Milwaukee is logical, but Madison? It has some lakes and the little Yahara River.
New York has one, and they used to assist in cargo loading when retrieving Flight 800 bodies and wreckage, and after 9/11 helped with evacuations, did logistical/clerical work, security, and first aid support. Their SeaBees put up a tent city for the emergency workers--there are a couple pages of bullet points. Now we're all grown-ups, and know the need to maximize the number of categories in a report (Assisted the Security Chief in moving his desk), but clearly there were ways to help out in a disaster that don't require that you be in a boat.
OTOH, I'm not sure what this would bring to the table that the Army National Guard wouldn't, except in oddball situations where the Reserve is stripped of one kind of skills and the Guard of another.
But we might still yet have our own naval militia.
(*) Not the same as privateers.
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OTOH, I'm not sure what this would bring to the table that the Army National Guard wouldn't, except in oddball situations where the Reserve is stripped of one kind of skills and the Guard of another.
One thing it brings is that you can add members without them needing to sign a contract of enlistment and committing to a long period of service. So for an emergency, a militia structure makes a lot of sense -- it gives you a command structure that can adopt in what is called in the South "the Cajun Navy," and help order and direct them.
However, it doesn't have to be ordered as a militia. We do the same thing with the emergency services here. Short-term volunteers are absorbed into the command structure set up according to the National Incident Management System (NIMS), which is used to throw up ad hoc command systems according to a universal form that will be familiar to all the various departments and agencies. The volunteers won't have been trained on it, but they can be slotted right into it as Strike Teams or whatever.
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