Notice he didn't mention the 800 Marines from Camp Pendleton, that will be delegated to fire fighting. I'd like to know what fraction of the CA National Guards is deployed to Iraq. I'll bet it's not over 20%, leaving all the rest, and the California State Guard (a true state militia, unlike the National Guard, which are reserve components of the US Army and Air Force, paid for almost entirely by the federal government) to fight the fire along with any other federal military active and reserve forces that the President will make available. We've got several Marine Bases (29 Palms, Pendleton) Air Force Bases (Edwards, Vandenberg), Navy bases (primarily San Diego), and Army posts (Ft. Irwin,
If the fires spread to San Francisco, I'd not be sending any US military, active, reserve or Guard, to fight it there. After all, they aren't welcome there any other time, so why now?
Of course if the DemonRats, and RINOS, hadn't spent the last 30 or 40 years slashing the snot out the military's fraction of the GDP, we wouldn't need to send the CA NG, or any other, to kill terrorists around the world, we'd have the active duty forces to do the job.
In the second year of the Kennedy administration, and the first for which they'd have had full input into the budget, 1962, the military was given 9.3% of the GDP to do it's job, which did not include fighting any significant hot war. In FY 2006, with a couple of related hot wars, and several other "deployments" such as Djibouti, the Balkans, etc, they were given 3.1%, exactly 1/3 the fraction of the GDP. Meanwhile entitlements almost doubled their fraction from 6.1% to 11.9% during the same period. Source
Don't be so sure, Camp Pendleton is under threat of a new blaze overnight dubbed the Horno Fire.