The 5,239 troops headed to the border is just the beginning

[Elderberry]

Military Times by  Tara Copp 10/30/2018



The number of troops who will deploy to the U.S.-Mexico border will rise beyond the 5,239 personnel already on orders and expected to be in place within days, U.S. Northern Command chief Air Force Gen. Terrence O’Shaughnessy said Tuesday.

O’Shaughnessy did not have a cost estimate for the rapidly-growing — and without recent precedent — mission of dispatching thousands of active-duty forces to Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California to counter a caravan of migrants traveling from Central America.

“There will be an additional force, over and above the 5,239,” O’Shaughnessy said. “The magnitude of that difference, I don’t have an answer to right now.”

Typically, U.S. National Guard forces have been tasked to support the border security mission, said William Banks, author of “Soldiers on the Home Front: The Domestic Role of the American Military” and director at the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism at Syracuse University’s College of Law.

However, those forces are under the control of their state governors, and in the spring, when President Donald Trump requested National Guard support to be sent to the Mexico border, several governors refused.

To date, only about 2,100 of the 4,000 National Guard billets authorized by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis in response to the president’s original request are filled.

This time, the president requested active-duty forces, and on Friday Mattis signed off on the new mission, “Operation Faithful Patriot.” The first 1,000 active-duty forces assigned to the mission are already in Texas, staging at Lackland Air Force base in San Antonio, O’Shaughnessy said.


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