Apparently we're doing this...
...because it worked so fucking well in Baghdad and Kabul:
"President Donald Trump announced he is placing the Washington, DC, police department “under direct federal control” and deploying National Guard troops to the nation’s capital..."
It's easy enough to sanewash or handwave why the drooling moron is doing this, but to me the real issues are in the mechanics of the actual doing. Because...
1) Soldiers are shitty cops.
That's also #2 through infinity.
Soldiers are trained to kill people and break shit. That's the nature of the business. So whenever you try to use them as "cops" (call them "OOTW", "assistance to the host nation", "peacekeeping", "occupation", whatever...) you run a genuine risk that that training will break out in unforeseen and usually disruptive or even dangerous ways.
Think the paras in Belfast, or the 325th in Fallujah. If you put Joe and Molly in a tight spot, they're going to default to their training, which is not "cop".
Mind you, as I think I've hammered hard on here, even "cops" aren't often very good at "peacekeeping". Confronted with people they dislike and distrust their go-to reaction is to pull out the club and the pepper spray and start shit.
So using soldiers to police D.C.? Just in and of itself that's not a smart thing, because
2) The things Trump is telling these GIs to do would be difficult to impossible even for truly gifted and well-led municipal leaders, police and social service organizations and staff.
"The Homeless will have to move out, IMMEDIATELY."
Where?
How?
As I noted when the City of Portland had this brilliant idea a couple of years back, what the actual fuck do you expect these poor bastards to do?
"The Good People for Portland are nutty enough about the hobo camps as it is. Can you imagine the reaction to wandering groups of encumbered homeless people like some sort of Mongol horde with shopping carts instead of horses? And this is the supposedly GOOD idea the Portland city government is proposing?"
Yeahno.
So here's an interesting note on this whole "round 'em up and shove 'em in The Camps" thing.
I had a lovely evening with a dear friend not too long ago. She's a retired elementary school teacher, grandma, traveler, thoughtful and honest and kind.
(FWIW, the tradition around here is that we don't show people's faces without their permission, but feet are fair game...)
But she's also a longtime Portlander who's had bad experience with homeless/feral street people in the past and, like the rest of us, is sick and tired of the trash and the noise and the apparent menace.
She's all in on these camps.
"They can get help there. They can get treatment. They can get their lives straightened out".
My response was "Okay, let's say that happens." (thinking "we don't want to pay for that now, why would we pay for that once the hoboes are locked up out of sight..?") "Then what?"
Once you've caught-and-released these people? They're still broke. Still unable to afford a roof, a shower, a toilet. Still unemployed, or underemployed to where they don't make enough to pay for those.
"We will give you places to stay..."
WTF? Seriously? How? Where? No, show your work. Where are these Homeless Havens? Who pays for them? Who maintains, and runs, and cleans them?
And how do soldiers help do all that?
Is Tubby suggesting that the D.C. Guard set up Homeless Refugee Camps in Bradenburg? Silver Spring? How? Who's gonna pay for that, and for how long?
And while we're on the subject of the D.C. Guard...
3) We're probably not talking the most elite of military material here or the best military experience for doing this, either.
Fatso might think that wearing the tree suit makes you a combination Rambo and Clausewitz (drink!), but in my experience a lot of Guard joes were fairly average at best, and a fair number of them had little or no active time.
Farkling about Southwest Asia has changed that...but not for the better. So the ones that do have RA experience? A lot of these jokers will have "presence patrol" experience in Iraq or Afghanistan and associate that with policing at best unwelcoming and at worst dangerously hostile places.
Putting someone whose "peacekeeping" experience is Kandahar or Basra or Baghdad in NW Washington D.C.? Probably not a good idea.
I'm guessing that the primary unit that will be tasked for this is the 372nd Military Police Battalion. The D.C. Guard website says that the "Red Hand" outfit...
"...plays a crucial role in conducting traffic control, corrections, security and mobility support, especially during National Special Security Events, like Presidential Inaugurations and when deployed, such as the 276th Military Police Company’s deployment to Guantanamo Naval Base, Cuba in 2016."
So pretty much cage-kickers, with a short c.v. in crowd control. Not sure how that works on the Mean Streets of Foggy Bottom.
So this looks a lot like the "depopulation" thing we just talked about; a "one-simple-trick" "conservative" "solution" to a difficult and complex (and, I note passing, an imaginary-in-the-"no, crime and vandalism and mayhem are not really running wild in D.C."-sense, but that's pointless to drag in because this isn't about an actual thing but the usual "conservative" reality-is-what-I-believe-it-is bugnuttery) problem.
One of the worst aspects of Trumpism is the grinding stupidity of it.
