Zoltan Grossman
Although the National Guard has
often been used against civil rebellion, deploying federal military forces
within the U.S. is a drastic and historically rare move. I’ve studied the
history and geography of U.S. military interventions from the “Indian Wars” to
the Middle East, and have documented only a handful of times that Army,
Marines, or federalized National Guard forces have been used against U.S.
citizens over the past century. For Trump to take such a profound leap is an
admission that a conflict at home is being equated to an overseas war. Sending
in soldiers trained for combat will only make a bad situation worse, by
launching a war at home against domestic dissent.
The Insurrection Act of 1807
governs the President’s ability to deploy the active-duty military within the
U.S. to put down rebellion. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 limited the federal
government’s power to use the military to enforce civilian laws, constricting
the military to a role supporting state and local police authorities.
Ironically, the limitation was put in place partly due to the white supremacist
rollback of Reconstruction, as President Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew federal
troops occupying the former Confederacy since the Civil War. The Act still
allows the President to deploy forces in the U.S. under congressional authority
(derived from the Insurrection Act), if a state cannot maintain so-called
“public order.”
Wars against Indigenous and
Mexican resistance
U.S. military forces fought the
so-called “Indian Wars” as foreign interventions on the soil of Indigenous
nations, using military bases (forts), to forcibly incorporate the nations into
(or keep them within) the United States. These included the 1862 war against
the Mdewakanton Dakota (Santee Sioux) in Minnesota, which ended in the
execution of 38 Dakota men.
The Army’s last major Indian War
was against the Lakota Nation, culminating in the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre of
about 300 civilians, for which the soldiers were awarded Medals of Honor. Later
interventions were directed against the Leech Lake Ojibwe in 1898 (using
soldiers just returned from the Philippines), and the Muskogee (Creek) in
Indian Territory (later Oklahoma) in 1901. U.S. naval forces also backed the
1893 settler overthrow of the U.S.-recognized Kingdom of Hawai’i.
During the Mexican Revolution,
U.S. Army troops were involved in fighting Mexican rebels who crossed the
border, in the 1915 Plan of San Diego raids into Texas, and Pancho Villa’s 1916
raid into Columbus, New Mexico in 1916 (triggering the Pershing Expedition deep
into Mexico). Although these were interventions on U.S. soil, they were not
directed primarily against U.S. citizens.
The “Indian Wars” were rekindled
in 1973, when FBI and other federal agents besieged Lakota community activists
joined by the American Indian Movement (AIM) at the Wounded Knee massacre site,
where two Native resisters were killed in firefights. Phantom jets from nearby
Ellsworth Air Force Base conducted surveillance overflights. The 82nd Airborne
was put on alert, but an FBI request for 2,000 Army troops was turned down by
Colonel Volney Warner, and the 72-day siege ended without a second massacre.
During the 2016-17 confrontations
at Standing Rock over the Dakota Access Pipeline, North Dakota National Guard
troops were deployed, and TigerSwan private security contractors (who had
worked with the military in Iraq and Afghanistan) spied on the water
protectors. Although there was no obvious direct use of federal military
forces, it is not always clear which agencies operated surveillance planes and
drones.
Deployments against strikers and
veterans
Army troops have also been sent
in to crush strikes by U.S. workers. During the 1894 Pullman rail strike in
Chicago, troops killed 34 strikers. In Idaho, troops intervened against
striking silver miners in the Coeur d’Alene region in 1892, and occupied the
area in 1899-1901. Troops were deployed against striking West Virginia coal
miners in 1920-21 (including the first aerial bombing of U.S. citizens); the
conflict inspired the film Matewan.
In 1932, during the Depression,
Army soldiers were deployed against World War I veterans demonstrating in
Washington for early payment of the government bonus for their service. General
Douglas Macarthur led the light-tank assault on the “Bonus Army” veterans and
their families; 55 veterans were injured and their shantytown burned to the
ground.
African American civil rights and
white backlash
By far the most common use of
federal troops in the U.S. has been related to African American civil rights,
and the white backlash against those rights. A series of racial confrontations
and pogroms in the 20th century involved state National Guard troops, but it
was not until World War II that federal troops were directly used. In June
1943, white rioters in Detroit protested a Black housing project and white
workers went on strike against promotions of Black workers in local industries.
