Trump, the Military, Puerto Rico and the News Media by Willy B

I. What Trump Actually Said

    If you've been depending on the major news media to keep up with the response to the disaster in Puerto Rico you might think that President Trump has been ignoring the plight of the people there both now and going forward. NBC posted a story, yesterday, headlined: "Trump Administration Won’t Promise To Fix Puerto Rico’s Infrastructure," following a tweet he issued that morning. But here's what he said on both the current and long term efforts required for Puerto Rico's recovery, in an address to the National Association of Manufacturers, later in the day, as reported by military.com:
    "We're closely coordinated with the territorial and local governments, which are totally and, unfortunately, unable to handle this catastrophic crisis on their own -- just totally unable to."    

    "The police and truck drivers are very substantially gone. They're taking care of their families and largely unable to get involved, largely unable to help. Therefore, we're forced to bring in truck drivers, security, and many, many other personnel, by the thousands. We've never seen a situation like this," he said. "Ultimately, the government of Puerto Rico will have to work with us to determine how this massive rebuilding effort -- it will end up being one of the biggest ever -- will be funded and organized, and what we will do with the tremendous amount of existing debt already on the island," Trump said.

    Does that sound like a refusal to promise to help rebuild the island? Trump's statement, here, actually begs the question of national economy, particularly on bringing back the Glass-Steagall separation of commercial banking from speculative investment banking, and a credit system to finance the rebuilding effort. Trump expressed support for the return of Glass Steagall, at least once late during the 2016 presidential campaign, and one or two times since taking office. There is legislation in both the House and the Senate to do just that, but so far, Wall Street lobbying has kept it from moving.

II. What the Military is Actually Doing

    Military officials involved in the recovery have been candid in reporting that what's been done, so far, hasn't been enough. "Our capability is building every single day, and we will keep building until we have fully met the needs of the people of Puerto Rico." Lt. Gen. Jeffrey S. Buchanan, the man in charge of the overall military effort told CNN, yesterday, that the DoD has not yet sent enough troops and vehicles to the island, though more are on the way. "We're certainly bringing in more [troops]," he said. "For example, on the military side, we're bringing in both Air Force, Navy, and Army medical capabilities in addition to aircraft, more helicopters. ... [But] it's not enough, and we're bringing more in."

    Much is being made of the pileup of shipping containers at the port in San Juan. White House Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert said in Thursday that the problem is the lack of trucks and truck drivers. He said that "the challenge becomes land-based distribution." It was especially difficult in the island's interior, Bossert said. "I understand the coverage in some cases is giving the appearance we are not moving fast enough," Bossert said of the growing criticism of the U.S. response.

    "What I will tell you is we are mobilizing and marshaling the resources of the United States of America in a way that is absolutely professional and fast and adequate to meet the needs," Bossert said.

    Bossert said that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers now had full responsibility for restoring power and the grid in Puerto Rico. "They've been given the mission" by federal authority to bring back power, transmission and distribution, Bossert said of USACE. USACE was also supplying 900 "super sandbags" to shore up the Guajataca Dam in the northeastern part of the island that has been in danger of failing. Each "super sandbag" weighs about 5,000 pounds, according to USACE. Two CH-47 helicopters from the Pennsylvania National Guard are on their way to deliver the sand bags to the dam.

    At the Pentagon, on Thursday, Brig. Gen. Keith Wark, director of operations for the National Guard Bureau, said that Guard and Reserve airlift into Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands was averaging about 50 missions daily. "I'm expecting to maintain this level of effort for at least the next two weeks," Wark said. "We're looking at some pretty big muscle movements across DoD if we have to go in and provide the level of troop efforts that we think we are," Wark said.

    In addition, "there's planning factors for up to 10,000 additional Guardsmen. If we have to do that -- that's a big if -- that's going to be a significant amount of capability," Wark said. What the Air Force is doing now "is making sure we're sequenced across FEMA, the active force, the Guard response, and make sure that's all synchronized to get things to the various airfields" for relief in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, he said. Initially, the main problem was clearing roads around the airfields to allow relief distribution, Wark said. As a result, massive supply distribution has been a challenge, especially in Puerto Rico, he said.

