Not so fast

You may recall that one of the problems in the response to Hurricane Katrina exactly twelve years ago was a shortage of trained personnel.  Almost all of the Louisiana National Guard had been deployed to Iraq, and there were not enough people to carry out the boat and helicopter rescues that might have saved hundreds of lives.  As the scope of the disaster (and the incompetence of Bush's FEMA) became obvious, even Fidel Castro offered to send in the Cuban navy.

There appear to be plenty of boots on the ground, and in the air, in southeastern Texas today.  At the same time, and largely unnoticed during the Big Story, we are told that there are around 11,000 American troops in Afghanistan, not the 8,400 previously announced; this is before the promised addition of thousands more (unless Betsy DeVos's brother Erik Prince can get the contract for his Blackwater mercenaries -- nepotism is a Leitmotif of this regime).  Most likely U.S. troop strength will be stepped up in South Korea, as the chest-pounding and missile-testing continue in the North.  Our "volunteer" military is stretched thin.  Clearly this is not the time to kick people out for spurious reasons.  (Think of Stalin dementedly purging his officer corps right up to the day of the German invasion in 1941.)

Perhaps that is one reason the Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, has decided to drag his feet on the separation of transgender personnel tweet-ordered by the idiot-in-chief, presumably a bone to the evangelicals who snuggled closer to him after his disgusting remarks about Charlottesville.  Mattis announced that he will appoint a "panel of experts" to study the matter, which begs the question, how do you find experts on a topic that has never come up before?  No doubt they will hold hearings, take meetings, produce a tsunami of paperwork, and at some point months or years from now, offer their ambiguously-worded recommendations. 

Perhaps the other reasons are common sense and human decency.