The tension led to a cascading series of rumors, violent clashes, and
shootings, resulting in the deaths of 34 people—25 African Americans (18 at the
hands of police), and nine whites. Although most of the rioters were white,
police arrested four times as many African Americans. President Roosevelt
deployed Army tanks and 6,000 troops, who stayed in the city for weeks, as
violence also erupted in New York and military bases in Britain.
Federal troops were deployed
during the civil rights era to enforce desegregation orders, against
intransigent Southern governors who refused to racially integrate the schools.
President Eisenhower famously sent Army troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to escort
Black children safely to school past white mobs. President Kennedy federalized
the National Guard to enforce federal courts’ orders to desegregate the
University of Mississippi in 1962, and the University of Alabama and Alabama
public schools in 1963. In 1965, President Johnson federalized the Alabama
National Guard to protect civil rights marchers at Selma.
But in that same year, the Watts
Uprising in Los Angeles signaled a wave of African American urban rebellions
against economic inequality, judicial racism, and police brutality, causing
repeated deployments of state National Guard troops. It was once again in
Detroit, with its extreme segregation and nearly all-white police force, where
federal troops were deployed. A July 1967 violent police raid on an African
American club (whose patrons were celebrating the return of two soldiers form
Vietnam) triggered a conflagration of violence that left 43 residents dead (33
African Americans and ten whites), and 1,189 injured. President Johnson sent in
4,700 paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne to back up the police and 4,000
National Guardsmen.
The assassination of Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr. in April 1968 immediately triggered a wave of urban rebellions
around the country that lasted up to two weeks, and the largest deployments of
federal troops on U.S. soil since the Civil War. At least 21,000 federal
soldiers were sent to cities around the country, 13,600 of them to Washington
D.C. and others to Baltimore, Chicago, and other cities. Troop transport planes
landed at O’Hare in darkened, combat conditions, and local soldiers were
enlisted to guide military units around the city. There were more armed
government forces (police and military) used in Chicago alone than in the 1983
invasion of Grenada. At least 43 people were killed in what became known as the
“Holy Week Uprisings.”
Even Johnson acknowledged, “I
don’t know why we’re so surprised. When you put your foot on a man’s neck and
hold him down for three hundred years, and then you let him up, what’s he going
to do? He’s going to knock your block off.”
First Bush Administration
In September 1968, the U.S. Army
published a classified plan known as Garden Plot projecting that
“dissatisfaction with the environmental conditions contributing to racial
unrest and civil disturbances” may require large-scale federal military
interventions “to preserve life and property and maintain normal processes of
governments,” laying the basis for a series of martial law-style plans for
counterinsurgency at home.
These plans for local martial law
were put into motion during the presidency of George H.W. Bush, first in the
U.S. Virgin Islands, where in 1989 he sent 1,100 heavily armed Military Police
to the island of St. Croix, which had been severely damaged by Hurricane Hugo.
The storm damage exacerbated longstanding racial tensions, and the troops’
primary mission was not disaster relief, but suppressing looting (even if it
was allowed by stores) and putting down a Black uprising. Although troops and
military contractors have since been deployed to other hurricane-damaged
regions, such as Florida in 1992 and Louisiana in 2005, they were sent in under
state authority.
The largest deployment of federal
forces after 1968 was during the Los Angeles Uprising, triggered by the April
1992 acquittal of police officers involved in the beating of Rodney King.
Initial mass protests led to arson, looting, and racial violence over 32 square
miles. As 10,000 National Guard troops were overwhelmed, Governor Pete Wilson
used the Insurrection Act to request federal troops. President Bush federalized
the National Guard, activated reservists at California military bases, and
deployed 4,000 Army and Marine troops to set up checkpoints and back up police
raids around the city. In one incident, a police officer confronting a shooter
requested “cover” from the Marines, meaning to aim their weapons at the house,
but the Marines instead unleashed 200 rounds in “covering” fire. In all, 63
people were killed in Los Angeles (including at least seven by police), and
2,000 injured.
The road from 9/11 and Black
Lives Matter
The 9/11 attacks in the George W.
