This article was posted at the great and holy Bishop Rene Gracida's website:
ABYSSUS ABYSSUM INVOCAT / DEEP CALLS TO DEEP
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Why Trump Doesn’t Just’Send In the Troops’
BY: Kurt SchlichterSeptember 03, 2020
There
are a lot of solid conservatives frustrated and appalled by the Biden
Riots, and a lot of those folks wonder why Donald Trump doesn’t just
make it all stop – you know, sort of like Grandpa Badfinger implicitly
promises he will do if we restore the garbage liberal establishment,
except with military force. “Call up the Guard,” right? But
what folks do not understand are the practical problems with Trump using
troops (sending federal law enforcement officers presents similar
problems, but also a unique and big one – there just aren’t as many
federal cops as there are soldiers). The devil is in the details, and
the devil here makes Trump pulling the trigger on the troops in the
current situation a very bad idea. We should support his strategic
patience and not do what the Democrats want by getting mad at the
president for refusing to stumble into an ambush.
Let me share some
background. After I got off active duty the first time, I joined the
California Army National Guard. For the next 23 years I participated in,
planned, and commanded during multiple civilian support operations. I
was in the Los Angeles Riots, the Northridge Earthquake, and I commanded
two battalions along with other forces in northern San Diego County
during the 2007 fires. I planned ops from platoon to state headquarters
level, and wrote about civil support ops in Infantry magazine and even in a first-of-its-kind law review article. So, I know a little about this stuff.
And what I know tells me that, despite our fantastic soldiers’ abilities, this is a bad idea.
But
why? Let’s address the donkey in the room – Democrat governors, mayors
and district attorneys do not want military forces deployed and will at
least refuse to cooperate with them, if not actively hinder them. That
makes a blue city like Portland a “non-permissive environment,”
and the military is certainly designed to operate in them. That’s why
when the military moves in force with, say, an infantry brigade combat
team (IBCT) of 5,000 soldiers plus support elements (thousands more), we
essentially deploy a small town with everything we need to survive –
food, fuel, ammo, medical, maintenance, commo, power, transportation,
even lawyers. Typically, in cities engulfed in chaos, it’s a permissive
environment. The cops work with us. They take custody of arrestees, hold
them, and the DA prosecutes them. Hospitals take in our wounded and
sick. We use local government property to operate out of. We have access
to the infrastructure of society. But what if the Democrat regime
refuses to allow all that? Then the troops are on their own; it’s now an
invasion, and while doable logistically, it takes a massive footprint.
A
permissive environment solves some, but not all of the issues we will
review. A non-permissive environment makes the whole thing exponentially
worse.
First, let’s think through the force package. Who do we send, and under what rules?
We
keep hearing about the National Guard, but few understand it. The Guard
is a reserve force trained and equipped just like active duty troops
and containing a large number of active duty veterans (I joined after
serving in Desert Storm). It works for the state governor – the Democrat
who hates Trump – unless it is “federalized,” in which case it
becomes an active duty unit and Trump is its commander-in-chief. Now,
federal troops are barred from enforcing civilian law by the Posse
Comitatus Act, unless the president invokes the Insurrection Act. On
state status, Posse Comitatus does not apply and Guard forces are not
prohibited by federal law from enforcing civilian law.
Got it? Seems
complicated, huh? Yeah, because it’s a giant cluster fark that only gets
more farked as we dive in to the details of implementing the idea of
sending in soldiers.
Oregon has the 41st IBCT. It has five “maneuver battalions,”
the ~500-soldier or so sub-units that would actually be on the street
(well, maybe two-thirds tops of those units’ personnel would actually be
on the street with guns. All the rest are support, as are the IBCT’s
other units). Only three battalions are actually in Oregon, and one of
those is an artillery unit. The rest are in other states. What is the
readiness of the 41st? Are elements deployed overseas? What’s their
manning? Their maintenance readiness? Who knows?
Maybe Trump uses
federal forces, like the 82nd Airborne Division’s ready brigade. Now
they have to fly from Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, to Portland. Can they
land at the airport? Remember, it’s a non-permissive environment. Will
the Democrat regime refuse to allow them to land, or if they do land,
refuse to service the planes? I guess we need to send in an Air Force
airbase unit to run things. That’s more troops.
And how are we
supporting this rapidly expanding force package? Will local contractors
serve the military, or be too intimidated to work with the military
(they will still be in Portland long after the Army goes home). I guess
we could bring in a support brigade. We’re over 10,000 troops now. Say,
how do we get their vehicles there? Drive them across the country? Put
them on trains? That takes time.
