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Originally Posted by RoBoBoy
i'm aware of everything you said and certainly you're not suggesting it's not possible to make a sneak attack on US soil.
My question has more to do with the "what if's". For the sake of conversation, say it did happen. Where are the troops?
My what if's might be a fantasy to most but I believe it's very possible.
Did anyone ever think 2 jets could possible get under the radar to take down manhatten or a truck bomber could blow up downtown OK city?
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That's the present day problem. Terrorism and conventional warfare require entirely different tactics. We've always tried to keep conventional forces from attacking us, and the result is that there have been no successful attacks on American soil in 63 years. But as Sinner posted in an other thread, terrorist attacks have begun to penetrate a little deeper and are a little more frequent as time passes. The new war is more dependent on information and being in the right place at the right time to act on that information.
The Department of Homeland Security is not a branch of the military, it's a collection of law enforcement agencies. So here's a what if for ya: some innocuous foreign visitors hijack a truckload of nuclear waste traveling south on I-25 on its way to the WIPP site. These shipments go through Colorado a dozen times a week and the trucks are easy targets.
If they manage to evade the state patrol long enough they can get the truck to a warehouse and open the containers to see what they got. Maybe there's just one spent nuclear fuel rod in the shipment, but that's all it takes. They ditch the truck the day after they hijacked it and the trail goes cold.
Meanwhile their friends are in Denver making enough fertilizer explosive to knock down a large building. They all meet up, put the nuclear waste in a white van with half a ton of sodium nitrate, wait until a windy day, and leave it on the roof of a parking garage with a short fuse.
There is no appropriate military response to this scenario, which is why the Homeland Security department was created in the first place. Step one, install GPS trackers on the nuclear waste trucks, hire truckers with security clearance, and radio them every hour to make sure there's no hold-ups. They've probably been doing that from the start. Next, put wire taps on non-American citizens, a provision given by the Patriot Act. These are preventative measures, but what if it isn't enough and the dirty bomb goes off after all?
Again it's up to Homeland Security to track down and capture those responsible. First responders need equipment to detect nuclear, biological, and chemical agents so they know how treat and evacuate the population. Investigators need to get to ground zero immediately to find evidence in of the van that carried the bomb, but they need to be equiped with fallout gear. So the local police need all that stuff before the attack. When the initial panic has been subdued then the federal investigation can begin, and the FBI will do what they do to best. They'll be able to compare their findings against CIA, NSA, and INS records to see who was there when it happened and where they came from, thanks also to the Patriot Act. Things have to happen quickly because the culprits will be trying to leave the country as soon as possible.
New technology might have a role to play here. Passports could be lowjacked with RFID tags (which would help people find them if they got lost too). Airport security checkpoints could be designed with chemical sniffers and Geiger counters, so anyone handling fertilizer or nuclear material would be easier to find trying to get away. And I'm sure there's dozens of other useful inventions I can't think of right now.
The only role the military might have here is to police the city to prevent riots and patrol the borders to stop the bad guys before they have a chance to sneak away. This is a job for the National Guard, and in that case it doesn't matter how far and wide the troops in the other branches are deployed, they can't help anyway.
Anyway, that's just one possibility, but still I don't think there are many instances in which a strong military response would be necessary if we were attacked here at home. They've already done their best to prevent those kinds of attacks, and the rest is up to non-military personel.
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Originally Posted by JackSpratts
if we got hit, many people throughout the world would reach out to assist us, separating and rightly so the actions of a president they consider a war criminal and the millions of citizens who tried unsuccessfully to unseat him.
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And lucky for them they have a map of all the counties where people voted against Bush so they can separate them out, leaving the other millions who voted for him to die.