President Donald Trump’s decision to activate around 800 National Guard troops in Washington, D.C., to tackle street crime has forced the Pentagon to look to other states for help.
Trump announced his decision to federalize D.C.’s police department at a White House press conference on Monday at which he was flanked by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who said that reinforcements could be called up if the Guard encounters resistance from protesters, adding that “specialized units” might be included in their number.
However, a senior Army official has since told The New York Times that the current deployment of D.C. Guard is likely to be sufficient for the task in hand.
The Department of Defense has reportedly moved to ensure the Guard’s duties in Washington are kept to a safe minimum, with one official telling the Times that “soldiers with M-16s who have been trained to kill adversaries” will not be placed in policing roles.
The mission has nevertheless been criticized, with Dr Carrie A Lee, former chair of the department of national security and strategy at the Army War College, telling the newspaper: “This is part of a pattern where the administration is using and appropriating military resources for nonmilitary domestic goals.
“Whether it’s immigration or going against drug cartels or crime in Washington, it’s very clear, to me at least, that this administration sees the military as a one-size-fits-all solution to accomplishing its domestic political priorities.”
Trump has previously dispatched the Guard to the U.S. southern border with Mexico and to Los Angeles in June to help quell anti-ICE demonstrations.
Guardsmen have since reportedly described that experience as bad for morale, obliterating much of the good will they had earned from helping to extinguish California’s wildfires in January and expressed a fear it could harm future enlistment drives.
The step also had a negative impact on the president’s own approval ratings.
At his press conference on Monday, Trump pledged to “rescue” the city from “crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse,” despite the city’s much-improved crime statistics suggesting there was no need or justification.
But the president nevertheless insisted: “Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people, and we’re not going to let it happen anymore.”
His opponents, meanwhile, have been quick to accuse him of seeking a distraction from the ongoing pressure he faces to release the government’s files on the late billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
