National Guard documents reveal candor, ‘shame’ over D.C. deployment

Whatever works.

This was intentional. Nobody writes journalist@definitelynotthemilitaryemail.com instead of specific-name@militaryemailthatwealwaysuse.com

Protect whistleblowers

Too much of the population has been radicalized by the Ultra Extreme Left. Only thing left to do is start cracking down on dissident media and turning up the local news jingoisms to 11.

Rumors abound of Antifa going house to house and force-feeding babies Fentanyl. News at 11. Then don't miss the Kristy Noem "Safer Under The Flag" Crime Hour, as we discuss what phonecalls you can make and what apps you can install in order to help keep your community happier.

A US Air Force recruiter emailed me this morning

I cussed her out, told her to grow a fucking back bone.

Used to never do that to military, now I don't respect them.

Can you maybe wait until they actually do anything fascist before you condemn them?

I sort of suspect that some of the reason for all the landscaping is that Trump tried to tell the guard to do what he really wants them to be doing, and somebody at some level told him to go fuck himself. It's not because Trump had picking up trash in mind as what he'd like the armed forces to be doing right now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_and_crying

They wanted to deport all the immigrants and now they have to bring in the National Guard to do the landscaping. 😂

I don't really want the National Guard to consist entirely of people enthusiastic about this stuff.

Fun fact, you can't just quit. I tried. You can desert, but then you'd risk going to prison.

Or stay and gunk up, otherwise you can get loyalists.

When Trump's wars happen, and they will happen, he's going to institute a draft, or perhaps even call for mandatory military service, like Israel or South Korea. That way, they get to indoctrinate every single young American citizen before they go into the world as adult citizens.

Unfortunately they don’t have to prove anything in court because they have the Supreme Court in their pocket. The only way to beat fascism is to kill fascism

Unfortunately, an order to go and walk around DC isn't a violation of anything. You have to wait until they give you an actually illegal order before telling them to stuff it (well, at least if you want to remain as a free person.)

The National Guard, in measuring public sentiment about President Donald Trump’s federal takeover of Washington, D.C., has assessed that its mission is perceived as “leveraging fear,” driving a “wedge between citizens and the military,” and promoting a sense of “shame” among some troops and veterans, according to internal documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

The assessments, which have not been previously reported, underscore how domestic mobilizations that are rooted in politics risk damaging Americans’ confidence in the men and women who serve their communities in times of crisis. The documents reveal, too, with a rare candor in some cases, that military officials have been kept apprised that their mission is viewed by a segment of society as wasteful, counterproductive and a threat to long-standing precedent stipulating that U.S. soldiers — with rare exception — are to be kept out of domestic law enforcement matters.

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Trump has said the activation of more than 2,300 National Guard troops was necessary to reduce crime in the nation’s capital, though data maintained by the D.C. police indicates an appreciable decline was underway long before his August declaration of an “emergency.” In the weeks since, the Guard has spotlighted troops’ work assisting the police and “beautifying” the city by laying mulch and picking up trash, part of a daily disclosure to the news media generated by Joint Task Force D.C., the agency overseeing the deployment.

Not for public consumption, however, is an internal “media roll up” that analyzes the tone of news stories and social media posts about the National Guard’s presence and activities in Washington. Government media relations personnel routinely produce such assessments and provide summaries to senior leaders for their awareness. They stop short of drawing conclusions about the sentiments being raised.

“Trending videos show residents reacting with alarm and indignation,” a summary from Friday said. “One segment features a local [resident] describing the Guard’s presence as leveraging fear, not security — highlighting widespread discomfort with what many perceive as a show of force.”

A National Guard official acknowledged the documents are authentic but downplayed their sensitivity, saying the assessments are intended for internal use and were inadvertently emailed to The Post last week. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing an unspecified policy. It is unclear how many people mistakenly received the documents.

Spokespeople for the Army, which is overseeing the deployment, did not provide comment.

Social media posts about the military mission in D.C. summarized on Friday were assessed to be 53 percent negative, 45 percent neutral and 2 percent positive, the documents say.

