Pentagon: Trump wants military parade in D.C.
WASHINGTON — President Trump has asked the Pentagon to plan a grand parade of the U.S. armed forces in Washington this year to celebrate military strength, officials said.
Trump wants an elaborate parade this year with soldiers marching and tanks rolling, but no date has been selected.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders confirmed last night that Trump wants the Pentagon to “explore a celebration” that will allow Americans to show appreciation for the military. Pentagon spokesman Charlie Summers said military officials are “looking at options.”
In her brief comment on Trump’s order to the Pentagon, Sanders did not elaborate on what sort of event he envisions.
A Washington Post report said Trump pushed for the parade in a Jan. 18 meeting with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and top generals at the Pentagon. It quoted an unidentified military official as saying, “The marching orders were: I want a parade like the one in France.” It was thus interpreted as a presidential order, the Post said, adding that the cost of shipping tanks and other military hardware to Washington could run in the millions of dollars.
The Post also reported that the Pentagon would prefer to hold such a parade on Veteran’s Day in November, in part because it would coincide with the 100th anniversary of the victorious end of World War I. It would thus be less directly associated with the president and politics, the Post said.
The idea is already stirring controversy.
John Kirby, a retired Navy rear admiral and former spokesman for the State Department and the Pentagon, wrote on CNN’s website last night that a big military parade in Washington is a bad idea.
“First of all, the United States doesn’t need a parade down Pennsylvania or any other avenue to show our military strength,” he wrote. “We do that every day in virtually every clime all over the world.”
Last September, at a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron, Trump announced his idea of staging a grand parade of the armed forces in Washington July 4.
Trump reminisced about watching France’s Bastille Day military parade when he visited Paris in July.
He said the two-hour parade was a “tremendous thing for France and for the spirit of France,” and said he wanted one on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington that would be grander than the one he saw in Paris.
The authoritarian regimes in Russia, the People’s Republic of China and North Korea also routinely stage massive military parades.