s not some conspiracy.
I should add that, historically speaking, the Civil Defense was used to prepare US citizens for Nazi air raids (read that wikipedia article). Don’t listen to the conspiracy theories! Be critical of all media, including the (quote) “liberal elite press”.
Whatever you call it, Dylan, it shouldn’t cost as much as five branches of the military, which is what Obama suggested. That alone makes everything else suspicious. And I well remember Civil Defense drills in school as often as fire drills, so I know that telling kids to hide under desks in case of a nuclear attack is not only woefully ineffective, it doesn’t cost nearly that much.
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