Always ready

Mark Thompson has a Swampland post at Time.com about the Marines:

The U.S. Marines have a pair of warships -- the USS Kearsarge and the USS Ponce -- just hanging around the southern end of the Red Sea waiting to see if they're needed to rescue U.S. diplomats and citizens from Cairo. They're half of the Marines' 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, a mini-armada that recently dispatched 1,400 of its 2,000 Marines into Afghanistan. But they've got a "fair number" of helicopters, and Marines, still aboard. "They're not in the on-deck circle yet," a military official says. "They're kind of getting ready to come out of the dugout." Meetings in Washington through Friday night and into the weekend will determine if they're ordered to carry out a NEO -- a non-combat (but potentially dicey) evacuation operation.