Issue Position: Military Service and Emergency Responders

Issue Position

Overwhelming military strength and a robust emergency response system is critical to ensuring peace and safety, and when diplomacy fails, or disasters happens, to immediately respond to belligerent aggression and civilian emergencies decisively and effectively. The United States Armed Forces should always be the most powerful military force in the world and should always be fully capable and ready to conduct offensive and defensive military operations on any battlefield. The National Guard and State Guard must also be capable of conducting full-spectrum military operations and homeland security missions as well as any other emergency response or community service activities as tasked or assigned to perform. By their very designation, emergency responders must be fully staffed, trained, equipped, and resourced to respond to any emergency that may occur, be it a terrorist attack, fire, flood, accident, or healthcare emergency. Our professional emergency responders should be augmented by an equally staffed, trained, equipped, and resourced reserve and volunteer corps of emergency responders. When the government makes a promise, then the government must keep its promise. Retirement Pensions, Death and Disability Compensation, Associated Benefits, and Rehabilitative Services should be protected from loss and reductions.

Considering that nuclear weapons are being developed by North Korea and other hostile and unstable regimes coupled with their unequivocal threat to use them against the United States and our Allies, it is now time for the United States to deploy a space based and global multi-layered ballistic missile defense system to protect our homeland and our allies from rouge aggression. The United States must also field and maintain a mix of strategic and tactical nuclear weapons to deter those who would threaten us with nuclear weapons and to retaliate with disproportionate force against those who have used weapons of mass-destruction against the United States or any of our Allies.

The United States Armed Forces should be restructured and increased in size and capability to simultaneously respond to several state-on-state wars and multiple regional asymmetrical conflicts of which the United States Marine Corps should be restructured to become a Tri-Service Special Operations and Rapid Deployment Force.

The National Guard should be transferred to the Department of Homeland Security and restructured in such a manner that the Army National Guard, Air National Guard, and the United States Coast Guard would be configured to equally perform military functions, homeland security operations, disaster relief missions, and other community service activities as tasked by federal and state authorities. The Texas State Guard should also be fully staffed, trained, equipped, and resourced to respond to foreign invasion and domestic rebellion, homeland security operations, disaster relief missions, and community service activities.

Military service-members and emergency responders who are killed or wounded incidence to their service, and their spouses, and children as applicable, should be exempted from all taxes in cases of death, and in cases of disability they should also be exempted from all taxes corresponding to their degree or percentage of disability.

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