In the past quarter-century, National Guard troops have hoisted desperate survivors from rooftops in Hurricane Katrina. Fought the flames of devastating wildfires in Maui and Los Angeles. Searched for survivors and secured the skies after Sept. 11. And deployed in the hundreds of thousands to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Delivering relief and maintaining order in times of great need is a well-established part of the Guard’s mission. But as the Guard fulfills a different kind of role envisioned by President Trump, supporting a crackdown on crime in Washington, D.C., that he now aims to expand to Memphis and other cities, several generals who have led Guard troops fear that shift will damage the force.
That includes, they say, hurting morale, weakening recruiting and retention, and straining the Guard’s relationship with the American public.
“The thing that supports the morale of the National Guard is that, for decades, we’ve been the good guys,” said Brig. Gen. Paul G. Smith, the former assistant adjutant general of Massachusetts whose command included responding to Hurricanes Sandy and Irene and the Boston Marathon bombings. “We fish families out of flood waters. We shovel ambulances through the snow to get to women delivering babies.”
But, he added, “patrolling the monuments, creating this sort of military net that’s descended on these urban areas — that’s not something a lot of people signed up for.”
The five generals who spoke to The Times included retired senior leaders at the National Guard Bureau, the agency in Washington, D.C., that oversees the Army and Air National Guard. Two were former top-ranking officers of the Massachusetts and Illinois National Guard, both appointed by Democratic governors. One was an Army general who oversaw one of the largest domestic Guard deployments in modern history. All of them served for decades under both Democratic and Republican administrations.
It is unclear whether their views are shared by a broader group of their peers. Several other former leaders who were appointed by Republicans to top Guard positions or who became Republican members of Congress declined or did not respond to requests for comment.
Last week, Mr. Trump authorized Guard troops to be deployed in Memphis next, saying that violent crime there had overwhelmed the local government, though the city’s mayor has said that crime had decreased in the city. That order came after weeks in which the president publicly mulled similar deployments to cities like Chicago, New Orleans and Baltimore, drawing backlash from local leaders.
And in late August, he took another step to expand the Guard’s domestic law enforcement role, ordering the establishment of a unit within each state’s ranks dedicated to “quelling civil disturbances” and “ensuring the public safety and order,” deployable at a moment’s notice to anywhere the country.
The president has many supporters in that effort, who see crime in Washington and other urban areas as a dire problem that requires federal intervention because, they say, cities have not done enough to address it, even though violent crime rates in many of them have been on the decline.
That approach has received the backing of defense secretary Pete Hegseth, a former infantry officer in the Minnesota National Guard, several former Guard troops in Congress and seven Republican governors who have agreed to send troops to assist units in Washington.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re from a blue city or a red state, you want to live in a place where it’s safe,” Representative Scott Perry, Republican of Pennsylvania and retired brigadier general in the National Guard, said in an interview with Fox Business in late August.
Several of the generals who were interviewed expressed support for Mr. Trump’s overall goal of tamping down crime in major cities. But they contended he should pursue those goals by leveraging local resources and dedicated law enforcement agencies in cooperation with local leaders, not with the National Guard.
The Guard “is not a law enforcement agency,” said Maj. Gen. William Enyart, a former adjutant general of Illinois — the Guard’s top officer in the state — and former Democratic congressman.
He added: “The military is designed to fight external enemies, not citizens.”
Maj. Gen. Randy E. Manner, former acting vice chief of the National Guard Bureau, said Mr. Trump’s decision to deploy the Guard to D.C. represented an attempt to “intimidate the local population,” politicizing the force and misusing its limited resources. He added that using the military to police American citizens “is the beginning of a divide between our military and our citizens, and that is absolutely detestable.”
He also noted that soldiers on deployment cannot train for another part of their mission: serving as a reserve force to support the active-duty U.S. military abroad.
General Enyart said that the risks to morale were especially high given the personal cost that deployments impose on troops.
Unlike service members in the other military branches, most Guard troops serve part time. While deployed, they leave behind jobs, families and businesses, General Enyart said. They often make less income than they would in their civilian jobs, and many are college students for whom a deployment can mean missing weeks or months of school.
“These are all really disincentives for retention, for morale, for recruiting,” General Enyart said. “It’s one thing when you’re out there sandbagging to prevent the Mississippi River from washing the town away. It’s another thing when you’re fulfilling a president’s political desires.”
On recent weekends in Washington, Guard troops were mostly seen taking up posts in subway stations and meandering among crowds on the waterfront. Their mission has included patrolling tourist areas, landscaping and cleaning up trash and graffiti.
Many troops, approached in public places, said their job was to follow orders regardless of personal opinions. Two troops said that they had deployed before for hurricane recovery and acknowledged that this mission felt different. Both also expressed a desire to go home. One of them, a carpenter in his civilian life, said he told his mother not to post on Facebook about his mission, because he feared a backlash.
Representative Barry Moore, Republican of Alabama, who served six years in the state’s National Guard, said that in his experience Guard members are eager to serve on any mission they’re called for. He contended that Mr. Trump’s use of the Guard was unlikely to damage the Guard’s ability to attract new soldiers.
“When we sign up, we don’t necessarily have a specific job description,” he said. “Ultimately, it’s to protect the American people — whatever that looks like.”
Several of the former generals also cautioned that maneuvering the Guard into domestic law enforcement against the wishes of state governors veered into legally dubious territory.
Mr. Trump is not the only leader to have summoned the National Guard to cities troubled by crime. The Democratic governors of both New York and New Mexico deployed the Guard in recent years for just that purpose, but those deployments were limited in scope.
An 1878 law called the Posse Comitatus Act forbids the active-duty military, with narrow exceptions, from carrying out law enforcement functions on U.S. soil. The National Guard, on the other hand, can perform those duties, but only when they are called into action at the request of a state governor.
Brig. Gen. David L. McGinnis, former chief of staff for the National Guard Association of the United States, which works as an advocate for the force on Capitol Hill, described any move to deploy the Guard over governors’ wishes as being firmly “outside the constitutional box.”
Washington, D.C., where local law grants the president greater authority to deploy the National Guard, is an exception to that rule. And in Los Angeles, where Mr. Trump deployed Guard troops in response to protests this year over the objections of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, the president claimed an exemption by arguing that protesters were impeding the enforcement of federal immigration law.
A federal judge ruled that the president had overstepped his authority in deploying the Guard to Los Angeles. The administration has appealed the ruling.
Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honoré, a retired Army general who commanded the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina, which included tens of thousands of Guard members, said he was not just concerned about how Mr. Trump’s contentious deployments might politicize the Guard. He also worries about putting Guard troops in a situation where they could be the focus of hostility from unreceptive citizens.
“Because when it goes bad — like Kent State — it goes bad,” General Honoré said, referencing the day in 1970 when Ohio National Guard troops fatally shot four students at Kent State University who were protesting the Vietnam War.
“We want to make sure we’re on the side of saving lives, not taking lives in America.”
Aishvarya Kavi, Emily Cochrane and Bernard Mokam contributed reporting.
Chris Hippensteel is a reporter covering breaking news and a member of the 2025-26 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers.
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