Bush Administration instantly demonstrated how, in its exclusive focus on
overseas interventions, the Pentagon had never really prepared for the actual
defense of the “homeland.” The PATRIOT Act and other laws intensified the
militarization of law enforcement (equipping police with military weaponry and
technology far beyond their needs), the use of private security contractors,
military spying on antiwar groups, and the increasing use of some regular Army
and Marine units along the U.S.-Mexico border. An 2006 revision of the
Insurrection Act allowed the President to deploy troops as a police force
during a natural disaster, epidemic, or terrorist attack, though it was
reversed two years later.
The result of the so-called
“Global War on Terror,” coupled with the continuing wars on drugs and
undocumented immigrants, was a blurring of the distinction between wars abroad
and the war at home. This trend became painfully evident by 2014 in the militarized,
racist response to Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and many
other cities. In 2020, as the George Floyd Uprising convulsed the country
during a pandemic and Depression, Predator drones (from Customs and Border
Protection) conduct surveillance flights over Minneapolis, “Lakota” and “Black
Hawk” military helicopters fly low to disperse protesters in Washington, and
President Trump designated anti-fascist groups as “terrorists.”
As the George Floyd Uprising
intensified in 2020, President Trump asked Acting Defense Secretary Mark Esper
for options to deploy federal troops to Minneapolis. He signaled to Minnesota
Governor Tim Walz, “We have our military ready, willing and able if they ever
want to call our military, and we can have troops on the ground every quickly.”
Military Police soldiers were ordered to be ready to deploy for crowd and
traffic control duties, if the state National Guards could not quell the
unrest. Trump put Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Mark Milley “in
charge,” lambasted state governors, and said he would soon order active-duty
federal troops into U.S. cities to “quickly solve the problem for them.” He
deployed thousands of National Guard troops from 11 states in the District of
Columbia, where he had the direct authority to do so. Milley and Esper balked
at deploying regular troops against the protests, causing Trump to name fierce
loyalists to their positions in his second term. And of course, on January 6,
2021, Trump refused for hours to deploy troops to protect the U.S. Capitol from
far-right insurrectionists evoking his name.
Military dissent
Ordering rank-and-file soldiers
into U.S. cities, to repress people in neighborhoods just like theirs, may not
be as easy as Trump may think. Military discipline was difficult enough to
enforce in Vietnam and Iraq, and could be harder in an American city. Soldiers
have the right to refuse illegal orders to harm civilians. The Uniform Code of
Military Justice (Article 92) establishes a duty to obey lawful orders, but
also a duty to disobey unlawful orders to that are clearly contrary to the
Constitution.
There is a long history of
resistance within the U.S. military. Some military enlistees and officers
questioned the possibility of attacking protesters in 2020, and resisted the
Iraq War a decade earlier, setting up several G.I. coffeehouses near military
bases. The troops are about 43 percent people of color, so (like during the
Vietnam War) some could refuse or frustrate orders to use their weapons at
home. Military dissent during the Vietnam War and against deployments at home
has been largely forgotten or glossed over in historical accounts of the era.
Carrying out mass deportations of
refugees and up to 11 million undocumented immigrants is a logistical
nightmare. If Trump claims the power to deploy the military against dissent,
there will be nothing to stop him from also encouraging armed paramilitary
militias, or promoting unrestrained mob violence in an “American Kristallnacht”
pogrom.
It may be critical to proactively
reach out to active-duty Army and National Guard soldiers, preferably via
veterans and military families, to educate them about the injustices facing war
refugees and undocumented workers. The soldiers could be educated about their
own rights and power, not just about becoming individual public refusers, but
about more covert collective disobedience (akin to “search-and-avoid” missions
in both Vietnam and Iraq).
Veterans’ groups such as Veterans
for Peace and About Face could play a pivotal role in reaching the hearts and
minds of the troops deployed to crack down on dissent. If soldiers feel they
are being given an unlawful order to harm or violate the rights of civilians,
“I was just following orders” may not be an adequate legal defense. They can
contact the G.I. Rights Hotline, or legally send an “Appeal for Redress” to
their congressional representative that is protected under the Military
Whistleblower Protection Act. Military personnel know quiet, creative ways to
“work-to-rule,” and share vital information about unlawful actions, to help
slow down the madness. And if in doubt, they can always kneel in solidarity or
pray for guidance.
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