The Trouble with Kansas

I dunno. I was trying to write some sort of measured post about the travesty of having most of the National Guard and their equipment in Iraq when it's desperately needed here, in what some might call the "homeland," in case we have something like, oh, I don't know, a tornado more than a mile-and-a-half wide with winds up to 205 miles per hour demolishing a town in Kansas, or whatever. But somehow the subject seemed to lend itself to an evenhanded presentation. We saw that this was a problem waiting out there during Katrina, and it only seems to have gotten worse. Although it doesn't do much to offer immediate help to the people devastated people of Greensburg, Kansas, state governor Kathleen Sebelius is making a an issue of it.

Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius said Monday that the state's National Guard couldn't respond as quickly as it should have because much of its equipment is overseas. About 300 Kansas National Guardsmen have been sent to Greensburg.

"Fifty percent of our trucks are gone. Our front loaders are gone. We are missing Humvees that move people," Sebelius told NBC's "Today" show. "We can't borrow them from other states because their equipment is gone. It's a huge issue for states across the country to respond to disasters like this."

Further down, the article from McClatchy offers some solid numbers.

A Government Accountability Office report in January found that of 300 types of equipment needed in natural disasters, the Guard had fewer in all categories than it did in 2001, before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Some of the equipment is unavailable for domestic disasters, the GAO found, including radios and dump trucks. Only 2 percent of the diesel generators needed are available, the study found.

The GAO report estimated that Guard units in the United States have only 50 percent of the equipment they'd need in the event of a disaster. A study by the National Guard Association of the United States pegs the percentage at 40 percent, according to John Goheen, the group's spokesman.

Even to achieve that number, Goheen said, some Guard units have had to count privately owned vehicles that would be made available under lease agreements in the event of a disaster.

The war belongs completely to the White House, of course, so it didn't take long before Tony Snow started pointing fingers the other way.

White House press secretary Tony Snow said the fault was Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius'.

In a spat reminiscent of White House finger-pointing at Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco after the federal government's botched response to Hurricane Katrina, Snow rapped Sebelius for not following procedure to find gaps and then asking the federal government to fill them.

"If you don't request it, you're not going to get it," he said.

. . .
"As far as we know, the only thing the governor has requested are FM radios," Snow said. "There have been no requests to the National Guard for heavy equipment."

Kansas Senator Sam Brownback (who, oddly enough, happens to be running for president) piled on, as well, insisting that the Kansas National Guard told him they had everything they need. For better or worse, this will all play out on the national stage, so we'll be able to see who's right.

Tony Snow, by the way, backed off on his claim in a press briefing later in the day. Perhaps he'd seen this post from Think Progress, which helpfully lists a number of reports of Sebelius raising the issue for almost a year and a half. Apparently, unlike other politicians, she did learn something from the FEMA failure during Katrina. She was asking Rumsfeld for new equipment just a couple of months after Katrina blew through New Orleans. She's not going to be caught unprepared like Kathleen Blanco was. But even so, there's still the immediate problem of the tornado aftermath. Let's just hope that we don't have another national disaster, like flooding or something.