What, exactly, is a ‘Civilian Reserve Corps’?

January 26, 2007

If the war on terror is the defining struggle of our time, the outcome of which will literally dictate the future of civilization, the president has called on Americans to do precious little about it. Bush has not called on Americans to sacrifice much of anything — aside from maybe “peace of mind” while watching the news.

With this in mind, there was one puzzling idea presented in the State of the Union this week.

“[A] task we can take on together is to design and establish a volunteer Civilian Reserve Corps. Such a corps would function much like our military reserve. It would ease the burden on the Armed Forces by allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them. It would give people across America who do not wear the uniform a chance to serve in the defining struggle of our time.”

Apparently, this would be some kind of not-entirely-peaceful Peace Corps? Maybe an offshoot of the Army Corps of Engineers, with international missions?

Unfortunately, given the president’s description, the audience had no idea what the Civilian Reserve Corps would actually do. As it turns out, neither does the White House.

President Bush’s proposal in his State of the Union speech to establish a “Civilian Reserve Corps” marks the latest call to mobilize Americans following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but like other calls to national service by Bush and both parties in Congress — most of which have not materialized — it is heavy on rhetoric but lacks an actual plan. […]

[W]hen asked yesterday to provide details on the president’s proposal, White House aides had little to offer.

“How this corps would be designed and established, and how [government] resources would support this effort, would need to be determined,” White House spokeswoman Emily Lawrimore said yesterday. “We are looking forward to working with interested members of Congress on how best to develop this idea.”

In other words, the president unveiled a new national service program, but hopes someone might fill in the details for him later — such as how it would work and what it would do.

Do you get the sense that maybe, just maybe, the White House threw the line into the speech so it could sound as if the administration still takes the idea of public service seriously?

Frankly, the Bush gang can allude to as many vague ideas as they want, but it won’t change the record. This White House, despite promises to the contrary, dramatically cut the AmeriCorps national service program (twice) with the intention of shutting it down entirely.

Every year, the SOTU features a few words about national service, and every year, the words are forgotten the next day. If the president really believed the nation were in the midst of a fight for civilization, one might assume he’d take the issue a bit more seriously.

Typo alert – should be allude, not elude

  • When I heard ‘Civilian Reserve Corps’, my first guess was it’s a program to replace the ‘contractors’ in Iraq with something cheaper. Not get rid of Halliburton – Just get them cheaper labor.

  • Leave elude alone and take out the ‘to’ that follows and it fits just fine as a Freudian Slip.

  • The Civilian Reserve Corp, AKA “The Blackwater Brigade”, sounds like a mercenary outfit that we can shell out big bucks to send into harms way when we don’t have regular army or marine troops to do it. This would make the “security contractors” currently in Iraq part of the president’s budget and a way to still fight Iraq when other troops are withdrawn.

    In another scary analogy, could this be the start of a “Republican Guard” of paid guns to do the president’s dirty work? Any way you look at it, this has evil written all over it.

  • Another scenario of this concept came to mind. Since for every soldier with a gun in his hand there are several other non-combat soldiers doing support work like cooking meals and fixing vehicles, this could be a way to turn every single soldier into frontline combat troop if the support functions were farmed out to civilians. This way tropp numbers could be reduced in Iraq with an actual increase in the number of soldiers in the way of hostile fire.

  • I’ve been thinking along the same lines as petarado. Rangel introduced a bill that would have created a civillian support corps for national and international deployment back in 2004 (I think) but it seems to have stalled.

    However, that assumes Bush meant anything when he said it. Any sort of CRC would take a while to set up and that “while” will be longer than his arse is funking up the White House. I think the speech-writers stuck it in to replace the usual fetus fetish/deliver us from gays drivel.

  • Petorado #5, from whatI understand the support work that the soldiers used to do is mostly being done by contractors now at about 4 times the pay.

  • So … this would be a type of armed civilian militia unbound by the military code of justice and without those nifty uniforms? A type of overseas customer service department? Maybe an easily mobilized Applebee’s/Firestone Humvee Care Center?

    You know, for a guy who calls himself The Decider/The Educator/The Decision Maker, he seems to pretty much suck at all of them.

