Air Force helping Army guard POWs

San Antonio Express-News ^ | 30 January 2005 | Sig Christenson

[Racehorse]

Hundreds of airmen began helping the Army run Iraq's biggest POW camp earlier this month, marking what may be the first time the Air Force has guarded enemy prisoners, the San Antonio Express-News has learned.

The decision to assign 400 Security Forces troops to Camp Bucca is little known among Army officials in Baghdad and the Pentagon.

Both a spokesman with Security Forces, which is headquartered at Lackland AFB, and a well-placed Pentagon official agreed the action was driven largely by the Army's becoming strained by widespread troop deployments.

"Military police are a high-demand occupational specialty in both the active duty and Army Reserve, and clearly the subject of frequent deployments given the nature of the world," the official said, noting that soldiers now are posted in 128 countries.

Security Forces troops arrived at the prison near Umm Qasr in southern Iraq earlier in January after more than a year of Pentagon planning. The order was given in early 2004 at the Pentagon, but it isn't clear who signed off on it, Security Forces spokesman Gary Emery said.

[ . . . ]

But while Security Forces personnel do many of the same tasks as MPs and have a specialized corrections division, the decision to use them as Army prison camp guards has raised eyebrows. One former Security Forces officer familiar with the organization's structure said that while the order to use airmen at Camp Bucca was lawful, it would thin the field's ranks.

"We're short doing our primary mission, and now we take over something we traditionally haven't done," he complained.

[Racehorse]

As with all Christenson's military reporting, this is a well researched story. The Air Force and Air National Guard has been augmenting the Army in other ways inside Iraq for quite awhile.

[USMCVet]

Don Rumsfeld's been claiming that "we have enough troops" yet we have Air Force and the Navy troops driving the trucks in convoys, senior Army officers asking to have the Combat Exception rescinded so they can use girls, almost all of the active Army and Marine Corps on tight rotations to go over there, pretty well all of the National Guard over there, now this...

Doesn't sound like "there's enough troops" to me! What's our fallback if China attacks Taiwan? What are we supposed to do back here if there's a major terrorist strike - call out the Boy Scouts?