The nations military leaders have begun to watch and worry as the President moves to mobilise active duty US Army and Marine units to face off against fellow American protestors in the streets…
The Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Mark Milley was grabed by Trump to carry out HIS orders which wrong in several ways….
The head of the Joint Chiefs actually is N OT a operational command…It ‘advises’ the President….Furthermore the use of the military units against protestors in the way Trump wants is not supposed to happen…American military units in such situations are supposed to work WITH local or state law enforcement as support….The Sec of Defense was NOT even notified or aware of Milley’s actions…
Among the military?
The actions of the Sec of Defense and Joint Chief have been severely cricized by others in the military ....
A LOT of Americans seem t0 be angry…
For those who are old enough?
Visions of Viet Nam protests and the firing on protestors at Kent State come to mind…
It took a long time for us to get over that…
Are we going back there for Donald Trump?
“The decision to use active military forces in crowd control in the United States should only be made as a last resort,” said Mick Mulroy, former deputy assistant secretary of defense under President Donald Trump. “Active Army and Marine Corps units are trained to fight our nation’s enemies, not their fellow Americans. American cities are not battlefields.”
The anxiety hit a high point on Monday, when word leaked out that Defense Secretary Mark Esper referred to cities undergoing protests as a “battlespace,” and as Esper and Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Mark Milley walked with Trump across the street from the White House after protesters were cleared from Lafayette Square in advance of a staged photo op in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church.
For years, top military leadership has tried to minimize the perception that the armed forces are being used by the president for political purposes. Today, the nation is confronting the prospect of civil strife that rivals the racial unrest of the late 1960s in scale, even as civil-military tensions reach levels not seen since the use of National Guard units to respond to anti-Vietnam protests at Kent State university.
The Pentagon sought to limit the role of the active-duty military in carrying out Trump’s desire to use soldiers to police the U.S.-Mexican border. It also successfully pushed back on Trump’s request to hold a large-scale military parade on July 4 last year, instead putting on a muted display of military hardware.
The president is trumpeting his powers as commander in chief as the nation confronts the dual crises of civil unrest over racial injustice and a public health emergency. On Monday, he said he was putting Milley, the nation’s top military officer, “in charge” of restoring order and threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, an 1807 law that gives him the authority to deploy federal troops to respond to domestic disorder.
Esper and Milley appear to have embraced their new roles, unlike Trump’s first Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who resigned in protest of the decision to pull troops out of Syria, and former Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford, who mostly remained in the shadows and was rarely photographed in public.
The Pentagon was “taken aback” by the president’s comments putting Milley in charge, according to one senior defense official.
“There is growing concern that this is not good for the role of the military going forward,” the official said. “Now you’ve injected the military into a moment in a political way. It just doesn’t seem right.”….
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Officials and experts acknowledge that the president put Milley in a tough position with his remarks on Monday when he said the general was “in charge” of the protest response — despite the fact that the nation’s top military officer is not in the chain of command. But they criticized Milley for embracing his new role all too willingly.
Milley “ought to be a quiet advocate for Esper to be the public face of things, if the president insists on putting the DoD in charge,” Cohn said. “I acknowledge that Milley is in a difficult position because the president has put him there — I don’t advocate for Milley to make a big show out of anything.”
Retired Maj. Gen. Charles Dunlap, the former deputy judge advocate general in the Air Force, said Milley could lead the effort to manage the protests “in some administrative or managerial sense.” But “federal law nevertheless stipulates that the chairman ‘may not exercise military command over the Joint Chiefs of Staff or any of the armed forces,’” he said in an email.
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Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper urged military personnel to “stay apolitical” as troops are increasingly called in to assist local police responding to protests, looting and riots in cities across the United States.
“I ask that you remember at all times our commitment as a Department and as public servants to stay apolitical in these turbulent days,” Esper wrote in a letter, obtained by The Washington Post, sent Tuesday evening to service members and Defense Department employees.
The letter followed a flurry of criticism aimed at the Defense Department and Esper, after National Guard troops forced peaceful protesters out of Lafayette Square in front of the White House on Monday so that President Trump could take a photo in front of nearby St. John’s Church. Esper stood near Trump during the photo op, but he told NBC News on Tuesday that he was not aware of the president’s plans beforehand and thought they were going to visit a vandalized public restroom and “talk to the troops” in the square…
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