  • I heard a few moments of White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten on NPR last night, and he said that the Civilian Reserve Corps would help the military with post-war clean-up, setting up government functions, building institutions, and so forth. DoD is quite interested in this program, as it will let them concentrate on blowing up stuff and people, and leave the paperwork to others.
    I thought there were already agencies in the State Dept and DoD that could handle such things. They worked well in Kosovo, but were cut out of the loop in Iraq (see Chandrasekaran’s “Imperial Life in the Emerald City”, for example).
    But then Bolten said something outrageous like ‘the President used the State of the Union Address to set out the most ambitious domestic agenda in decades.’

  • “Allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them.”

    I think CRC sounds exactly like how one would describe our National Guard before Iraq. But since the Iraq war their part-time service has turned into a full-time committment

  • More and more what we need in the world is not armed forces in the form of some sort of international quick-strike force, but a trained, permanent group that specializes in going into disaster zones &/or a third-world crisis spots after the shooting stops, for the purpose of massive and efficient nation building, including training and rebuilding infrastructure. This would be a nation-building team that can make a significant improvement in the lives of the locals and provide a basis for political stability and economic progress, thereby winning hearts and minds. The military isn’t really trained or equipped for these sorts of tasks and shouldn’t be used for them.

    Bush’s suggestion doesn’t seem to be quite what I envision, though – he demonstrates daily that he still doesn’t do nation-building, no matter how much it is needed.

  • Iraqi civilians with guns = “Militia”
    American civilians with guns = “Civilian Reserve Corps”

  • The Mayberry Machievelli’s strike again, with an even lamer demonstration of putting politics before policy. Congress should just tell the White House to submit a proposal first (one preferably longer than, say, two pages), and otherwise forget about it.

  • When I first heard “Civilian Reserve Corps”, I was reminded of Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, an idea that had broad public support (even among Roosevelt’s enemies) and actually did some great work. I imagined a set of volunteers who might take on some modern-day domestic problems (Katrina, anyone?) Of course, with Bush running the show, a CRC would just be another source of bodies for the meatgrinder in Iraq.

  • Volksturm brigades. Legions and legions of poorly equipped fodder, marched into the grinder and butchered, so Bush and his cronies can thump their chests and boast of what a brave charge it was.

    It’s also a really neat way to get a lot of unsuspecting people to enlist in the Army….

  • Volksturm brigades. Legions and legions of poorly equipped fodder

    Funny… I was thinking brownshirts, but was afraid to invoke Godwins law.

  • All the danger with none of the perks. No pension, no veterans benefits, cheaper than Private Security and Halliburton.

    Fog up the mirror, turn on the smoke machine.

    I think everything bush knows, he learned watching Rocky and Bullwinkle.

    Hey, Rockie – watch me pull a plan outta my ass.

  • My thought was that it would be a training program at taxpayer’s expense to create a reserve of draftable, trained support personnel that Halliburton could ‘hire’ on a moment’s notice to support the Iranian Invasion Force.

    We could also march them across minefields in front of our more valuable trained fighters. Decontaminate nuclear bomb sites? Hand out Republican literature?

    Since the ‘Civilian Reserve Corps’ is certain to be less affluent and therefore predominantly Democratic the government could activate them on the Saturday before the first Tuesday of November in even numbered years and train them in the north woods for a week.

  • Maybe he’s decided he needs a Praetorian Guard after all. Seriously, this seems like a way to get mymidonic soldiers without bothering with niceties like the Code of Military Justice, or hospitalization or veterans benefits or the crybaby squawks currently raised by families of Guardsmen and Reservists held way beyond what they understood their obligation to be. I think this will be an army whose principal task will be to protect and defend the property of American oil companies, and passing the cost along to the taxpayers.

  • So who’s department does this Corps fall under? State or Defense?
    Or will it be a separate entity, kind of like CIA and NASA?

    And would they be full-fledged federal employees, or simply contract workers?

    And if they are contractors, and considering that military contractors now have to abide by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, does this mean that the new “civilian” hires don’t have to?

