An increasingly power-crazed President Donald Trump wants a specialized force of U.S. troops to be ready around the clock to quell whatever he deems as unrest across America.
A plan being weighed by the Pentagon would designate 600 National Guard soldiers as being on standby every day, ready to rapidly deploy from HQs in Arizona and Alabama to wherever the president wants them to go, reports The Washington Post.
If approved, the project is expected to cost hundreds of millions to operate, with a significant amount of the expense being the potential need to have military aircraft ready on a moment’s notice.
Documents shared internally in the Pentagon say guardsmen will need to be able to deploy in as little as one hour after Trump’s order comes down, according to the Post.
The plan was first discussed during Trump’s first term, the Post reports, as genuine civil unrest erupted in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd. Trump has used his executive powers more loosely in MAGA 2.0, most recently to authorize the mobilization of 800 National Guard troops in Washington, despite the capital’s District Attorney’s Office asserting in January that violent crime is at a 30-year low.
D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser called Trump’s latest power grab “unsettling and unprecedented.” Democrats in California, where Trump ordered a similar deployment in June amid anti-ICE demonstrations, have challenged the president in court.
The tentative name for the garrison of guardsmen is the “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force.” If put in place, it would further normalize the deployment of U.S. troops against their countrymen—something once considered to be a rare, last-ditch necessity in extreme cases, like to quell riots after the Rodney King verdict in 1992 or to protect Black students enrolling in college in the South after segregation.
An official at the Department of Defense confirmed to the Daily Beast that such a plan is being considered, but declined to divulge any details about it.
“The Department of Defense is a planning organization and routinely reviews how the department would respond to a variety of contingencies across the globe,” the official said. “We will not discuss these plans through leaked documents, pre-decisional or otherwise.”
Documents viewed by the Post listed task force discussions as “predecisional,” with time stamps as recent as August. It is unclear when such a task force might begin work, but the documents note Fiscal Year 2027 is the earliest this program would be able to receive funding through the Pentagon’s traditional budgetary process.
The White House may try to expedite the force’s creation, as Trump has skirted the traditional budget process for several other issues this year—like his mass cuts within the federal bureaucracy.
The rapid deployment concept was tested during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. The Post reports Trump was eager to deploy troops to quell demonstrations at the time, but was talked out of it by his former Defense Secretary Mark Esper and other Pentagon officials.
If implemented this term, the 600 guardsmen who make up the response force would be split into two groups—300 to Arizona, to deploy to events west of the Mississippi River, and 300 to Alabama, to do the same for the eastern half of the country. The Post reports the troops will be outfitted with “weapons and riot gear.” Guardsmen would be on task for 90 days at a time to “limit burnout.”
Critics say that the repeated deployment of the military against its fellow citizens is not something the president should make a habit of.
Joseph Nunn, an attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice who specializes in legal issues germane to the U.S. military’s domestic activities, told the Post that “you don’t want to normalize routine domestic deployment.”
Nunn said that, if the response force is approved, Trump is inevitably going to use it.
“When you have this tool waiting at your fingertips, you’re going to want to use it,” he said.
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