After a summer of civil unrest over racial injustice in the United States, the National Guard has put hundreds of military police on standby specifically to help law enforcement deal with any potential violence in the coming months, three U.S. military officials have told...
WASHINGTON - After a summer of civil unrest over racial injustice in the United States, the National Guard has put hundreds of military police on standby specifically to help law enforcement deal with any potential violence in the coming months, three U.S. military officials have told Reuters.
While the units were not specifically created to address potential violence around the Nov. 3 elections, their existence highlights how the military could help deal with unrest around the vote without deploying active duty troops to cities - a key tenet for Pentagon leadership. In the campaign, tensions have risen over Republican President Donald Trump's calls for his supporters to act as ad-hoc poll watchers. Democrats and nonpartisan election experts have denounced that as an oblique call for illegal voter intimidation.
After the June protests in Washington, Reuters reported that Trump had told his advisers at one point he wanted 10,000 troops to deploy to the capital. “We’ve shown that the National Guard is the optimal choice to support civil authorities ... to me it’s just a natural selection for us to utilize the National Guard,” the senior Guard official said.
Trump has increasingly intervened in lower-level military affairs ahead of the election. Just hours before testing positive for the novel coronavirus on Thursday, Trump said on Twitter that a military decision to make the Navy SEAL ethos gender-neutral was “ridiculous” and vowed to overturn it.
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