  • I don’t know what you guys are waiting for. I’ve already signed up and shot a few Muslim terrorists I saw plotting an attack in my local 7-11. It’s easy and fun. And best of all, I didn’t need to wait for some redtape-loving Washington Bureaucrat to tell me how to do it. For the first time in my life, I’ve taken my destiny into my own hands, and I like it.

    For once, we’re finally getting a level playing field with the terrorists. They don’t wait for Tehran Bureaucrats to tell them what to do, and neither should we. Just go for it.

  • Honestly though, I think Bush stole this idea from me. Except in my idea, it was ex-CIA guys establishing unofficial CIA-cells built of educated white Republicans who were being underutilized, in order to fight terrorists at their own game. And it was a movie idea, though it really would work so well that I probably shouldn’t let them know about it, as it could serve as a good plan for implementing Bush’s idea far better than they’re ever likely to do it.

    I worked out all the details, and have it built into an excellent storyline. Now if only I had some way I could make it into a movie, yet prevent anyone from actually using my ideas for evil…

  • You just have to connect the dots. Bush promised a mission to Mars in a previous SOTU. The CRC will be needed to help colonize the planet after we get there.

  • We could also march them across minefields in front of our more valuable trained fighters. Decontaminate nuclear bomb sites? Hand out Republican literature?

    [Art K]

    Heh. Did you see the South Park movie? Visions of CRC members strapped to tanks and helicopters.

  • The AmeriCorps budget for 2006 was $851.5 million, which is about 1/2 of one week’s expense of the Iraq war. A review by the Office of Management and Budget found it to have a per-participant cost of $27,859

    Created by President Bill Clinton in 1993 as a kind of domestic counterpart to the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps is a network of three federal programs devoted to youth service in areas such as education, health, public safety and the environment. Participants in all three become eligible for education grants of $4,725 to pay for college or to repay student loans.

    The programs are:

    · AmeriCorps State and National, which provides grants to public and nonprofit groups that, in turn, take on more than 67,000 AmeriCorps volunteers who help with service projects.

    · AmeriCorps Vista, which annually provides about 6,000 full-time participants to nonprofit, faith-based and community organizations that help impoverished communities.

    · AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps, which brings more than 1,100 18- to 24-year-olds together on five residential campuses to spend 10 months working on service projects, with an emphasis on homeland security and disaster relief.

    I’ll bet we could hire at least two Blackwater contractors, rather than those thousands of commie do-gooders. And they would do more in one day than those commies ever did. (to ruin our national reputation)

    Bush’s buddies the Republicrooks had their own reasons to undermine the AmeriCorps program:

    In the 1990s, congressional Republicans, who had no love for one of Clinton’s favorite initiatives, regularly targeted AmeriCorps for budget cuts. They said the program cost too much per volunteer and undermined the spirit of service by giving participants monetary rewards.

    Of course they also voted themselves a nice fat raise, thus undermining the spirit of their service.

  • I think a hybrid, part civilian mercenary that does not get VA benefits, part thought police to organize groups to spy on and report the unamerican activities of their neighbors, part SS style zealots who will end up a special class in the NWO as a reward for their early loyalty. This decision-maker is scary!

  • The CRC sounds more like the Freikorps of post WW1 Germany (yeah, breaking Goodwin’s Law)

    Just another name for “Cannon Fodder and Lackies”

  • With more troops heading for Iraq, SOMEBODY’S got to replace Bush’s flag-waving audience. The Prop Corps is urgently needed.

  • It doesn’t have to be anything. It’s a plaque on a door behind which sits an administrative assistant waiting for a budget to kick in so they can get to work messing with things. Beyond the general concept of dismantling the U.S. gov’t for the benefit of the wealthy and connected, the reign of his Shrubness has been characterized by ad hoc creations and dodges all along the way.

    They don’t need no stinking purpose. They just need another hose in America’s fuel tank to siphon off more cash and vitality. Civilian Reserve Corps has a nice ring to it. They can get away with all sorts of shit with a name like that.

    CRC = Creating RepubCo Cancers

  • Once again, like the “axis of evil”, we have speach writers creating national policy.

    Is there further proof needed that “Bushite” equals “Incompetent”?

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