The Guard won't guard

My initial optimism about the announced deployment of 6,000 National Guard troops to the Mexican border is unwarranted, it seems. The assistant SecDef, Paul McHale, says they will only be used in a support role, and will have no arrest powers:

The National Guard's border missions will include surveillance and reconnaissance, engineering support, transportation support, logistics support, vehicle dismantling, medical support, barrier and infrastructure construction, road building, and linguistics support, McHale said. He emphasized that Guard forces will play no role in the direct apprehension, custodial care or security associated with those who are detained by civilian law enforcement authorities.

Now I'm sure these support missions are valuable, but when President Bush tells people that 6,000 Guard troopers are going to be "deployed on the southern border", one would be under the impression that the troops were going to be, you know, on the southern border - and not sitting in ops centers or manning commo equipment in the vicinity of the border.

It's not like we have a lack of NG personnel to actually engage in serious border enforcement - of 444,000 available Guard troops, only 71,000 are deployed in the war on terror. What's lacking is the political will to let the Guard, guard.