Pentagon readies 1,500 troops to possibly deploy to Minnesota, US media say
reuters.com
reuters.com
Note the two verbs, adjective, and adverb: "deescalate", "protect", "legal", and "legally"; does ICE operate as professionally?
https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN35675-ATP_3-...
> U.S forces responding to planned rallies and demonstrations, spontaneous crowds, and civil disturbances must follow the procedures best designed to deescalate crowd actions and to protect life, the rights and safety of the persons involved, and property.
https://rdl.train.army.mil/catalog-ws/view/Army-Blue-Book/in...
> All Soldiers are required to obey the legal orders of their lawful seniors.
https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN34403-ADP_6-...
> Commanders are legally and ethically accountable for the decisions they make or do not make, and for the actions, accomplishments, and failures of their subordinates.
EDIT: elsewhere I'd asked if the Soldier's Manual still (post 2002) includes the duty to disobey manifestly unlawful orders. I now guess that it does, as this duty is explicitly described on p.22 of FM-1 "THE ARMY: A PRIMER TO OUR PROFESSION OF ARMS" (01 May 2025).
To enforce an ideology you need people whom identity is based around the ideology, they need to be losers, goons who don't have anything else for them going on.
Therefore the proper military can indeed be an attempt to de-escalate the situation.
Considering that our military swore an oath to the constitution and to defend the country against domestic threats the correct thing for them to do might instead be an escalation against that alternative force of losers operating in American cities. I wouldn't bet on the military occupiers marching into Minnesota upholding their oaths though.
Further, under the current regime, you have to remember that military leadership and checks and balances has been systematically eroded for the last 12 months. Military leaders that would oppose trump are/have been removed or retired. Holsey is the latest/biggest example I can think of. Look what happened in Venezuela almost immediately after.
Also, recall the address Hegseth and Trump gave to the gathering of generals in Quantico. They explicitly said if you aren't an ideologue aligned with the administration, there is no place for you in the military. Which is to say that the time of the US military being non-partisan is over.
Lastly, I'd consider the kind of leadership Hegseth and Trump want leading that occupying unit. It's going to be somebody that will be receptive to their orders, legal or not.
But hey, perhaps things will be different when they are face-to-face with regular Americans who could've been their neighbors, instead of some anonymous pixels of foreigners on a computer screen.
While there's certainly many instances where ICE breaks the law, what would be the rationale for the military wholly refusing to support ICE performing their stated duty of enforcing immigration law? (besides more specific orders like "disperse these legal protesters" which could be disobeyed for more narrow reasons, because peaceful protesting is legal)
This suggestion is that the insurrection act could be moving from the fire into the frying pan: I'm not saying the military would be good occupiers, only that they're probably better occupiers than ICE.
(and were they to be supporting ICE operations, from what I've seen in the news reported on this side of the Atlantic, they'd be more likely to ride herd on ICE than on the public*: keep the SOF LARPers on the up and up, as it were)
* after all, the Arctic Angels have been training for going up against the ВДВ, not for playing "respect my authoritah!" games with civilians.
There's also just the chaos angle. From the same New Yorker article I linked elsewhere in this thread, I thought this anecdote was nuts:
> In Los Angeles, for example, [in 1992] there was a situation where marines were accompanying police to a house where there was a domestic disturbance and the police officers said to “cover me” as they went into the house. “Cover” means something very different in the Marines, and they opened fire on the house. It was only by good fortune that no one was killed.
The administration has systematically removed leadership in both the military and the DoJ that aren't ideologues. Case in point: SOUTHCOM
Further, internal DoJ and military checks and balances have been eviscerated for the last 12 months. Specifically military lawyers and inspectors general that are concerned with lawful conduct.
We've already seen that it's extremely rare for even the national guard to support protesters in their own communities when being deployed against them
We've already seen that the military will willfully follow trump's unlawful orders, including clear violations of international law
Acting unlawfully and then falling back on "just following orders" is far less likely to have negative consequences for soldiers than refusing to follow unlawful orders would
Should we be optimistic that current law will be followed? Maybe. Does the existence of the law ensure it? Not at all.
Minnesota has no clue how serious a can of whoop-ass they're about to pry open.
> U.S forces responding to planned rallies and demonstrations, spontaneous crowds, and civil disturbances must follow the procedures best designed to deescalate crowd actions and to protect life, the rights and safety of the persons involved, and property.
Can Trump Really Use the Insurrection Act?
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/can-trump-really-use-...
> The other point that I want to make is that if the military were being deployed to try to bring ice under control, that would be one thing. That’s not the purpose. The purpose of deploying the military here would be to enable the violence and lawlessness that we’re seeing from ice. And so even if the military itself is not engaging in these kinds of destructive actions, it is there to insure that ice is able to do so. It would serve in that way as a force amplifier for ice.
And then a more optimistic take in which Jamelle Bouie talks about how difficult it would be for Trump to disrupt upcoming elections in any meaningful way:
I've heard some very decent Generals speak recently about an America I remember.
Need to exit Don the Long Con Man with a Pong stage left and deport him to Greenland.
It seems like the administration been toying with the idea of cancelling both the upcoming 2026 elections, and the 2028, but how feasible that is, I don't know, as far as I know the US always have elections, even when at war, but then also lots of things that has happened had requirements and precedents that were never broken but still were, so not sure what will actually happen. I'm personally not super optimistic the administration won't at least try to stop them from happening.
We could even create a ton of new jobs in the guillotine sector.
And if it means we destroy AI, modern media and most of the web, all the better.
I'm honestly struggling to see a downside here.
If ICE gets the fuck out everything returns to normal. But MAGA and their Repub fellow travellers want to burn down America and rebuild to their fascist ideology.