(no subject)

[dr_tectonic]

So, Happy Birthday to the mid-terming monkey! (As of Tuesday, but since he's study-study-study man all week, it's a good thing we did all the celebrating last weekend.) G&C on Saturday for Jerry and Thomas's birthdays. Dinner with Mel on Sunday.

It snowed today. It was 70 yesterday. It's supposed to be 50 tomorrow.

Lots of not getting to bed early enough for me, but I also got a bunch of work done on the R project this week, so I'm feeling satisfied. This month will mostly about writing a grant proposal, UGH BLEAH GLEARGH.

Saw a couple of interesting talks yesterday, the upshot of which is basically: having the military deal with natural disasters is a horrible idea. And sensationalism in news reporting has evil, evil effects, so if you watch CNN or Fox News, or hell, any kind of TV news reporting, please stop. I'm serious. It literally kills people. And if you're watching, you're contributing to the problem.

Feeling kind of scattershot. Buh?

Why aren't I in bed?

Comments

[bats22.livejournal.com]

...having the military deal with natural disasters is a horrible idea.

Really? Wow... I often think of the military (typically active duty) as a blunt instrument, but I always thought of the National Guard as a group that's supposed to be useful in natural disasters (i.e., a bunch of bodies that can be easily mobilized, and is self-sufficient for transport, accomodations, supply chain, and communication). What are the problems of using the military here?

And sensationalism in news reporting has evil, evil effects, so if you watch CNN or Fox News, or hell, any kind of TV news reporting, please stop. I'm serious. It literally kills people.

As a non-television watching NPR listener, I can feel a bit of smug satisfaction at this [grin]. But can you explain the specifics of this? Is there a pattern of mass panics? Or resources being allocated to what is in front of the cameras at the second, as opposed to what really matters? I'm just wondering about example cases.

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

I don't have my notes in front of me, but IIRC:

Having the military deal with natural disasters is a bad idea because it's used to dealing with two kinds of people: allies (that is, other military) and enemies. And it's not used to dealing with, basically, civilians. Which is appropriate; that's what you want your army to be good at.

So it's great for dealing with the purely physical parts of the response problem like shoring up miles of levees with sandbags, and absolutely awful at the parts that involve people, like directing volunteer efforts, and coordinating with local authorities, and helping people evacuate, and caring for victims, and all that stuff.

As a contributor to the response, fantastic. In charge of the response, horrible.

[navrins]

So who would be better at it?

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

Emergency management professionals.

Y'know. All the people we have whose job it is to know how to do emergency response, rather than the people whose job it is to employ force against criminals and enemy soldiers.

(In particular, FEMA used to be really good at this, before it got totally gutted by the creation of DHS and its subordination to law-enforcement/military agencies therein in post-911 hysteria.)

[arcticturtle.livejournal.com]

It's been said, and I think it's true, that it's time we had a large, serious, and specialized force* to do policing, organization, relief, etc. Nation-building and region-rebuilding, you nkow.

Especially if we're going to continue invading hostile and chaotic regions and following environmental policies that induce "natural" disasters.

* - not necessarily the right noun, but 'agency' sounds too much like people in chairs with wheels, which we already have plenty of.

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

You're probably right, although I'd rather we focused on obviating the need for such a force in the first place, instead...

[ocschwar.livejournal.com]

People in chairs with wheels? I think that's called the Air Force.

Change?

[ng-nighthawk.livejournal.com]

See, looking at the actions the military has to carry out, it seems that most of our most likely threats are not folks who will face us on the battlefield for very long, but folks who will hide among civilian populations. Wouldn't it make sense to shift/add to the army's focus so that civilian management is at least a branch of the military if not a skill generally held by all infantry troops to one degree or another?

I'm not saying this so they can help with disaster relief (although if that's a side benefit, great) but so they can actually do what we've recently been asking them to do.

Re: Change?

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

Probably you are right. I'd be interested to know how much folks in the U.S. military are already thinking about that issue, and whether they're likely to be able to make that shift effecively.

Re: Change?

[ocschwar.livejournal.com]

The Special Operations Command is already performing missions of that kind. It might be counterintuitive to think people known for being able to parachute down into enemy territory wearing a tutu and carring a piano wire, killing the bad guy and fighting their way home, being sent on civilian liason missions, but what makes those guys "special" is their ability to improvise and act without pre-rehearsing 222 times, and that doesn't just apply to combat.

Hmm. I wonder if the Navy SEALS have an improv troupe.

Re: Change?

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

But aren't they colossally expensive?

Couldn't one train a rapid response team that wasn't military (and so didn't need to know how to be snipers, say) for cheaper?

Re: Change?

[ocschwar.livejournal.com]

The idea is for the specops dudes to write up how it can be done, after they've done it. You don't know whether you need snipers along until you've gone in such places and found out. But specops isn't that expensive. The trouble is that people mentally capable of that kind of work are just plain rare.

Re: Change?

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

But this assumes that people who can handle crises are also good ones to learn lessons from one crisis that apply to how other people should handle subsequent ones. Why would that necessarily be true?

And shouldn't people with these skills who are trained in military goals be finding Osama bin Laden or something like that? [I'm only partly being flip. This just feels way too Stand on Zanzibar or The Sheep Look Up for me.]

Re: Change?

[ocschwar.livejournal.com]

There's an unwritten law somewhere requiring 2 hours of cheetos and first-person shootemups before lifelong civilians like you and me get to engage in second guessing special forces officers. So I'll try to be brief. There are mundane crises, which people handle because they've either handled them before or because they've drilled and drilled and drilled beforehand. Then there are crises where drilling is futile. That's when special forces get involved. If their afteraction reports prove useful to conventional units, they'll move to other things.

As for ObL, them Spec Ops troops have been operating along the Durand Line for what, 5 years? By now they've probably all been photographed from a distance, and are thus best not sent on get-in,get-on-with-it,get-it-over-with-and-get-out missions to Waziristan.

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

Again, don't have my notes, but:

In the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, the media (especially TV news like Fox News & CNN) put a very negative spin on the behavior of refugees, greatly exaggerating the small incidents of violence and portraying people's attempts to forage for supplies as "roving gangs of looters". And there was this nasty racist edge to it, too. Sensationalism.

That actually influenced the decision-makers in charge of response to stop getting supplies to people in need and instead focus on "restoring law and order" -- a fake problem that didn't need solving. Relief efforts were actually HALTED for a couple days while police forces were sent in to threaten the storm's victims if they didn't behave.

And that diversion of effort caused people to die. It took a lot longer to get drinkable water and other necessities to people who were desperately in need of them, and in many cases that delay was enough to kill them. Those deaths are directly attributable to sensationalistic news coverage and its effects on the relief efforts.

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

What's most embarrassing to me is that I believed it.