Security is ready for Jan. 20
WASHINGTON — A senior official involved in organizing security for Wednesday’s inauguration puts the mission of ensuring the orderly transition of power in the starkest terms: “We need to do everything it takes.”
The Defense and Justice departments were shocked by the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. They thought they had sufficient forces to contain the mob, but they were disastrously wrong.
Officials aren’t making the same mistake this time. National Guard troops in the D.C. area for President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration could total more than 20,000, more than 50 times the number initially available on Jan. 6, one senior official said. The Secret Service will coordinate planning. Activeduty Army troops from the Old Guard will be standing by at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall.
The goal is an overwhelming show of force, not just in Washington, but around the country. Gen. Daniel Hokanson, chief of the National Guard, has been in touch with all 50 states to prepare for contingencies if insurgents carry out threats to attack state capitols. Airspace around the Washington D.C. area will be tightly controlled, in higher altitudes where planes could operate and nearer the ground where drones might fly.
The storming of the Capitol was frightening to legislators trapped by the mob but also to military and law enforcement planners who knew such an attack would be possible but didn’t prepare adequately. What worried Pentagon officials was that some members of the mob were clearly military veterans — suggesting the insurgency might have supporters within the activeduty military itself.
Officials say the presence of veterans was clear from unit insignia displayed by some members of the mob, tactical gear they wore and the way they cleared some rooms in the Capitol.
Commanders drew a sharp line for the military in an unusual “Message to the Joint Force” sent Tuesday to U.S. troops around the world. It was written by Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and signed by him and all seven other chiefs of staff. The chiefs didn’t clear the letter with any Pentagon civilians; they felt it was their obligation to communicate directly to the troops.
The warning was blunt. “Any act to disrupt the Constitutional process is not only against our traditions, values and oath; it is against the law,” the message read. The riot inside the Capitol was “inconsistent with the rule of law,” the memorandum stressed, and First Amendment rights “do not give anyone the right to resort to violence, sedition and insurrection.”
Warning to the troops: Do your duty to the country, regardless of your political views. Commanders believed this decisive admonition was necessary because some activeduty and retired soldiers and Marines sympathize with Trump.
One Pentagon official describes a letter he received from a retired officer comparing the crackdown on the mob to “Hitler’s Germany.” Trump “has done nothing but good,” pleaded the letter writer. “They’ve cut off our places of worship, they’ve closed our businesses, they’ve demonized anyone who disagrees with them.”
Those words echo the standard litany of pro-Trump supporters, and officials know these ideas are shared by some in the military and law enforcement.
The military has learned some bitter lessons about combating insurgencies in the past two decades of “endless wars,” and they apply at home as well as abroad. One is the need to show overwhelming force in crisis situations. Another is the importance of intelligence that can identify and disrupt the command-and-control structure of the adversary.
That’s one reason the FBI is moving so aggressively. It wants to gather as much intelligence about this domestic terrorist network as possible in an initial wave of arrests, and then use that information to drive a second and third wave.
The military’s unity and independence from politics should be one of the country’s strengths going forward. This generation of commanders understands viscerally the danger of creating what strategist David Kilcullen has called “accidental guerrillas” — people who didn’t initially challenge the state but were driven toward revolt by policies that treated them as the enemy.
The FBI and its law enforcement colleagues will have to walk a fine line in the coming weeks and months, identifying the dangerous vanguard and distinguishing it from MAGA-chanting bystanders and wannabes. Stopping this insurgency requires force and intimidation — and even more, intelligence that can separate real threats from conspiratorial chatter.