So the Navy pulled sailors off land and sea duty as “individual augmentees,” gave them special training and dispatched them to one-year tours at Guantánamo. Some were “Masters at Arms,” the official said, Navy cops who typically patrol a base or waterway, do some criminal investigations and enforce traffic laws. But many were not. Engineers, bosun’s mates, supply specialists, even clerks got special training and one-year tours in the cellblocks of Guantánamo.

Today, Smith said, only a few Guantánamo guards are sailors.

They’re assigned to at least one of the three camps that the military won’t let reporters see — Camp Iguana, housing a few men the courts have ordered free; Camp 7, housing former CIA prisoners, or Camp Echo, a segregation site for lawyers to meet their captive clients and others. He would not elaborate.

And MP units, both active duty and reserves, have moved in to the place that Obama ordered closed upon taking office even before he ordered the withdrawals from Iraq or Afghanistan.

Smith, who has done mix-and-match service from Iraq to his last post at the Key West interagency anti-trafficking center, says it’s all about trying to create stability in a place where troops come and the “one thing that’s constant is the detainees.”

Most of them have been in U.S. custody for more than a decade.

“The detainees will use that,” said Smith, noting the captives at times know the military’s Standard Operation Procedures that govern Guantánamo detention “better than we do. So to have a constituent force in some form or fashion will help facilitate and mitigate that gap.”