The tensions that arose from the military’s role during the Floyd protests did not occur in a vacuum. Since the start of his tenure as president, Trump has repeatedly dragged the Pentagon into awkward political situations it would much rather avoid.
When National Guard troops helped police officers push back peaceful demonstrators in front of the White House, while active-duty Army units waited for orders on the outskirts of the nation’s capital, former Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work was remembering Vietnam War-era protests.
To Work, the country to which he was returning “was nearly unrecognizable” from the one he’d left in 1965. Many Americans’ trust in the military, already under great strain after five years of war in Vietnam, had been shattered by the events in Ohio. The president’s instinct seems to be to push the military over a line from which it has done its best to stay well back in recent generations. “It begins to appear as if the president is using them for political purposes,” Panetta said. That in turn raises “questions about whether or not the military can maintain that necessary independence in order to focus on its primary job, which is to confront foreign adversaries but more importantly protect the national security,” he added.
That afternoon, speaking in the Rose Garden, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 in order to send the active-duty military to states where he deemed local authorities had not taken enough action to defend lives and property during the protests. The result was an unprecedented outpouring of public concern from former senior defense officials, both military and civilian.
On June 5, 89 former senior defense officials, including numerous Republicans, signed an open letter published in the Washington Post that decried the use of security forces, including National Guard troops, to facilitate the Lafayette Square photo op, which, the authors wrote, was “inappropriately” attended by Esper and Milley.
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