It's Trump's Fault!

Whether the "Seditious Six" casmpaign to convince military members to refuse "illegal" orders from Trump is actually a CIA operation is up in the air, but it's separate from the recent allegations that the shootings of two National Guard members in Washington last Wednesday are "Trump's fault". The most respectable version of this line can be found at Real Clear Politics in a piece from The Atlantic, A Terrible and Avoidable Tragedy in D.C.:

The troops, deployed in an effort to reduce crime, are untrained in law enforcement; their days are spent cleaning up trash and walking the streets in uniform. Commanders, in a memo that was included in litigation challenging the high-visibility mission in D.C., argued that this could put them in danger. The Justice Department countered that the risk was merely “speculative.” It wasn’t. There are costs to performatively deploying members of the military—one of which is the risk of endangering them.

Let's parse this out. The argument is that the National Guard troops in Washington have been deployed "performatively", which implies that this is somehow unrelated to their actual function, which is otherwise unspecified (Hurricane relief? Border control? Overseas opeerations?) I did a web search on "performative" and got several definitions that I think reflect what the writer means by using the word in this context:

• done or expressed insincerely or inauthentically, typically with the intention of impressing others or improving one's own image
• a pejorative for people that publicly act out in a way to show their goodness and virtue but do not actually do the real work
• done or expressed for the sake of appearance, esp. to impress others or to improve one's own image.

The writer stresses this by asserting the troops' "days are spent cleaning up trash and walking the streets in uniform". That two members should be shot by an aggrieved illegal is just the natural consequence of such a feckless deployment.

But in the wake of the Martin Luther King assassination, there were riots in Washington:

As the violence and property destruction continued, President Lyndon B. Johnson called in U.S. troops to quell the disturbance and District of Columbia Mayor Walter E. Washington declared a 5:30 p.m. curfew. About 6,000 troops were mobilized in the District by dusk on April 5, including units from the Army and the Marine Corps as well as the D.C. National Guard.

. . . More than 13,000 soldiers patrolled Washington, DC, during this tumultuous period—the first time federal troops were sent into the capital since the Army dispersed the Bonus Marchers in 1932. The Marines remained stationed at the Capitol until April 12, eventually using barracks on Capitol Hill to rest.

This was, in fact, a "performative deployment". Thousands of National Guard troops were deployed to Los Angeles in the wake of the 1992 Rodney King riots. As in every such case, they were untrained in law enforcement. Their job wasn't to collar criminals; their job was simply to be the face of authority, to be present on the streets as a deterrent to disorder. All such deployments are "performative". The police are always the ones who actually collar criminals.

I asked Chrome AI mode, "Is it legitimate for military power to be deliberately performative?" It answered,

Yes, military power is considered to be deliberately performative to a significant extent. Actions, from training to actual operations, are often designed not just for their immediate physical effects, but also to signal strength, intent, and resolve to both domestic and international audiences.

Even in the gospels, there's reference to the performative value of the military (Luke 14:31-32):

Or what king marching into battle would not first sit down and decide whether with ten thousand troops he can successfully oppose another king advancing upon him with twenty thousand troops?

And if not, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace.

But we come to the next question, the risk that troops on such a deployment are endangered. The fact is that there's a certain amount of unavoidable risk that comes just from being in the military. For instance,

Four Louisiana National Guardsmen from the 1st Assault Helicopter Battalion, 244th Aviation Regiment who died in a training accident, March 10, have been identified.

. . . The Louisiana Army National Guard was participating in a routine night-time training exercise with the Marine 2nd Special Operations Battalion. The Black Hawk carrying the four aircrew and seven Marines crashed into the Santa Rosa Sound in Navarre, Florida, March 10.

The two National Guard members were shot while in the line of duty during their deployment to Washington, D.C., while on what were said to be "high visibility patrols" near the Farragut West metro station; i.e., under legal orders to conduct legitimate performative operations. But the Atlantic writer concludes,

We are not at war now. But Trump’s use of the National Guard suggests that he thinks we are not at peace either. The National Guard is stranded somewhere on this battlefield of partisan politics. They are not ready for this arena, and we should never have asked them to be.

What's war got to do with it? The National Guard is routinely deployed for disaster relief, riot control, and many other functions outside wartime. Deployments are both inconvenient and risky, but members have signed up for them, and they're paid to be available. But aLso, the National Guard, especially within Washington, can be and has been deployed for purposes that have been hard to distinguish from politics, such as dispersing the 1932 Bonus Army encampment or contributing to the air of crisis that sorrounded the passage of the 1968 Civil Rights Act during that year's Martin Luther King riots.

There can be no question that Trump's deployment of the National Guard, especially to Washington, DC, was within the scope of his authority. In addition, he was elected to office in an atmosphere of uncertainty about the extent and nature of two related issues, illegal migration and urban crime. Are we "not at peace" over these issues? The National Guard members were apparently targeted by an aggrieved illegal migrant acting as a partisan combatant in something that's hard not to characterize as this same quasi-war, while on an anti-crime deployment. If anything, it's sharpened the the impression we have of the nature of this conflict.