Hurricane Katrina: The Disintegrating New Orleans Police Department

"The real issue, particularly in New Orleans, is that no one anticipated the disintegration or the erosion of the civilian police force in New Orleans. Once that assessment was made ... then the requirement became obvious. And that's when we started flowing military police into the theater. We were pulsing forces in in very degraded infrastructure -- airports had reduced capabilities ... in some cases we only had one road in because of lack of bridges, flooding, loss of infrastructure. So we couldn't rush to failure on this thing and we had to take a more measured approach on this thing than any of us wanted. Had we gone in with a lesser force we may have been challenged, innocents may have been caught in a fight between the guard and military police and those who did not want to be processed or apprehended."