    Some news reports might give you the impression that nobody is getting help in Puerto Rico. Clearly not enough are, but this report from CBS does give a glimpse into what's actually being done by the military, in this case, Marines from the Kearsarge.

    It seems to me that there are many questions that could be asked about the response that the critics aren't taking up. I can think of a few–others can probably come up with more:
     * There were two category four storms that hit Texas and Florida in the two weeks before Maria hit Puerto Rico that both required a massive, still ongoing response. How did those effect the response to Puerto Rico?
    * Is the imperial overstretch of the US military making it more difficult to allocate forces for the hurricane response? The Wasp, I know, originally departed Norfolk for an overseas deployment before it was diverted to hurricane response.
    * When military forces are deployed in any type of operation, they also require support, including food, shelter, fuel and other logistics. How does that factor into deployment calculations?

https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/puerto-rico-crisis/trump-admin-has-not-promised-fix-puerto-rico-s-infrastructure-n805986

http://thehill.com/policy/defense/353137-not-enough-troops-equipment-in-puerto-rico-says-general-in-charge-of-relief

https://www.defensetech.org/2017/09/28/low-tech-logjam-san-juan-port-stymies-puerto-rico-relief-effort/

https://www.defense.gov/News/Article/Article/1328357/pennsylvania-national-guard-joins-puerto-rico-hurricane-relief-efforts/

http://www.military.com/daily-news/2017/09/29/calls-military-take-over-puerto-rico-relief-new-storm-looms.html

Comments

[Valissa]

Very informative, thanks Willy! I have been taking a break from reading the news as much as possible the last few months. Got tired of having to continually research everything. It takes work to figure out reality versus propaganda/political hysteria. On top of that is the necessity to work to consciously and actively tune out the inchoate collective anger-mongering that seems to have become omnipresent (shields up!).

So I especially appreciate this concise overview of the Puerto Rico situation.

[b]

Thanks Willy.

We are now on day 10 after the original incident. I believe the questions have to start earlier.

1. The U.S. has a professional civil defense organization called FEMA that is supposed to prepare for disasters and to respond when one happened. The Hurricane was predicted, with high probability, to hit Puerto Rico directly four days before the impact.

How come that the preparations failed. No storm protected local diesel & food depot in every township? No equipment ready to clean up and distribute? No crews organized?

How come there was no staging of the necessary stuff on the continental U.S.? No pre-alarm for military assets? Where was/is the Fema management in this?

2. The introduction of military transport assets took much too long. The storm hit 10 days ago. When was the first military helo flying over Puerto Rico? Five days later? Six?

3. Why does the president have to get involved in this? The press likes to beat up Trump, but this is, for the size of the U.S., a minor, localized incident. Why can't local or regional resources or this or that federal department handle it alone? That is a point where the media should do some real digging.

Now some will say "this can't be done any better". But it can.

On September 8/9 Cuba was hit by a Cat 5 storm. It was the biggest and hardest impact since 1932. A lot of houses and other stuff was destroyed. 1.7 million people had to be evacuated.

A week later Medicc reported:
http://medicc.org/ns/irmarecoveryupdates/
/quote/
87% of the population affected now has both electricity and water. No outbreaks of infectious diseases are reported, and cleanup is prioritized in both the capital and hardest-hit central provinces. Food processing centers are operating in all these provinces, and cooked food is being distributed in shelters (where 26,000 remain of the 1.7 evacuees) and in areas without electricity.

Teaching activities have resumed throughout the country as of September 18 ...
/endquote/

So - the f***ing socialists can do it but the mighty U.S. fails?

[r whitman]

I need to say up front that I am not pro-Trump but in the case of Puerto Rico he is doing a good job. There has been a great lack of preplanning on the part of the local authorities for a natural disaster. I live in Houston and the city and county authorities were well prepared to handle our disaster. Emergency services were evacuating people during the storm and depositing them in local shelters where they were me with food, water and dry clothing before they were even registered. Most of this was local with little input from FEMA except for money. Government people and volunteers knew what to do and how to do it, they rehearsed it a number of times over the last few years after the disasters of previous years with Rita and Ike.

