Small beans

President Barack has announced that he wants

to keep 250 National Guardsmen on the U.S.-Mexico border for another three months, once their deployment ends at the end of this month. He is asking Congress to allocate

$30 million — that’s $40,000 per person, per month — to keep them here through the summer.

Many border residents might have forgotten that 1,200 Guardsmen have been here for the past year; Obama ordered their deployment in May 2010. They were to assist Border Patrol officers while the Department of Homeland Security hired and trained a similar number of people to work on the border permanently.

These are just the most recent of the deployments, which began during the George W. Bush regime. After public concerns over militarizing the border became known, the troops’ orders were restricted to support duties such as surveillance and helping process people who were detained.

So keeping 250 troops along the 2,000-mile border probably won’t make much difference, at least for the people who live here. Despite the heat and boredom that characterize border duty, it’s probably preferred to some of the alternatives, which include dodging bullets and handmade mines in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If anything, their duties on the border probably help them strengthen their skills with the kind of surveillance equipment that the DHS uses, and the troops likely also use in combat.

National Guardsmen have been a key part of our wars in those two countries and elsewhere for the past 10 years. They and reservists have comprised 45 percent of the fighting forces, and suffered about 20 percent of the casualties.

Call us skeptics, but we can’t help but notice the coincidence between the president’s announcement that he wants to keep some troops on the border and the announcement of his re-election campaign a few weeks ago. Since that announcement Obama has talked up the border and immigration, topics he has essentially ignored since he was sworn in to office in 2009.

Of course, the response has been just as political. One of the first to weigh in is Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who is expected to launch a bid for the Republican Party nomination for president, says 1,000 troops are needed on the Texas border alone. Perry has at his disposal 2,000 members of the Texas State Guard. According to their mission statement, this group of volunteers seeks to "provide mission-ready military forces to assist State and local authorities in times of state emergencies, with homeland security and community service. …" The State Guard seems qualified, and probably willing, to provide the kind of support duties that National Guardsmen have been providing.

Allocating $30 million for so few troops on the border seem a lot for a deployment that is so small that it will be inconsequential, and that appears to be a political stunt to help Obama stay in office. This amount is small beans, however, to a government that has become so accustomed to spending billions of dollars simply to make political statements.

At least it will keep these 250 people stateside, and out of Iraq and Afghanistan, where the cost of deployment is measured in lives lost, not money spent.