It's exhausting. The daily piling of stupid on nonsensical on corrupt on ignorant all founded on ridiculous 4chan gibberish. Trying to push back against it is like shoveling water; it's ALL just bullshit all the way down, so there's no actual logic or reason or sense involved, there's no bedrock there outside bafflegab, so there's no pinning down these people or their ideas to beat the life out of them. They just ooze from one idiotic notion to another to justify whatever they want to do, because that's all it's really about.
It's what they want to do and now they can.
And that it pisses their enemies off?
That's just gravy.
6 comments:
Precisely correct.
The other thing about using the D.C. Guard is that my guess is that this isn't like, say, Oregon, where you could activate one of the southern Oregon infantry battalions and flood the Mean Streets of Portland with a bunch of Medford rednecks who'd gleefully smash liberal white and impoverished black heads alike.
These will be people from the District itself, meaning largely people who have friends and relatives and family in the very area they're being ordered to Fallujahize. Not sure how that works, but little as I like some of my relatives I'm not sure I'd be willing to bust their heads or open fire on them regardless of what some MAGAt officer told me to do.
The Lawyers, Guns & Money website had a good piece on the famous "Tank Man" video from Tiananmen Square, noting that the "problem" for the PRC government WASN'T "Tank Man" (the dude with the grocery bags). They could and probably did simply find him and put two in his skull.
No, the "problem" was the Tank Driver or Tank Commander or both, who refused to obey orders and run Tank Man over.
The regime survives Tank Man. Maybe not happily, indeed, more viciously and savagely and unhappily. But not Tank Commander refusing to run Tank Man down. So the Tsar falls when the guards don't shoot down the mob storming the Winter Palace, and the Bourbons when the Swiss are massacred defending the Tuileries because the Garde National has turned their muskets and cannon on them.
As I've said here before; Posse Comitatus is only common sense for U.S. soldiers. If you let the soldiers into the public square as arbiters of law you make the soldiers your rulers. They have the weapons, and your only defense against them is their conviction that you are their political masters. In extreme cases those weapons must be deployed. But in the absence of those extremes - and this is very much not one of them - to roll the troop units risks getting those soldiers used to the idea that they are indeed the Final Argument of Kings.
Here's the LG&M post: https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2009/06/tank-man-and-tank-commander
Very well said, Chief.
Seems to me that this is another very expensive and temporary circus to divert attention from the fact that His Name is in The Files, part XVIII.
I don't think anyone seriously thinks this is going to work the way that they say it will.
BTW, thanks for identifying the unit; the journalists and press releases just give a number... but even though an MP battalion is the least stupid troop type to deploy it still won't work.
You make another good point: don't use locals to oppress the locals. The Romans sent their legions far far away from their recruiting Wehrkreise, The British were careful to use underdog tribes to police their possessions, and the Myanmar junta stays in power because their army is mostly made up of country boys who are very happy about breaking southern city-dweller heads when required.
A lot of people are talking about how this is a drill, a practice or test, and Trump has been vocal about the other cities he would like to do this too. But the fact of the matter is when it comes to urban conflict, or even generally, the rulers rule by the consent of the ruled. There are at most 3 million deployable uniformed and capable Soldiers, Marines, Guardsmen, Reservists and LEO to ride herd over 335 million people who may decide they've had enough of this. They can't be everywhere at once, in numbers worth noticing, and no matter how often they "kill a chicken to frighten the monkeys" (old Chinese saying) there will be a time when that does not work.
Note I didn't say disciplined or trustworthy when I said uniformed; Tank Commander will likely flip flop one day too, when he's had enough.
So...
1) I don't think this is really strategic; I think this is Tubby channeling his id. He hates "those people" and was triggered (as he always is) by the FOX-News-grampa-story about Big Balls' Scary Brown People beating. He's always been about this - shooting protesters and subhumans, force, might, beatings. His handlers might want this to chase the Files thing off the news, but I don't think he's triangulating. I think he wants to do it because that's who he is.
2) The unit is my guess. The DCARNG is heavily weighted with service support units. The MP Bn is as close to useful as they have, so what you said. No idea who they'll actually deploy. It's stupid, and stupid is as stupid does.
3) I've been beating that drum about the idiotic "thin blue line" copaganda thing. No, it's not cops or soldiers that "stand between civilization and savagery". It's you and me, all the citizens who buy into our civil governance and lawful society. If we really were the Hobbesian horror the wingnuts think we are the tiny minority of coppers and troops would be swarmed under in seconds.
FWIW, I am getting a cynical guffaw out of our Heroic Threepers and Molon Labe-ers. Turns out that ACTUAL government tyranny isn't so much fun to cosplay Resistance to, eh, boys? Forget the snacks again? Where have you gone, oh noble Responsible Gun Owner, with your AR-15 knockoff locked and loaded to resist the Evil Gummint?
Perhaps your nonsense was...just that..?
I think the Threepers and Spart-timers are all signing up for ICE. They can commandeer all the snacks they want from their victims. And they'll still tell you it's all about freedom... their freedom, that is.
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