JUNE 2, 2020
As the George
Floyd Uprising intensified in Minneapolis on Friday and Saturday, President Trump
asked Acting Defense Secretary Mark Esper for options to deploy federal troops
to the city. 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 from Fort Bragg
(North Carolina), Fort Drum (New York), Fort Carson (Colorado), and Fort Riley
(Kansas) were ordered to be ready to
deploy for crowd and traffic
control duties, if the state National Guards could not quell the unrest.
On Monday,
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 also indicated that he
would soon be deploying active-duty military forces in the District of
Columbia, where he has the direct authority to do so.
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 would be an admission, as Gov. Walz stated, that 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 the 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. Interestingly, 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, to forcibly incorporate them 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 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 the 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 also 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 were turned down by
Colonel Volney Warner and the 72-day siege ended without a second massacre.
(AIM still exists, and is this week leading neighborhood patrols to protect the
Minneapolis Native community, as an alternative to police or military violence.)
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 northern Idaho’s 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 the 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 from 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 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 Ferguson
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. A 2006 revision of the
Insurrection Act allowed
the President to deploy troops as a police force during a natural disaster, the 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
convulses 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 designates
anti-fascist groups as
“terrorists” (perhaps to justify federal military involvement on U.S. soil).
Ordering
rank-and-file soldiers into U.S. cities, to repress people in neighborhoods
just like theirs, it may not be as easy as Trump may think. Military discipline
was difficult enough to enforce in Vietnam and Iraq, and will 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.
Veterans for Peace and About Face have already called for National Guard troops
to stand down. 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 (as a few police have
already done) can always
kneel in solidarity or pray for guidance.
Zoltan Grossman is a professor of Geography and Native Studies
at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, who has been a warm body
in peace, justice, and environmental movements for the past 35 years. His
website is http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz and email is grossmaz@evergreen.edu
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