Chances are that the same situation existed in Florida. As far as I know , Puerto Rico did none of this preplanning and rehearsing on a local level, or if they did it was done poorly.

[MRW]

Got tired of having to continually research everything.

No kidding. It’s exhausting. A second job without income.

[VietnamVet]

WB Thanks

It is astonishing how Florida and Houston disappeared from the news replaced by Caribbean hysteria to spike the ratings and the ongoing White House coup. Preparation, rescue and reconstruction takes money; Puerto Rico doesn’t have any. The velocity of the flow of money through the economy is declining. God forbid that any of the money hoarded by the wealthy is used to save American lives.

[MRW]

b,

They haven’t been able to use the PR airport until recently. The Virgin Islands got theirs fixed up earlier.

Cuba has had well-rehearsed and carefully planned national reactions to hurricanes and other natural disasters in place for decades. Extraordinarily well-planned.

[MRW]

B,

BTW, it’s the military in control of this operation, not FEMA.

[Jack]

b,

Puerto Rico is the equivalent of a state. They have the primary responsibility for making sure preparations are adequate not the federal government.

The problem in Puerto Rico is "socialism". The government and public agencies borrowed and spent and delivered nothing for their citizens including good infrastructure. Their electrical grid is no better than a third world country. They're financially bankrupt! No chance of ever repaying their municipal debt.

US taxpayers will be footing the bill for their recovery How much of those recovery funds will be siphoned off by their politically well connected elites??

[turcopolier]

MRW

It was only after demonstration of the fact that FEMA and the Commonwealth government are incapable of managing something this size was the military tasked to run the disaster recovery. pl

[turcopolier]

b

The time for maintaining overseas colonial possessions ended long ago. We need to re-think the association of the island with the US once we get through shelling out 50 billion dollars or whatever it will be. We have to remember that the island government is essentially bankrupt through their own actions and graft. The US no longer has significant military or naval bases on the island. I have been there a number of times and in spite of their possession of full US citizenship the place is not much like the US. The UN makes noises about US colonialism in PR. Fine, let there be another referendum once things settle down. At present the commonwealth calls itself the "Estado Libre Associado de Puerto Rico." They have their own Olympic team and mayor Cruz's party wants an independent foreign policy and freedom from subordination to the US federal courts. Fine! Viva Puerto Rico Libre! BTW, unless things have changed, persons resident on the island and deriving their income from the island pay no US personal income tax. pl

[steve]

The severity of the storm and its effects were underestimated. There was inadequate preparation by both Puerto Rico and FEMA. Once we figured out how bad this was, the response has been pretty strong, but it will take a while to catch up.

Long term, I don't really see an advantage in having Puerto Rico as part of the US. If they have another referendum and vote to become a state can we say no?

Steve

[Babak Makkinejad]

I think that the United States is not prepared for large scale natural disasters, just look at Katrina. As the Earth warms, the incidents of such disasters will increase as well.

[Walrus]

Its easier to respond quickly to a crisis in a one party dictatorship where people can be ordered about more easily.

[MRW]

Jack,

"The government and public agencies borrowed and spent and delivered nothing for their citizens including good infrastructure” is not the definition of socialism.

[paul]

@VietnamVet

1) there is a huge difference between a disaster effecting states on the mainland and the same one effecting a tiny island.

2)puerto ricans are americans

[MRW]

Of course. How could it be otherwise, Colonel. FEMA has had years, if not decades, to learn military logistics, the best our country has to offer. What’s it been doing during that time? Fuck if I know.

[ISL]

Willy B,

Having not spent much time on following the issue except snippets, I graded Trump an F. So I started writing a response, asking the question: What does this say about US preparedness for say a container nuke in Port of Los Angeles? And I realized that it would not be the same because aid could and would drive in from all the neighboring states.

