Homeland Security: Soldier On The Beat

Most Americans in the service don't join up to guard downtown Minneapolis or serve in, say, the Pennsylvania theater. But they may have to change their outlook. Last week the Pentagon made it clear it wants to make a senior military officer responsible for the defense of the nation.

This may seem like an obvious idea when the Pentagon seems so involved in every aspect of American life right now. Since Sept. 11 its warplanes have been patrolling U.S. skies, and thousands of military troops have been guarding U.S. airports and key bridges, ports and dams. But these forces are being commanded by very different parts of the military: the airplanes are controlled by the North American Aerospace Defense Command, and ports are being looked after by both the Coast Guard and the Pentagon's Joint Forces Command. The National Guard troops, meanwhile, are guarded by the nation's Governors. In other words, it's a bureaucratic mess, if not a logistical one.

So now the military wants to assign a single four-star officer to protect American territory, just as four others are responsible for the European, Central, Pacific and Southern commands. These regional commanders in chief are called CINCs. Although CINCs have been around since World War II, there's never been such a high-ranking officer in charge of defending the U.S. It's likely that the mission will be assigned to either the Norfolk-based Joint Forces Command, which oversees 80% of U.S. forces based inside the U.S., or NORAD, based in Colorado Springs, Colo. The homeland-defense commander would support, not supplant, the new White House Office of Homeland Security run by Tom Ridge, with all those problematic details on who outranks whom still to be worked out.

While the concept of a domestic commander may seem natural in a post-September world, it is actually a radical departure for the military. The Pentagon has mostly stayed away from the job of defending American cities and suburbs, leaving it to local cops, fire fighters and haz-mat teams. That tradition has its roots in a law known as the Posse Comitatus (Latin for power of the county) Act of 1878, which bars military personnel from searching, seizing or arresting people in the U.S. Congress passed it after President Ulysses S. Grant ordered troops to serve as federal marshals at the polls in former Confederate states during the hotly contested 1876 presidential elections; Southerners then complained bitterly that Grant was "protecting" his party's candidates. "There comes a time when we've got to re-examine the old laws of the 1800s in light of this extraordinary series of challenges that we're faced with today," says Senator John Warner of Virginia, the senior Republican on the Armed Services Committee.