The Obama Administration sent out notice today that he will be pulling almost all of the National Guard he deployed to the border in September 2010 off of the border by February 2011. One has to sit and wonder just a bit how much the midterm elections came into play with his decision to send the troops there in the first place. With an election occurring in November, National Guard troops are sent to the border 2 months before the election and then will be promptly removed 2 months later.

It is obviously all a dog and pony show and there was no concern in the first place with securing our nation's borders. The amount of troops sent to the border was not enough to have any impact on the flood of illegal aliens, drugs and potential terrorists coming across the border. The mission given to the Guard - that of simply acting in desk jobs - also was a sign that the whole plan was ill conceived and applied.

Sara Carter at the Washington Examiner reports that Texas Governor Rick Perry received this word from the Obama Administration.

"In February, 2011, the Texas, New Mexico, and California National Guard forces that were deployed to the border in September, 2010, under President's Obama's Southwest Border Augmentation Plan, will have 30 days to complete a total draw down of forces."

The troops along the Arizona border will remain and be augmented with 100 troops from those removed on other portions of the border in Texas, New Mexico and California. They will remain in their ineffective positions of support however.

Let us just contemplate for a minute how much of a tragic failure of an operation this entire scheme was. Imagine for a minute that someone deployed you to a job you weren't familiar with in a location you weren't familiar and in office space you weren't familiar with. On top of this some of the people coming with you didn't arrive until October, a month after you got there. How long would it take you to get up to speed as a group? One month? Two months? I argue that they are just now becoming familiar with what they were sent there to do. Now they get the word that they need to start wrapping up shop.

Congressman Ted Poe of Texas told Carter that this is probably Obama's idea of saving money.

"It's apparently a plan the Obama administration believes will save money. We don't need fewer National Guard we need more."

And how much exactly is this supposed to save the citizens of this country that they claim they are securing the border for? Well, the entire budget of the deployment was set at $135 million and slated to end in July 2011. For those who have been paying attention to other spending recently in this country lets look a little at our priorities. President Obama just got back from a two week sightseeing trip of India and the far east. There were some reports that his trip was costing $200 million per day (I do not believe these figures, but the trip certainly was expensive. Even at about 70% of that figure, the president spent 6 months of border security per day on his trip). Also to put this spending on defending our national security into perspective, let us not forget the $787 billion stimulus bill.

For the price of the stimulus, those troops could have been deployed permanently along the southern border for 970+ years!

Or double the troops for 485 years; 4 times the troops for 242 years; 10 times the troops for 97 years; 100 times the troops for just about 10 years. You get the idea.

Yet to defend our southern border the president only allocates $135 million for a six month deployment of desk jockeying. This was all done without consulting the states in any way on what they needed. And they wonder why people claim they are not being serious about securing the border.

Update
Congressman Ted Poe released a statement via Facebook just after this story broke:

"I am sending a letter to the White House today, urging against any plan being considered by the administration to begin withdrawing National Guard Troops from the U.S.-Mexico border. We need more security, not less."