This team has 30 members. That’s large, but even with that many, the cost of uniforms is negligible when you consider the cost of the weapons, training, travel to conferences and competitions, etc.”

Each of those comes from a seperately tracked funds. Fraud and abuse aside (and I’m sure you’ve reported on plenty of those) you can’t just use money from one pot to pay for an item that is funded from another. That’s why when I was in the military we’d get a big shiny new vehicle we didn’t really need, but the barracks were falling apart. The commander couldn’t just hold off on the vehicle and use that money to pay for barracks repair, that’s misallocation of funds and people get prosecuted for it all the time. In my accounting courses we were taught this is pretty much how every large organization does it, government or private sector.

Mind you, I’m not saying they don’t get their rocks off by running around in camoflaugue, I just doubt that was the reason behind the purchasing decision. The soldier play is just a ancillary benefit.

This team has 30 members. That’s large, but even with that many, the cost of uniforms is negligible when you consider the cost of the weapons, training, travel to conferences and competitions, etc.

We’re talking about, at most, a difference of $20-$30 per uniform.

Like the other poster said, cammo is just cheaper, I’ve shopped around and solid color or specialty utility uniforms are almost always more expensive, presumably because so much is made to supply the military demand. I don’t think it really has anything to do with mangroves.

Why would they want to blend into the natural surroundings there if their job is to defend what’s in the space center? I would think you’d want a conspicuous presence.

Or maybe the cammo presages what the vegetation at the Kennedy Space Center will look like within five years of the budget cuts.

*post-read wipe-up req’d*

I think that we’ve come to the place give terorists too much credit – which is the entire f#*&ing point of terrisim in the first place!

Getting onto a plane at Logan is waaaaaaaaaay easier than even just getting onto KSC, whatever action you intend to undertake once inside.

“Members of the SWAT team admit that one of the best parts of their job is getting the ‘big-boy toys.’”

They could at least sound a bit more professional.

Have none of you ever been to Cape Canaveral? The vast majority of the land space there is is not concrete and buildings and launch pads, but mangrove flats and coastal marsh where camo would be a far better option tactically than *insert color here*.

There I go again, giving government the benefit of the doubt. Bad liberal. Bad!

This raises an interesting problem. Perhaps NASA should have a SWAT team available, in case of some kind of extremely unlikely but awful event. But they have never been deployed. So how do they get enough experience to be capable to do their jobs on the day they’re needed.”

Every military force faces the same problem. They must train for combat in peacetime, and even when there is an ongoing war to give real combat experience, first they must train recruits without killing (many of) them. The solution is well known – lots of hard training, as realistic as possible. This doesn’t start at the rifle range – it starts with weeks of following stupid orders in barracks and parade grounds, so that you’ll obey instantly when the officer tells you to do something *really* stupid, such as leaving your safe bunker to look for armed men that want to kill you. Next, they acquire specific skills, such as marksmanship. But all that just gets them ready for the real training – going through exercises simulating combat and the other situations they must face, as realistically as possible without being too unsafe, over and over again. Then after the exercise, they get together and review what happened, look for areas in which they can improve themselves, and look for ways to make the exercises more realistic. If a soldier is lucky, he’ll keep doing that for the rest of his time in the service; if not so lucky, he’ll get the chance to find out how well the training scenarios have prepared him for the real thing…

A SWAT team could and should train the same way – as a full-time job, interrupted only by the rare instances when SWAT is really needed. The trouble is, most police chiefs don’t feel that they can afford to have a number of their best people on the payroll, but unavailable for day-to-day police work. (Also, proper training is expensive in facilities, ammunition, and wear and tear on equipment.) At best, you get part-time SWAT teams, that leave their regular jobs to train a few hours a week; they will be far more competent in a hostage rescue (for instance) than regular cops, although noticeably less competent than a team that does nothing but train correctly.

But nowadays too many departments seem to have found a worse way – keep the SWAT team together and misuse it for regular warrant service. One cost of that (but unfortunately not born by the department) is unnecessarily violent police raids. The other cost is that the SWAT team gets sloppy and arrogant, as it deals again and again with criminals that are either nonviolent or unprepared to put up an effective resistance. Then they get killed when they run into the kind of situation SWAT was created for…

Don’t you have to trip the waitress before you can try her? er, I meant, tip.

(From a song about Wallops flight facility, in VA)

“Oh, I looked over Wallops, and what did I see?
Comin’ for to carry me hooooooome?
A cloud of mosquitos, a comin’ after me,
comin’ for to carry me home!”

I hope Ted S. is happy that his comment has spawned a run of bad puns.

No secure installation is perfect, so I’m not saying that there isn’t some imaginable situation when they might be deployed, but such situations would be incredibly rare. The idea that NASA needs a specialized SWAT team in addition to its normal security is like saying the White House needs its own SWAT team.