Military prepares for Hurricane Rita's arrival

After facing serious criticism in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, FEMA is well on its way in the planning for Hurricane Rita.

So far, 50 truckloads of water and ice have been called in along with 20 truckloads of MREs.  Those are meals read to eat.  Medical teams are making their way to the region and so are urban search and rescue forces.

On Wednesday, Retired U.S. Army Col. Ken Allard joined MSNBC's Natalie Morales to discuss how the military is preparing for Rita.

To read an excerpt of their conversation, continue to the text below. To watch the video, click on the "Launch" button to the right.

NATALIE MORALES: The United States Navy is starting to move some of its personal out of the areas that are affected as well as specifically, Corpus Christi, Ingelside and Kingsville.  So I mean, you're seeing the military having to react as well in preparing themselves.

KEN ALLARD: Last week, when I was with General Honore, who commands the Joint Task Force Katrina, he was very eloquent in describing what it was that he was facing.  It was as if he was facing a military attack against the southern Gulf Coast of the United States. 

The idea is you move your people out of the way so that they become first responders instead of first victims and so what the Navy is doing now is making sure that at the very least, people that are not directly involved in the mission are well out of the way of the storm. 

The same way you would do with any other civilian evacuation.

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MORALES:  Speaking of moving out of the way, we're seeing that six of the Navy ships have already been moved out of the way but are getting closer to the Texas coastline just in case.  So what will be their roles or their personnel's role in that area?

ALLARD:  Because they are a mobile force, they want to be close enough to be responsive but not close enough to be the first victims.  Navy ships are one of the best forms of force that you can have to be able to be closer to it because they're designed to ride these things out. 

They are sea-going forces so frankly storm surges do not mean that much to them.  So what they're doing here is simply being prepared to be helpful with the rescue efforts as we saw during Katrina and whatever is involved here, either a helicopter rescue, hospital ship operations; they're there for all that.

MORALES:  And the Pentagon is now ready to deploy more active duty personnel, bring in some more National Guards to the area; some 12-13,000 troops that were from the National Guard and were already on Katrina.  You have to ask yourself the question, yet once again:  This is a military that is already stretched so thing- how much more can they possible manage?

ALLARD:  The 82nd troops that I was with in New Orleans last week, all of them had already been to either Iraq, Afghanistan or both and what your seeing right now is the Texas National Guard that is being moved out of Louisiana where they had deployed to help out with Katrina.  So they're going to be moved back to home stations.  But when you move them back, you have to give them some form of rest before you can re-deploy them on this thing with Hurricane Katrina.