New Orleans Repackaged: Let the wartimes roll

New Orleans is still far from recovery and has much more work to be done if it is to be rebuilt. And what's more, it is still just as vulnerable, just as much under sea level, as before Hurricane Katrina. So why go to the trouble to rebuild it, if all this will only happen again some time down the road. But, what would we do with New Orleans if we don't rebuild?

Well, what we have is a great resource and opportunity. Most of the city quite frankly looks like a war zone. (I've been there, trust me.) And so, why not leave it that way? War is shifting ever towards urban combat, and we need to train our troops to fight in urban zones. So, why not turn New Orleans into a massive urban combat training center; one that would make the one at Fort Know look like a McDonald's playground?

Seriously. This would save us the trouble of rebuilding the whole city, and would save us the money, time, and resources of having to demolish the whole place and put all that debris who knows where. Furthermore, the money already spent on rebuilding would not have been wasted. It will be necessary to have some of the infrastructure working properly as to create a realistic situation in which to train. We need electricity, water, sewage, and gas running so that the troops would learn how to deal with them, and enough of the city has that now.

You could not find a better spot to train our soldiers. New Orleans has got it all. It's a major city with all types of buildings and structures including skyscrapers, the Superdome, a convention center, homes, bridges, and everything else you could think of. It's a port, so our navy can practice blockages, bombardments, and amphibious landings, etc. (Puerto Rico, we'll no longer have to use you for target practice.) It's got a major airport for the air force to use, and for infantry to practice securing. It's literally got everything. The only work we might have to do is to clean up the petrochemicals left to prevent environmental damage. And really, if we're going to fight wars for oil, we could just leave all that there for more realistic training. When the military isn't conducting exercises, it could be used to train for counter-terrorism, crowd control, dealing with natural disasters, and to train police. And it can be used to try out new weapons. What more could you ask for?

And what about when the levies break again. No harm done, and we won't even need to bother to fix them again. After we get as much use out of the city dry, when the city refloods again, we'll have a great place to prepare to fight wars in a post-global warming age, when all our coastal cities are flooded. (After all, there's no reason to expect that we will build levies to protect our major coastal cities, when we won't even build decent levies around one city that's under sea level right now. I'm sure Al Gore would support me here.)

Once we get get this off the ground, we'll be the envy of the rest of the world. Pretty soon every nation will be wanting a disaster to happen to them so they can train their soldiers too. Lebanon, Indonesia, Iraq, don't rebuild and you could be the next world power. And if they don't rebuild, we'll have no choice but not to rebuild, for we don't want to fall behind. So, if you support our troops, you will support turning New Orleans into a massive urban combat training center that will adequately prepare them. And if you don't support this, then I guess you're just cutting and running, leaving our future troops in future wars for future oil out to dry.