on active duty. The Guard and Reserves are certainly useful and necessary. They are just, by nature, slow out of the gate. And that is fine, as long as, there is an active duty force to take the first shock, and to handle things UNTIL the guard and reserves can come on line.

When Katrina hit New Orleans, and the city and state simply folded up and refused to acknowledge their responsiblities in terms of disaster response, it left a lot of federal agencies scrambling around. The sad part is that the ignorant twits out there actually BELLIEVE that it was all FEMA's job and all federal responsibility from the get go... It NEVER was intended to be that way.

FEMA is supposed to provide the STATE with the resources and the STATE is supposed to handle most of the coordination and requests for distribution of supplies and equipment. The problem with Katrina was that the STATE of Louisiana failed completely to fulfill its duties in terms of disaster repsonse and DUMPED the states responsibliteis onto FEMA.

The idiots now simply try to blame FEMA. When in fact the only thing FEMA failed to do was that FEMA failed to predict that the state gov't of Louisiana would simply QUIT in the middle of a disaster.