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Our largest and most targeted cities (e.g. NYC, DC) absolutely should have dedicated heavy weapons troops on call to respond in real time to a terrorist attack.Absolutely not. The military does not handle issues like this on US soil. (If you meant something else by "troops", please choose your words more carefully.)
I have zero confidence that, with such a force on standby all the time, departments will resist using that force for more mundane matters until it becomes routine.
> They've targeted huge international cities: DC, NYC, London, Paris, Mumbai. These are the kinds of targets (and the only kinds of targets) that plausibly need military-level policing on stand-by 24/7.
Would "military-level policing" have actually helped in any of these terrorist attacks? I fail to see how a tricked-out army would have stopped 9/11. I did a quick search for "terrorist attacks in washington dc", and nothing really came up, except for some theoretical worries and a few foiled plots, which clearly did not need "military-level policing" to deal with.
I'm really tired of how "oh my, terrorists!" is used as an excuse for domestic militarization and draconian domestic policy. The threat of terrorism in the US is hugely overblown, and traditional policing at the local and federal level is what we need to handle these sorts of things, by catching them during the planning phases. And with most terrorist attacks, if you get to a point where there's an active attack, it's too late to do all that much that's meaningful, and bringing in militarized units has just as much potential to make the situation worse. Sure, there are exceptions, but not enough to warrant militarized police on call 24/7.