But aid can't drive to Puerto Rico. Which Trump tweeted, but it sounded rather idiotic in 140 characters. But he was right. Its just that in 140 characters you can't actually communicate.

I think Trump is shooting himself in the foot with his tweeting rather than having a decent length speech followed by some press Q&A.

I turned off on him when he said he was worried about shippers, and that aid couldn't be considered before Puerto Rico paid back wall street (i.e., his cabinet). However, that is not the immediate disaster response.

Thanks for your summary!

[The Twisted Genius]

Amateur radio operators stepped in to help. A group of 50 volunteers teamed up with the Red Cross to provide emergency HF commo for rescue and relief workers. A second group will soon establish "health and welfare" networks back to CONUS. My older son would have volunteered for this if he didn't just start a new job.

[MRW]

Babak, how can natural disasters increase if the earth warms? C’mon, think about it. If the temperature were the same throughout the planet, there wouldn’t be storms. Period. (Of course not something that political activist self-proclaimed ‘climate scientists’ have bothered to study.) Storms are caused by differences in the temperature gradient, NOT by temperatures that are even and consistent. Pick up any university meteorology textbook for a definition of what causes storms, cyclones, and hurricanes. I’m not making this shit up.

Katrina could have been avoided had the U.S. Army Corps of Engineering done its job fixing the levees, which New Orleans pooh-poohed worrying about for 10 years before Katrina struck when they were warned. Repeatedly. Check the records. I did..

It’s like Mayor Bloomberg. He was WARNED by whatever emergency group he had reporting to the City in 2010 to take measures to fix “The Bight.” Yes, that’s bight, not blight. (Look up on Google. It’s a natural shoreline configuration that can cause massive tidal surges.) I have the safety report somewhere on this computer. Bloomberg completely ignored it. Probably had to go out for lunch uptown.

So when Sandy hit, Bloomberg, the mayor scumbag that he was, pulled at his pearls and made some mewling comment about “Global Warming” causing all this—not him—and President Sparky and his media minions bought Bloomberg’s coverup of neglect, and millions to this day believe that lying fucker.

Nobody does their goddam homework.

I’d rather have a bunch of high school grunts trained in logistics at Camp LeJeune any day of the week than the lazy-ass thinkers who pound out their substandard pieces for the NY Times, Washington Post, and HuffPo who think they’re impressing me with their incredible stupidity.

Don’t fall for this shit, Babak.

[MRW]

Babak, how can natural disasters increase if the earth warms? C’mon, think about it. If the temperature were the same throughout the planet, there wouldn’t be storms. Period. (Of course not something that political activist self-proclaimed ‘climate scientists’ have bothered to study.) Storms are caused by differences in the temperature gradient, NOT by temperatures that are even and consistent. Pick up any university meteorology textbook for a definition of what causes storms, cyclones, and hurricanes. I’m not making this shit up.

Katrina could have been avoided had the U.S. Army Corps of Engineering done its job fixing the levees, which New Orleans pooh-poohed worrying about for 10 years before Katrina struck when they were warned. Repeatedly. Check the records. I did..

It’s like Mayor Bloomberg. He was WARNED by whatever emergency group he had reporting to the City in 2010 to take measures to fix “The Bight.” Yes, that’s bight, not blight. (Look up on Google. It’s a natural shoreline configuration that can cause massive tidal surges.) I have the safety report somewhere on this computer. Bloomberg completely ignored it. Probably had to go out for lunch uptown.

So when Sandy hit, Bloomberg, the mayor scumbag that he was, pulled at his pearls and made some mewling comment about “Global Warming” causing all this—not him—and President Sparky and his media minions bought Bloomberg’s coverup of neglect, and millions to this day believe that lying fucker.

Nobody does their goddam homework.

I’d rather have a bunch of high school grunts trained in logistics at Camp LeJeune any day of the week than the lazy-ass thinkers who pound out their substandard pieces for the NY Times, Washington Post, and HuffPo who think they’re impressing me with their incredible stupidity.

Don’t fall for this shit, Babak.

[Cortes]

Your final point makes the case exactly, Colonel.

