Washington under armed siege

Armed US national guardsmen, plucked from their civilian jobs for emergency duty in the nation’s capital, are now forming one of the largest-ever military deployments in Washington’s history. The requirement for the part-time soldiers and airmen has risen from 15,000 to 25,000 which is 8,000 more than President Obama sent as regular-troop reinforcements to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban in 2009. They are coming from states all over the country. President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration next Wednesday has been designated a “national special security event”. Those guards personnel who have had prior experience of backing the police in urban crises will be armed, but all 25,000 will have access to weapons if needed. There are heavy-truck checkpoints in the area around the Capitol. The national guardsmen and women, many of whom will have had combat experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, are the acceptable face of the military as far as law enforcement support on the streets of the capital are concerned. In June 4, 1,600 active-duty troops, including from 82nd Airborne Division, were sent to the Washington area after violence erupted during protests about alleged police brutality following the fatal shooting of a black man, George Floyd. It was a controversial decision but the troops were never deployed to the capital. The national guards personnel, a mixture of army and air force, now in Washington, are part of the reserve components of the US military and have full-time civilian jobs. Their total strength is around 450,000. They were originally authorised as state militia by the US constitution. The name, national guard, was used for the first time in 1824. They are protected by employment legislation to keep their jobs when deployed on military service. Under the national guard motto, “always ready, always there”, the part-timers have born a large share of the deployment burden in wars. About 45 per cent of the forces sent to Iraq and Afghanistan were from the national guard and full-time reserve units and suffered more than 18 per cent of the casualties. In September 2003, 10,000 national guard troops were sent to Iraq, the largest mobilisation of guard personnel since Vietnam.