This paper addressed three main themes related to the role of the U.S. military in domestic emergency management.  The first section of this paper provides a brief discussion of how the U.S. military has been employed domestically during emergencies involving civil unrest.  This discussion reveals a long history of military support to law enforcement authorities but cautions how future scenarios which might involve bioterrorism and quarantine enforcement present a much broader and direct problem that the U.S. military is currently not trained or prepared to accomplish.  The second portion of this paper discusses the divide that has existed between national civil defense and disaster preparedness efforts.  While the need to incorporate an all-hazards approach to domestic emergency preparedness was identified at the very beginning of the Cold War, the allocation of fiscal responsibility to the federal government and operational responsibility to the state and local governments resulted in natural disaster preparedness being short-changed and civil defense over-stated.  This dichotomy was amplified for the Department of Defense that had a primary mission of defending the homeland via the achievement of warfighting supremacy overseas and was therefore not trained or funded for a robust and sustained domestic response capability.
    
     Finally, this paper concludes by examining two issues that impact the current and future role of the U.S. military in domestic emergency management.  The first issue is linked to the above discussion of the overseas focus of the DoD.  In the absence of budget line items for developing and sustaining "all-hazards" mission planning, and the absence of the legal authority to stockpile disaster response assets, the Department of Defense must prepare primarily for its core missions and respond "ad hoc" when called upon for domestic disasters.  A counterpoint here, and the final topic of this paper, corresponds to the fact that this paper concentrates on the use of federal military assets to support state and local emergency management agencies.  An issue rarely discussed is that in twenty-three of the fifty states, the emergency management agency falls under the leadership of the state adjutant general and therefore is led by a "local" military authority.  In this capacity, the U.S. military plays a pivotal role in emergency management functions of this nation.     

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