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Comment by mjevans | Hacker News Reader

This directly runs counter to the idea I was going to pitch.

Send in the troops and have the Core of Engineers actually build out infrastructure and cities to bring them up to modern code in a maintainable way. Also pull in some locals for education in how that stuff is done in the process and try to do knowledge transfer of "This is how you build civilization that does not get flattened by a hurricane."

Given the political history, I doubt that would go well. Is there a foreign military power with a similar skill set that could do this task?

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It’s not that they could not build a “civilization that doesn’t get flattened by a hurricane” . Let’s speak facts and not some semi 4chan baseless insults. Haiti’s slave revolt the only successful one in history saw African people pummel Napoleons French army, the British army and the Spanish army. From 1804-1825 there was a economic embargo on the country (similar to what we do to North Korea). It only stopped when Haitians agreed to pay French slave owners reparations for the money they lost and property (slaves and land ). “In 1838, France agreed to reduce the debt to 90 million francs to be paid over a period of 30 years to compensate former plantation owners who had lost their property. The modern equivalent of $21 billion was paid from Haiti to France.” So, French banks actually loaned Haiti money with very high interest to pay the French government and avoid sanctions thus very deliberately stifling the growth of the country almost haunting it altogether. Note also this was the colony that made the French more money than all 13 of its colonies put together. Therefore the predicament we have today is due to the pure wickedness and greed of the French coupled with natural disasters.

Why does it need to be military? IIRC, Australia sent police, specialists as part of post Iraq war efforts.

US could send in fact send non military; engineers, etc, but it will viewed with local suspicion and may make things worst (assaults, sabotage by either side or third party). Even US is suspicious of foreigners building US infrastructure (ie Huawei).

When there's so much distrust of US by Haitians and US likewise doesn't trust Haitian government with funds, there are quasi government organisations such as UN: https://www.un.org/un70/en/content/70ways/index.html

Even they have had issues in Haiti.

Armies are portable civilisation.

If you task most civilian forces with going somewhere that has disaster level problems there will be blockers. Oh, we can't go there until they have: power, clean water, working telecoms, physical security, etc.

In contrast your military forces can, if necessary, bring everything. A US army deployment can make its own electrical power, make water safe, deploy radio communications, and of course it can provide its own physical security. It is not cheap, but it works.

Is there something like THW in the US?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technisches_Hilfswerk

The only thing they don't do is the physical security.

We have FEMA, which is similar:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Emergency_Management...

They did a pretty shit job managing Hurricane Katrina though. Bush's political appointee to run FEMA had no relevant experience, and Trump now also has a variety of incompetents running various agencies.

The military is bigger, better funded, and most importantly, more competent. A lot of people in a disaster in the US, upon hearing that FEMA is coming, would rather wish it were the military (just based on track record).

Very much this. It's like with data-recovery. If things are extra-broken you don't try to fix the problem from within; you bring external order (A rescue disk, taking out the problem storage disk and mounting it to another system) and then fix the problem from a working host environment.

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