Incomprehensible incompetence

Today's WaPo reports Guard Troops Descend on New Orleans (emphasis mine):

As reports continued of famished and dehydrated people isolated across the Gulf Coast, angry questions were pressed about why the military has not been dropping food packets for them -- as was done in Afghanistan, Bosnia and in the aftermath of the Asian tsunami.

Bill Wattenburg, a consultant for the University of California Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and one of the designers of the earlier food drop programs, said that he has lobbied the administration and the military to immediately begin something similar. He said he was told that the military was prepared to begin, but that it was awaiting a request from FEMA.

'We know very well how to do this, and it's just incomprehensible that we're not,' Wattenburg said.

Incomprehensible, indeed. Bush's response to this incompetence is: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job". If his marching orders were to bungle the relief and rescue efforts to the point that they manufacture a crisis, I'd have to agree.