Reflections on the National Guard in DC

In my 14 June Substack newsletter, I offer reflections on the Trump administration's deployment of Marines to patrol the streets of Los Angeles against the will of LA's mayor and California's governor. On 11 August, President Trump declared a "crime emergency" in Washington, DC and, again over the objections of local officials, mobilized approximately 800 members of the DC National Guard. Since then, the Republican governors of Ohio, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and West Virginia deployed their own Army and Air National Guard to support the operation, bringing the number of Guardsmen in DC to just over 2200 as I'm writing this.

The militarization of our nation's capital signals a threat to the Republic that was first imagined before we were a Republic. I'll discuss this in a moment. First, however, I want to offer one reason to feel somewhat better about this deployment than the last time President Trump exercised military power in an American city.

There's a subtle but important difference between these two deployments. Unlike the Marine Corps, the National Guard is organized, trained, and equipped to respond to domestic emergencies. Although National Guard soldiers and airmen have fought alongside their active-duty compatriots in every US war, a Guardsman's "primary area of operation," according to a National Guard recruiting site, is their home state. While law enforcement is not a National Guard mission by law, doctrine, or tradition, Guardsmen routinely integrate with state and local law enforcement and first responders to support their communities during natural disasters, civil disturbances, and public health crises. National Guard training in the "rules for the use of force" – typically more restrictive than "rules of engagement" that regulate military operations overseas – is modeled on civilian law enforcement standards that emphasize graduated force, de-escalation techniques, and self-defense.

Contrast this with the training and culture of the 2nd Battalion of the 7th Marines. Until they were called away in June to "protect federal personnel and federal property in the greater Los Angeles area," the Marines were preparing for their doctrinal mission: to find, fix, and destroy enemy formations and dominate foreign battlefields. Marines exist to impose the will of the US government on hostile foreign powers by deterring aggression or, should deterrence fail, by marshalling overwhelming firepower to destroy their adversary's capacity and will to resist.

My 14 June article argues that employing the Marine Corps, an organization whose principal mission involves killing at scale, in a domestic law enforcement role raises three concerns. First, given their training and culture, Marines are generally more likely than trained law enforcement officers to misread a threat and employ lethal force unnecessarily. This would be tragic not only for the victim, but also for the service member who needlessly killed a countryman. A related concern I raise in my essay is that because Marines are less familiar with making threat assessments in law-enforcement scenarios and justifiably anxious about the moral and legal repercussions of "getting it wrong," there was risk that a Marine would fail to pull the trigger when lethal force would have been the right call. That hesitation, as cops know, could cost lives. Finally, because the standards of discrimination – distinguishing between friend and foe and only harming the latter – are far more stringent for domestic law enforcement than for combat operations, introducing Marines to an already volatile situation put innocent lives at risk. Marines are trained to respond to enemy fire by laying down "walls of lead," accepting "collateral damage" as a regrettable but foreseeable feature of war. In policing, there is no acceptable level of "non-combatant" casualties. Regardless of whether these concerns were realized in LA, they were and always will be present anytime active-duty troops are deployed in a domestic law enforcement role.

To be clear, neither the National Guard nor the active-duty force should be involved in domestic law enforcement. Good policing and good soldiering require fundamentally different skill sets and mindsets. Neither Marines nor Guardsmen enlisted to fight crime. However, if indeed crime in DC constitutes a domestic emergency of such extraordinary proportions that military augmentation is necessary (a dubious claim given readily available and widely reported statistics about crime trends in DC), then turning to the National Guard is a less awful option, by a country mile, than deploying active-duty troops. The National Guard option does not eliminate the three concerns I describe in my 14 June essay, but it does diminish their severity.

On this one point, therefore, the deployment of the National Guard to DC gives me fewer reasons for alarm than the deployment of Marines to LA. The overall signal it sends, however, is far more menacing.

Although National Guard soldiers may be somewhat better prepared than active-duty troops to respond to a domestic law enforcement tasking, they are still soldiers. For the second time in the seven months since President Trump's inauguration, the administration has applied military force allegedly to "restore law and order" to an American city. In both cases, the president did so over the objections of elected officials at the state and municipal levels. To put this in context, excluding the US Civil War, a US president has deployed federal troops or federalized National Guardsmen over a governor's objections only five times in our nation's history (to put down the Illinois Pullman Strike in 1894 and to enforce civil rights laws in Arkansas [1957], Mississippi [1962], and Alabama [1963 and 1965]). Now, still early in Trump's second term, that count is already up to seven, with President Trump making it clear that Americans should expect more. "When we're ready, we'll go in and straighten out Chicago just like we did DC," he announced on 22 August. Trump has also voiced an appetite to militarize Oakland, Baltimore, and New York, and to re-occupy Los Angeles.

