ABSTRACT
Introduction The U .S . military has taken fairly deliberate steps to remind itself (and the American people) that the defense of the homeland is “job 1 .” In the Defense Strategic Guidance (DSG) issued in January 2012, “defend the homeland and provide support to civil authorities” is listed as the seventh of the 10 primary missions of the U .S . armed forces (Department of Defense, p . 5) (see Figure 5 .1) . While there were some minor concerns raised over signals of prioritization via the listings order, the Department of Defense (DoD) assured its critics that the sequence was not meant to signal relative importance . The following year, DoD issued a revised Strategy for Homeland Defense and
Defense Support of Civil Authorities (2013a) that was more direct in asserting domestic primacy in the military’s mission sets:
Recently, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff contributed to the reassuring rhetoric when he said, “The homeland is actually achieving greater prominence in our discussions of future strategy than at any time in my forty years [of service], as it should” (Gaskell, 2013) .
