Every soldier I have ever met was at least as familiar with how to operate his shovel/ digging in tool as he was his personal weaponry...... good shovel handling skills are hard to come by in large numbers at short notice.
Need a thousand men with a shovel each? Who you gonna call? Why not the local Army barracks, at least you know the guys they send will be physically up to the task.
Down here the military is routinely heavily involved in any emergency relief situation.
Soldiers filling sandbags for levy banks are a common sight in places where floods are a problem.
As is salt lickblocks and bales of hay being dropped to marooned livestock from the back of C-130s and Caribous.
Or people being evacuated from their roof by Blackhawks and Hueys.
Army engineers and their heavy equipment are invaluable in a lot of emergency situations, like clearing highways and rail lines after a cyclone, laying temporary pontoon bridges where floods have made the usual route unpassable etc.
Oil spills, storm beached ships, ship wrecked round the world sailors....will all see heavy involvement by the Navy.
IMHO, having that sort of equipment and manpower available and NOT using it is just senseless.
As a by-the-way, it also makes for an excellent training and response time evaluation exercise for the units involved, trying men, machines and logistics setups under highly stressful real world conditions....all on the same pay they would have got for sitting back at barracks doing nothing. Win-Win situation.
Protecting and serving your nation and people doesn't always involve guns and bombs, sometimes a strong back , a helping hand and a can-do attitude goes a long way further in maintaining national security than an aggressive stance and shouldered weapon ever could.
How can all those extra helping hands and equipment be anything but an absolute Godsend in an emergency?