While officials have insisted that troops are not policing, their actions have sometimes blurred the lines between soldiering and law enforcement, including detaining criminal suspects until police have arrived. One soldier has been credited with helping the apparent victim of a drug overdose by giving them Narcan, officials have noted.

For most Washington residents and tourists, though, the troops often are most visible at Metro stops and federal monuments, looking bored and absorbing both praise and insults from passersby.

Friday’s assessment highlights “Mentions of Fatigue, confusion, and demoralization — ‘just gardening,’ unclear mission, wedge between citizens and the military.”

The National Guard was ordered to this mission and does not have a responsibility to make it palatable to the public, said Jason Dempsey, a former Army officer who studies civil military affairs for the Center for a New American Security. But, he said, military leaders should think about how deployments with political undertones could have implications for recruiting and sustaining the force.

The themes raised in these assessments, Dempsey said, also should give pause to American citizens. National Guard troops are overseen by governors, who almost always provide their approval when those forces are mobilized for federal service overseas or within the United States. But the mission in Washington, and an earlier deployment to Los Angeles, both occurred against the consent of civil authorities in those jurisdictions.

“When elected representatives say, ‘We do not want them,’ but the federal government sends them, and then you see these kinds of numbers,” he said, “it does raise existential questions for the health of the National Guard, for how America views its National Guard and how America uses the military writ large.”

Such concerns also were spelled out in a separate cache of internal documents that outlined another Trump administration initiative: the creation of a “quick reaction force” of National Guard troops to respond to civil unrest anywhere in the United States. In that case, first reported by The Post as Trump’s D.C. deployment got underway in mid-August, military officials voiced concern about “potential political sensitivities” and “legal considerations related to their role as a nonpartisan force.”

Trump has since signed an executive order directing formation of the quick reaction force.

In examining public opinions online, Guard officials last week highlighted the sentiments shared by people who self-identified as veterans and active-duty troops, who, the documents show, say they viewed the deployment “with shame and alarm.” The assessment also homed in on how people are reacting to various court cases challenging Trump’s domestic military deployments.

A federal judge last week ruled Trump’s mobilization of nearly 5,000 U.S. troops to Los Angeles in June was an illegal use of military force to conduct law enforcement. An appeals court later granted the Trump administration’s motion for a stay in the case until its argument could be heard in greater detail — allowing the military mission there to continue. About 300 National Guard troops remain in the area.

The D.C. deployment, which includes troops not only from the District but from eight Republican-led states as well, is the subject of a lawsuit by city officials who argue that Trump broke the law by putting Guard troops into law enforcement roles. The public reaction being monitored by military officials focuses on “debate about the legality of the mission, whether it’s needed and if it has been successful,” one assessment reads, noting that there is ongoing criticism of the mission as “federal overreach and politically motivated.”

Others viewed the ongoing lawsuit in Washington as “unreasonable,” the assessment shows.

The National Guard has sometimes struggled to highlight significant impact from their presence. The public summary from Tuesday, for instance, noted a sole example of troops providing undescribed support to police at Union Station when a person was “acting aggressively.” The person was ushered out the door, the Guard noted.

In another update, the Guard indicates troops “continue efforts to restore and beautify public spaces across the District” and have “cleared 906 bags of trash, spread 744 cubic yards of mulch, removed five truckloads of plant waste, cleared 3.2 miles of roadway, and painted 270 feet of fencing.”

Those statistics may be among the most consequential takeaways of Trump’s use of the military in D.C., Dempsey said, and should prompt scrutiny of whether this mission was ever necessary in the first place.

“That is such a suboptimal use of military training that we should all be asking, ‘Why are they here?’” Dempsey said. “If they’re picking up trash, they’re not here for a security emergency. There’s no clearer metric than that.”

Washington Post only loads a portion of the article unless you are logged in. You need to go straight to the archive for Post articles.

It's longer than that — maybe check the archive.is version?

If you use reader mode, many articles get chopped down to the first paragraph. Maybe the rest is obfuscated by JavaScript?

Catering to deeply ignorant people who lose their shit at the first chance they get?

https://lemmy.ca/comment/18863461

They're writing to the attention span of the average internet user