Too much scope for shucking off the blame for bad behaviour onto others. The few PR contacts I have are unhappy with the local government.

[MRW]

In the meantime, let’s deal with reality. They’re Americans.

[Lars]

I think that the US Armed Forces are the only entity that can deal with a situation like this and they were not mobilized when they should have been. Regarding Donal Trump, he did not engage a whole lot until the criticism arrived. He is after all the head of the federal government, and as GWB found out, this is a test of leadership. What I have seen so far, that is inadequate.

The recovery in Puerto Rico will take a long time, will require a lot of resources and solid planning. I recently made it through Hurricane Irma and in 2004, I was involved in repairing damage from 3 hurricanes. What I see in PR does not even come close to that.

I am sure federal assets are catching up, but they are still way behind the curve and that is due to failed leadership at the top of the federal government. In 2004, I spent 3 years repairing storm damage and as I said, it was not nearly as extensive as the situation in Puerto Rico.

I expect another million people from there to come here to Florida, where many have relatives. The GOP is not going to like that, because they know who failed them when it mattered and when they arrive here, they can vote.

[Laura]

This situation reminds me of a lecture by Dr. Barry Ryan on the Vietnam War....after carefully reviewing all of the fear of Communism of the time right after WWII, the development by the USSR of the hydrogen bomb, the fact that China had indeed "gone Red" and had indeed joined the Korean War on North Korea's side....he projected 2 maps: one of the area around Korea and one of the area around Vietnam.

Then he asked: see the difference? (The Korean PENNINSULA could actually be cut into a North and South. A DMZ was a possible construct. Vietnam? No way and, according to his analysis, therein was the
problem for the US...and it was insolvable because there was no way to actually keep the North out of the South on the ground.)

Okay...that brings me to Puerto Rico which is an ISLAND. OF COURSE, the PR truckers, etc. are unavailable as they are with their families or looking for their families. BIG DIFFERENCE between Houston and Florida ----- TRUCKERS/WORKERS/ASSISTANCE CAN DRIVE IN!!!

This part of the problem really could have been foreseen --- not such a mystery and comparing the two situations really clarifies the difficulties on a whole host of levels....which SHOULD HAVE BEEN FORSEEN.

Not necessarily by Trump...but someone should have said "Hey guys" we need a different logistical response...soon. No system is perfect...and now this can be baked into future responses for islands.

[Bobo]

Maria went into the SE coast at a Cat 4 and came out on the NW coast as a Cat 2 and dumped +20" of rain on an island that had not seen anything close to that severity since Hurricane Hugo 20+ years ago. So most new roofs suffered due poor construction and building codes. A good number on roads and culverts had severe damage. Every Puerto Rican has their own individual horror story of this storm but the real horror is their government response.
FEMA had pre-positioned supplies and the first five vessels that discharged containers in the port had a number of FEMA containers onboard. FEMA had pre-arranged response plans which have been put into effect and working properly. The USCG had helicopters up right after the storm supplemented by US Navy and British Navy. A lot has been going on that is organized and normal after an event such as this but what is not normal is the local government response which is why the military has/will take over the recovery.
It took four months for electricity to get back to normal after Hugo and will take a lot longer for it to get back this time as a complete new transmission line network needs to be implemented. Due lack of electricity only 50% of gas stations could open, banks, grocery stores, pharmacies and other merchants also were quite limited. Those that did open had the foresight to have generators on hand to operate. Today Walmart and other large chains are opening up stores and taking credit/debit cards so life is getting back to some stability but had a ways to go. The island is a cash only society till all gets back to normal and if you have to make payroll you better fly the cash in.
Now in San Juan land lines, cell lines, water distribution all functioned prior, during and after the storm and overall the city fared pretty well as its the interior of the island where the serious problems are but people have been successful driving from Ponce and Mayaquez to San Juan with an extra hour or two for detours. Trash and refuse need to be picked up and I guess the Army will arrange that as the local politicians are doing nothing but crying to Crybaby News Network.
The real hindrance is lack of electricity which is due to the Thieves who have been in political office for that past twenty years on the island.