U.S. Armed Forces on Guard Everywhere Except on
America's Border

By Wayne Lutton

hile neglecting to guard our own nation's borders, America's political elites have no trouble sending military units to guard foreign countries.

According to the Wall Street investment firm Bear Stearns, twenty million illegal aliens are currently residing in the United States, double the official Federal government estimates. And as Donald Bartlett and James Steele reported in Time magazine, "the number of illegal aliens flooding into the United States this year will total 3 million. It will be the largest wave since 2001 and roughly triple the number of immigrants that will come to the U.S. by legal means."

The American public is constantly told that we can't "seal" our borders and better screen entrants through our ports of entry. The fact is, Congress and the White House have never tried. Official Washington is more than willing to deploy the U. S. Armed Forces to help secure the borders and ensure the political and economic stability of foreign countries. The U.S. Army currently has more than 300,000 soldiers serving abroad. As of March, 2005, the U.S. Department of Defense mobilized for active duty 184,103 National Guard and Reserve personnel for the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard. The U.S. House Appropriations Committee recently approved $81.3 billion in additional spending for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, pushing military costs there to more than $100 billion in fiscal 2005 and increasing Defense Department spending overall by about 25 percent.

Additionally, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (the Federal agency that replaced the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and is now a division of the Department of Homeland Security) deployed another team of CBP officers and Border Patrol agents to Iraq to help secure Iraq's borders. While CBP is charged with the management, control, and protection of our Nation's borders and official ports of entry, CBP Commissioner Robert Bonner said of their deployment to protect Iraq's borders, "There is no more important mission."

Of the 192 countries in the world, the United States currently has military units stationed in 135 of them. The following list is taken from the U. S. Department of Defense, "Active Duty Military Personnel Strengths by Regional Area and by Country":