SENSITIVE INSENSITIVITY? Instapundit on the prohibition of the Red Cross and other non-governmental eelymosynary institutions from bringing supplies into New Orleans.

Apparently, they wanted people hungry, thirsty, and anxious to leave.

They also wanted the relief workers who came into the area to avoid being accused of harassment, a development that annoys commentators as diverse as The Anchoress and Mahablog.

Something there is about the deployment of relief workers, whether they be professionals or volunteers, that reminds me of the much-maligned "Repple Depple" system of restoring the strength of U.S. Army units during World War II. Apparently teams of relief workers are being held outside the recovery zone and being split up once the authorities -- and there is still division of command, and that might not be all bad -- decide how many people they'd like to deploy and where.

At the other end of the replacement pipeline, replacements were trained by replacement centers (or stripped from divisions), shipped as anonymous replacement increments to a theater of war, and held at the repple-depple until needed by units. These men were military orphans with little esprit de corps and no cohesion. Many thought of themselves as replaceable parts in the giant army "machine," or as rounds of ammunition. The sole virtue of this system was that it allowed divisions to stay in near continuous combat for days on end, theoretically without eroding their numerical strength. As casualties left, replacements came in. However, the reality became that replacements came in, and with no combat experience and no one in their new unit looking out for them (the "I don't know him and don't want to know him, he's only gonna be a casualty" syndrome), they quickly became casualties.

Those that do not recall the past ...