For two decades of the global war on terror, U.S. troops were tasked with missions far beyond their training. In Iraq and Afghanistan, infantry units became de facto police, conventional soldiers trained local forces, and junior officers were sent to mediate local disputes in societies that they barely understood. Most infamously, they were told to win the “hearts and minds” of communities that did not want them there. Their uniforms and armored vehicles, meant to project strength, instead became barriers to the very goals that they were assigned.
Now, the same is being asked of troops deployed at home. If the global war on terror should have taught Washington anything, it’s that U.S. troops are trained to fight wars and, in the case of the National Guard, to handle fleeting emergencies, not to impose order on complex societies. And the United States is as complex a society as any. Soldiers cannot rebuild communities at home any more than they can remake nations abroad.
Earlier this month, President Donald Trump declared a “crime emergency,” taking control of Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department and deploying National Guard troops across the capital, to conduct both immigration checks and community policing. Even as he insisted that there was no need to expand the city’s police force, he reinforced it with federal agents and soldiers, some of whom are being hastily deputized in the process.
Homicides in Washington, D.C., rose from 88 in 2012 to 162 in 2015 and reached 274 in 2023. Many U.S. cities, including parts of Washington, experience levels of violent crime and a feeling of public insecurity that would be considered unacceptable in most developed countries. However, since 2023, crime in Washington has been trending downward. By Aug. 28 this year, the city had recorded 103 killings, a sharp decline from the same time last year but not enough to dispel false claims by right-wing social media that crime is rising.
Studies consistently show that militarized policing, much less the use of actual soldiers, does not reduce crime, particularly in countries where citizens expect civil liberties to be upheld.
The initial deployment is already spiraling. The governors of Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, West Virginia, South Carolina, and Ohio also dispatched National Guard units to Washington, despite the fact that some of the cities with the country’s highest rates of violent crime, from Memphis and Cleveland to New Orleans and Monroe, are in their own states. Trump has also threatened to deploy troops to other U.S. cities, with or without the cooperation of governors.
The move followed an earlier deployment of the National Guard and U.S. Marines to secure federal buildings and respond to anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protests in Los Angeles in June. At one point, there were more U.S. troops in Los Angeles than in Iraq and Syria combined. While not unprecedented, the scale of the recent mobilizations and fears that it may become routine have ignited a wider debate over the role of the U.S. military in maintaining law and order within the country.
First, let’s be clear about what the deployment of U.S. troops in American cities is not. It is not a combat deployment. It may resemble one, and that may be the point politically, but the fact that it’s not a deployment matters. These troops are performing police duties on U.S. soil, at the direction of an elected president, in coordination with local law enforcement.
Around the world, soldiers performing police duties is hardly unusual. In Mexico; Colombia; Pakistan; Israel; Iraq; and in past decades, Northern Ireland, military units have long filled roles that civilians expect police to handle, though in those instances, soldiers were augmenting efforts against organized crime and terrorism.
There are many examples of militarized policing and the use of soldiers in civilian settings during peacetime, though typically in response to acute crises rather than presidential whimsy. The National Guard has long doubled as the United States’ domestic police force of last resort, from enforcing desegregation in Little Rock in 1957 to patrolling the streets of Detroit during the 1967 and 1968 riots, Los Angeles during the 1992 Rodney King unrest, and cities across the country during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.
Active-duty troops have been used far more sparingly, but when presidents have invoked the Insurrection Act, they were sent to Detroit during the 1967 riots, Washington, D.C., after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968, and Los Angeles during the 1992 riots.
Militarized policing is hardly unique to the United States—but its global record is also largely one of failure and brutality. Britain deployed militarized policing tactics during the 1984 miners’ strike, copied from the tactics used by Hong Kong police in the 1960s, while Hong Kong police, now under the control of China, fired tens of thousands of tear gas canisters and rubber bullets at pro-democracy protesters in 2019. Several Western democracies have also sent soldiers to police their own citizens. During the Troubles of the 1970s, British troops patrolled Northern Ireland’s streets, enforced curfews, and carried out “public order operations,” culminating in the Bloody Sunday massacre of 1972.
In France, the “yellow vest” uprisings of 2018 drew a response that included armored vehicles and even troops under the ongoing Operation Sentinelle, initially created in 2015 as a response to deadly Islamic State attacks. In Mexico, former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador created a National Guard in 2019, expanding the military’s role in law enforcement nationwide, while El Salvador has sharply reduced gang violence through the mass mobilization of its military, albeit by curtailing civil liberties in a way that would be unconstitutional in the United States.
Still, the sight of military units patrolling the streets is jarring to many Americans, especially in the absence of a precipitating crisis. Armored vehicles and uniformed troops evoke the aesthetics of conflict watched on television: a military vehicle colliding with a civilian car on a D.C. street, an MRAP with soldiers idling outside Union Station, convoys of Humvees rolling through city blocks, and Marines patrolling Los Angeles boulevards.
Such images unsettle many Americans and shock sections of the commentariat, who worry the president could one day deploy these troops to enforce manufactured election-time emergencies. Part of the discomfort stems from the nation’s ingrained suspicion of standing armies, rooted in the Founders’ deep mistrust of them.
It is also because, despite at least 2 million U.S. troops rotating through Iraq, Afghanistan, and other theaters in a war on terror that has stretched for nearly a quarter of a century, most Americans have remained detached from the all-volunteer force that fought those battles—unlike Vietnam, Korea, or World War II, when the experience of war touched nearly every household. Even the more mundane reactions to soldiers in the D.C. Beltway show a disconnect—like the surprise at troops picking up trash or standing pointless guard, both staples of military life on or off base.
For today’s Americans, war and what comes with it belongs overseas, not in their streets. Now, the logic, aesthetics, and institutions born of the global war on terror have reached the metropole. Even supporters of Trump’s use of troops in U.S. cities should pause, because just as the global war on terror expanded presidential power to deploy forces abroad without much oversight across administrations, this precedent will endure at home.
After 9/11, U.S. leaders struggled to respond to a complex surge of transnational terrorism and the United States’ vulnerabilities to it. Lacking a coherent strategy, they leaned on the military and built sprawling new security bureaucracies, mistaking “security theater” for solutions and succumbing to the political temptation to appear tough on threats that they could not fully control.
During the nationwide protests of 2020, then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper told governors, “the sooner that you mass and dominate the battlespace, the quicker this dissipates and we can get back to the right normal.” He later walked back the phrase, saying it was a military term for physical space, not people, and “certainly not our fellow Americans.” But Esper was almost on to something. The military is effective at securing space; it is far less effective at policing or governing it. The legacy of the war on terror is the reflex to treat every societal problem as a battlefield, to substitute soldiers for policy, and to mistake the appearance of security for the hard work of governance.
There’s a certain irony in Washington enduring military checkpoints and security theater after two decades of exporting the war on terror from its fluorescent-lit offices. As one D.C. resident quipped online, the only upside to a “pointless military occupation of DC is if it teaches DC that pointless military occupations are bad.”
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