Originally Posted by gsoltso

Having participated in a couple of "peacekeeping" missions, and humanitarian missions in the military, I have found that the majority of military members are not necessarily equipped to function as peacekeepers. I tend to agree with RB (gasp*) in that the majority of missions defined in the military are about finding new and ingenious ways of destroying people, things and structures, and if you can find a simple way to do all three at once, you usually have a SGM stripe on your sleeve. It is not that the people are bad, or that they don't care, it is that the training they receive and repeat (ad nauseum) is geared towards ending threats. Using the military in the airports would violate Posse Comitatus to start with, and would require a whole new set of training, theories and thought process just to get to a starting point - which would take years to design. The military is doing what it has been designed to do (more or less), which is destroy. Without a whole rewrite of many laws (at a constitutional level in some cases), the training and attitude of the military members involved, and a reconditioning of the American public to get used to soldiers interacting with them on a regular basis (and there are tons of folks here and in the blogosphere already screaming brown shirts this, nazi that - imagine what would happen if you had soldiers patting down folks that alarmed the system on the evening news!), I just don't see that this is viable. The drain on resources and imagery alone would be a non-starter.

*Sorry, had to go bang my head on the wall for agreeing with RB on something outright!