US/Mexican Border Discussion

[shran]

I still like my idea. You give financial stimulis, you provide job and a goal to the veterans of the Wars who probably are having trouble coping with PTSD. And you leave such job outside of formal military hands, and into civil services, so there aren't any fear of militarise your country's administration.

A problem may be that PTSD sufferers may be unwilling and even unable to perform any task for a lengthy number of years. Let alone on wether or not they would be entusiastic in re-entering military service, be it in a supporting non-combative task or actual combat, or any variation thereupon.

[SolkaTruesilver]

I still like my idea. You give financial stimulis, you provide job and a goal to the veterans of the Wars who probably are having trouble coping with PTSD. And you leave such job outside of formal military hands, and into civil services, so there aren't any fear of militarise your country's administration.

A problem may be that PTSD sufferers may be unwilling and even unable to perform any task for a lengthy number of years. Let alone on wether or not they would be entusiastic in re-entering military service, be it in a supporting non-combative task or actual combat, or any variation thereupon.

It would be up to them to make that choice, obviously.

And it wouldn't be re-entering military service. It would be about patrolling a very peaceful border, with a very nice countryside, with a civilian organisation, alongside some of your fellow veterans. I don't expect them to actually start shooting. But I would expect these kind of activity to be better than unemployment, begging or other problems that plague the post-military period of life. The majority of your hobos are Vietnam war veterans. Do you want to have another generation joining them in a few years?

[Sionnach Glic]

Temporarily locked for splitting.

[Sionnach Glic]

Thread now open.

Still, if we continue this conversation, I'm going to have to move parts of this thread, and I'm just not in the mood today.

Lazy.

[Tsukiyumi]

Yeah. sorry.

[Sionnach Glic]

Eh, no worries. It only took a couple of minutes and I was bored anyway.

[BigJKU316]

Here's my quick and dirty solution:
Step one, station National Guard units on the border for their 1 month a year deployments.
Step two, issue less than lethal ammo.
Step three, have the Air National Guard permanently doing over watch on the border.
Step four, issue orders to the ground troops to stop and investigate any person/vehicle in their area of operations, with permission to use force to detain subjects as needed.

Problem mitigated

Congratulations, you just firmly secured about 3% of the border. The other 97% is still wide open. Do you honestly realize just how long the border with Mexico is and how narrow a front a man in foxhole can control? Your idea successfully does several things though, wastes a s**t load of money, wastes a month of time the National Guard could have spent training to fight a real war, and congratulations you've now got soldiers doing police work and that always ends well.

The simple solution is to make it eaiser to immigrate to the US legally and make the penalties for doing so illegally much stiffer. Combine that with a moderate increase to the border patrol budget and you can solve a huge amount of the problem.

The only way short of that to fix things would be to deploy landmines across the whole of the border. So long as one can make many mutiples of what they can make in Mexico in the United States this will be a problem.

[McAvoy]

The only way short of that to fix things would be to deploy landmines across the whole of the border. So long as one can make many mutiples of what they can make in Mexico in the United States this will be a problem.

While landmines sounds like a good idea, you probably need millions to have a effect on the Mexican population. Besides sometimes it isn't even the land borders but by using the sea. Though the Coast Guard are pretty good at this.

[stitch626]

What about this for a solution: a 30ft wall with manned machine guns every 100 ft. Biggest employment boom in US history!!



Ok, I'm joking, that that would provide plenty of work for people in the area (the construction I mean).

[Deepcrush]

Congratulations, you just firmly secured about 3% of the border. The other 97% is still wide open. Do you honestly realize just how long the border with Mexico is and how narrow a front a man in foxhole can control? Your idea successfully does several things though, wastes a s**t load of money, wastes a month of time the National Guard could have spent training to fight a real war, and congratulations you've now got soldiers doing police work and that always ends well.

Wow, were you shitting a brick when you wrote this? What crawled up your ass?

[Tyyr]

Wow, were you shitting a brick when you wrote this? What crawled up your ass?

Since when have you treated stupid ideas with kid gloves?

[lcpl seilicki]

Since when have you treated stupid ideas with kid gloves?

Just because you don't agree with an idea doesn't make it stupid. Defending our borders is a military issue not a police matter hence the use of the "National Guard" not the Army or navy, btw the coast guard in a military branch not a police agency and they defend our coast lines while acting in a police capacity. You don't here about any complaints about them.
My whole point is we have an underused asset, that can be utilized. The plus side of deploying them here stateside is that there is a much better chance of them coming home alive from the deployment. Also they know how to secure a perimeter as opposed to the police that don't.

[SolkaTruesilver]

Defending our borders is a military issue not a police matter hence the use of the "National Guard" not the Army or navy, btw the coast guard in a military branch not a police agency and they defend our coast lines while acting in a police capacity.

I would understand the coast Guard being a branch of the military, since naval matters is probably Federal jurisdiction. However, are the Border Guards really a military responsibility?

[lcpl seilicki]

The people who currently protect our borders are federal employees, INS, DHS, FBI, NSA. Although NSA's purview is the entire world not just the US. The expense for posting national guard units on the border would be cost neutral because we already pay them for the time they spend in uniform. If anything it would save money to fly them domestically then to send them over seas.
A good portion of the men and women in the gaurd are in their cilivian lives police officers. So they know how to detain someone properly.

[SolkaTruesilver]

The people who currently protect our borders are federal employees, INS, DHS, FBI, NSA. Although NSA's purview is the entire world not just the US. The expense for posting national guard units on the border would be cost neutral because we already pay them for the time they spend in uniform. If anything it would save money to fly them domestically then to send them over seas.
A good portion of the men and women in the gaurd are in their cilivian lives police officers. So they know how to detain someone properly.

I still don't like the idea of deploying a formal military on a peaceful border. (Peaceful = not going to be fighting a formal war). The problem is all about policing the border, not occupying it. And I think the military usually go a poor job at policing. They are trained, organised and equipped to follow orders and be professional killers. Not civilian-managing (It is by no mean a fault. They are the State's tool, and using a hammer when you need a screwdriver isn't usually efficient).

But what I wonder if the problem would about their training or their organisation. If you take the military, you take them our of those kaki uniforms, you give them civil authority to deal with the border and you lax on the organisational structure (making it a loosely-controlled force of Border Ranger), would they be better equipped to deal with patrolling the border than if they were organised like the classic military grunts?

(please do not think I am dismissing the military as inneficient. They are probably one of the best for what they are meant to do. It's when they are asked to do things they aren't meant to do that they screw up. I'd put my money on the U.S. military against any military force in the world right now, but I don't want to see them within a hundred mile of a riot in Chicago, for example).