At a San Francisco business event, the former head of forces in Afghanistan criticised President Trump’s domestic deployment of troops
At a business conference in San Francisco onWednesday, former Army General Stanley McChrystal warned that President Donald Trump ’s deployment of troops in U.S. cities risks poisoning the public’s relationship with the military.
American tradition and law generally prohibits domestic use of the military, McChrystal noted. There are good reasons for that, he said. You don’t want the American public to identify the military with a group that comes and polices their cities. And you don’t want to politicize the military by seeing it as a tool of one party or the other, he said. The deployment of troops in American cities is “unfortunate, and I think it’s a big mistake,” McChrystal said during a fireside chat with comedian and podcast host Baratunde Thurstone at Presidio Theatre during the Masters of Scale Summit. McChrystal’s comments come as Trump has mobilized National Guard troops to deploy them to Chicago and has attempted to do the same in Portland, Ore., but has been blocked by the courts. Previously, his administration sent National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. Trump’s stated rationale for deploying the National Guard has been to fight crime and disorder, despite crime rates having fallen sharply in recent years in all of those cities. His move to deploy troops has also come in spite of the opposition of state and local officials in charge of those cities, not to mention much of the public. It’s unclear if Trump knows or cares what’s happening in those cities. In an interview with NBC News late last month, the president reportedly said he believed Portland was experiencing a violent insurrection because of what he was seeing on television, despite being told by Oregon’s governor that the city was calm and there wasn’t an insurrection actually happening. As part of a session at the conference focusing on character in leadership, Thurstone asked McChrystal for his reaction to Trump’s decision to send in troops to cities as well as mass numbers of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement Officers to detain immigrants. McChrystal indicated that he opposed illegal immigration. But he added that all people, particularly those who are vulnerable, needed to be treated as human beings and with respect. In explaining the dangers of using troops in American cities, he noted that the quartering of British soldiers — the Redcoats — in the colonies was one of the sparks of the Revolution and spurred the Third Amendment to the Constitution forbidding the practice. Ex // Top Stories SF to honor ‘friend to the community’ killed outside library Joey Alexander, an Urban Alchemy street practitioner, will be remembered outside City Hall on Tuesday Fleet Week flies on in The City — even if the Blue Angels don’t This year’s festival looks — and sounds — a lot different with decidedly less American representation Why next year's Castro supervisor race is already off and running Gary McCoy and Manny Yekutiel are the first to enter the 2026 contest to represent District 8McChrystal also referenced the Posse Comitatus Act, an 1878 law that generally forbids the use of American troops on domestic soil for the purpose of law enforcement. That law was a reaction to the stationing of American troops in the South during Reconstruction, a practice that protected newly freed Blacks but was opposed by many white citizens. “What we don’t want is for the American people to grow to fear or be resentful of our own military,” he said. The other danger with what Trump is doing is the politicization of the military, said McChrystal, who formed his own business consulting firm in 2011, said. There’s a long tradition in the U.S. of a separation of politics and the military. When he served, McChrystal said, he never knew the political beliefs of his colleagues. Other countries aren’t like that, he noted. And the military takes on a different role in society when it’s politicized, he said.To be sure, McChrystal is no stranger to military-political controversies. In 2010, he resigned his position as head of the international forces in Afghanistan immediately before the release of an article in Rolling Stone that quoted his staff disparaging then-Vice President Joe Biden and other Obama administration officials.Despite the brouhaha, McChrystal endorsed Biden when the latter ran for president in 2020 and Biden's intended successor, Kamala Harris, when she ran for president last year.
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