The Republic is standing at a dangerous precipice. Indeed, we may be witnessing the realization of one of the deepest fears of America's founding generation. During the 1787 Constitutional Convention, James Madison warned that "a standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty." He, along with Alexander Hamilton and others, feared that a standing army would tempt a future president to contrive domestic emergencies to justify the threat or use of military force to suppress public opposition to the executive's will. "The means of defence against foreign danger," Madison continues, "have been always the instruments of tyranny at home…Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people."

Prior to Trump's presidency, Madison's warnings seemed antiquated, out of touch with how civil-military relations ultimately evolved in the years that followed our country's founding. Today, however, current events track Madison's predictions with alarming fidelity. I, for one, have been slow to recognize this danger. In my 25 March Substack post, "Our Apolitical Military in Politicized Times," I argue that the US military, the most trusted institution in America and deservedly so, is culturally and structurally immune to politicization. "When newly commissioned officers take their oaths of office," I explain,

they promise the American people that they will "support and defend the Constitution," that they will run to the sound of the guns when prudence would suggest running away, and that they will never misuse the awesome power entrusted to them. Inspired by America's deep historical distrust of concentrated military power, the oath of office commits an officer's loyalty to the law of the land – to a document, not a prince.

My essay insists that an officer's oath to the Constitution establishes an ethical framework that is "sunk so deeply into the cultural soil of our officer corps" that we can count on our military leaders to "rise above the politics of this anxious moment" regardless of who occupies the White House.

I made these optimistic projections only five months ago. Having now witnessed two brazenly politicized applications of military power in such close succession, they already seem wildly naïve. While I stand by my argument that we can rely on our officers to disobey unlawful orders, even unlawful orders from the president, the LA and DC deployments reveal that the Constitution is an insufficient safeguard against politicization. I should have recognized this. The same oath that requires military officers to disobey palpably unlawful orders demands obedience to all lawful orders, even if those lawful orders are manifestly unwise. Governor Newsom has formally challenged the legality of President Trump's federalization of the California National Guard. However, until the courts adjudicate Newsom's challenge, military officers presented with deployment orders into Chicago, New York, or Baltimore will be obliged, legally and ethically, to either salute and move out or resign their commissions.

An "overgrown Executive" with ready access to a standing army is not only a potential threat to the democratic character of the Republic, as the Founders astutely recognized, but it is also a threat to the character and efficacy of the military itself. In a letter to one of his subordinate commanders in 1944, General George Marshall explained that the US military possesses a "great asset" that few other militaries enjoy: "Our countrymen, our fellow citizens, are not afraid of us. They don't harbor any ideas that we intend to alter the government of the country or the nature of this government in any way." Marshall concluded his letter with an admonition that the US military must never do anything that would violate this "sacred trust."

Every time Mr. Trump deploys our military to an American city, he risks eroding that sacred trust. No matter how professionally our soldiers conduct themselves – and the Marine deployment to LA confirms that we can count on that professionalism – their mere presence is a conspicuous act of state intimidation. Staging military vehicles in front of public buildings is an act of intimidation. Deploying Guardsmen from "foreign" states to occupy majority-minority cities like DC and LA is an unconscionable act of intimidation, especially when those out-of-state Guardsmen come from states that fought against the US in the Civil War to preserve the institution of chattel slavery.

Most Americans do not take kindly to acts of intimidation. They will blame our troops. They will view them as occupiers. They will hurl epithets and chant "go home fascists," failing to recognize that those soldiers and airmen did not enlist for duty like this and would rather be just about anywhere else.

In an explosive Oval Office meeting in 2020, President Trump demanded that Secretary of Defense Mark Esper deploy the DC National Guard to violently suppress the Black Lives Matter protests. As Esper recounts in his 2022 memoir, he and General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, strongly opposed this option. For Milley especially, the prospect of setting American troops against American citizens was anathema. It was his generation that restored public trust in the military after its collapse in the late 1960s in the wake of an unpopular war. Like General Marshall, Milley and Esper recognized the immeasurable strategic value of retaining public trust in the military and successfully resisted the president's militaristic impulses that threatened it.

Today, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and General Dan Caine are playing the parts that Esper and Milley performed so well and honorably in 2020. Thus far, it seems that these men either lack the persuasive powers of their predecessors or fail to comprehend the urgency of Madison's warnings and the gravity of the harms to our military and our Republic.

Photo credit: J. Scott Applewhite/AP