Where does this military force
assemble if the state and local government are not letting them use
local facilities? Maybe the military just moves into, say, a stadium
parking lot to use as a base. And maybe a federal judge issues an
injunction saying it can’t. Oh, we’ll need more troops to defend this
logistics and command and control base. And we’ll need a combat support
hospital in case the local government refuses to allow local hospitals
to treat the sick and wounded.Please, try and maintain a straight face
saying there is no way Democrat politicians in a blue city would forbid
our troops from getting medical care.
Let’s put the awkward issues of
logistics aside and talk tactics, though professionals always think
logistics while amateurs only think tactics. What do the troops
actually do? Patrol? Got to wait on our vehicles. Do they go arrest
looters? For what? If the looters violate federal law – like crossing a
state line to riot – that’s easy. You hook them up, turn them over to
the federal cops and the US attorney prosecutes them. But what if they
commit a state crime, which most routine crimes are? In LA ‘92, we
grabbed a crook and handed him over to the LAPD and he went to jail and
got prosecuted. But the Portland police will be ordered not to
cooperate. Moreover, the Portland DA will not charge them, much less
prosecute them. What do you do with them? How do the feds hold a rioter
for a state crime that he is not charged with?
Non-permissive environments suck, huh?
Then
there is the rules of engagement (ROE) issue. What are the ROE going to
be? Basically, the ROE outlines what force can you use on the rioters,
with particular interest in when you can shoot them. That’s always a
huge deal. You want these soldiers to go out and do something to the
rioters, so you need to decide what. Remember, they are the ones who can
get prosecuted if they kill someone. Oh, Trump’s Department of Justice
won’t prosecute them today, but will a Democrat administration’s DOJ do
that tomorrow? Don’t scoff – British ex-soldiers today are, despicably,
getting prosecuted for killing IRA terrorists in Northern Ireland back
in the 1970s.
Now, the Democrat regime would love nothing more than for a military unit to open fire on “peaceful protesters.”
So, would the media. Looking for fairness? How many of the mainstream
outlets have reported that one of the criminals Kyle Rittenhouse shot in
self-defense was a convicted pedophile? The demagogues are aching for
Trump to throw them into the briar patch of a military crackdown.
Remember, this whole riot scheme is an information operation designed to
present the country as out of control and Trump as, alternatively,
ineffectual or authoritarian.
These rioters have no actual power.
They don’t hold ground and a determined police response by local cops
with a DA who prosecutes them would scatter them. The Democrats are
using them to intimidate voters into accepting Biden’s implicit argument
that if we allow the liberal establishment back into power, these bad
people will go away (they won’t, but that’s what the Dems want you to
think). These Antifa and BLM street punks can serve the liberal elite’s
cause just as well as martyrs.
Bottom Line: All in all, sending military forces into a non-permissive environment in a blue city is a recipe for disaster.
It’s
easy to fume about Trump not waving his magic camo wand and making the
Antifa and BLM rioters disappear, but the reality of the situation
created by the Democrat regime makes it a disaster waiting to happen.
You either go in and essentially invade the cities and use an iron fist
to crush the rioters – and make Kent State’s body count look as paltry
as the audience for a Joe Biden rally – or you alienate some on your own
side when you refuse to save the Democrat demagogues’ bacon by becoming
the villain in their information operation.
These hard truths are not to say there is nothing for the feds to do.
Until
the Democrat regimes decide this needs to end and cooperate, the feds
should do one of the few things the feds are good at – taking down large
criminal organizations. Antifa is just like the drug cartels with less
testosterone, and just like the mafia except with worse clothes and less
testosterone. The feds should ignore the street thugs who make up the
shock troops. It was no coincidence that 100 percent of the people Kyle
shot had criminal records. The feds should focus on the LARPing middle
class SJWs and the dedicated Marxist cadre and use RICO, conspiracy,
and other federal charges to take them out and lock them up. When little
Ashleigh from the suburbs realizes that she’s looking at five years in
federal prison instead of heading back to the Evergreen State to finish
her Bolivian Trans Dance of the 13th Century degree, the lawyer daddy
buys her will get her to sing like a canary about her commie pals. The
feds should identify and map the whole criminal organization, identify
its players and funding, and wipe it out.
Look, it’s perfectly
understandable to be frustrated. But getting mad at Trump because he is
not doing something that would turn into the cluster fark to end all
cluster farks is doing exactly what the liberal elite and its media
minions want. Let Portland and the rest of the blue cities trash
themselves. Let the DOJ, which has already charged dozens of these
degenerates with federal beefs, do its thing. And make sure you get out
and vote straight Republican if you want any hope of this ever ending.
Email Link https://conta.cc/3hX85lH
RIP MCINTOSH
Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Mass and the Church as well as for the Triumph of the Kingdom of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary
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