Defending the homeland, not deterring China, tops the list of priorities that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sent to senior Pentagon leaders and combatant commanders earlier this month, ahead of the expected release of the second Trump administration’s first National Defense Strategy.
This focus reflects “the President’s determination to restore our neglected position in the Western Hemisphere,” Hegseth wrote in an Aug. 7 memo laying out his defense-planning guidance. Defense One obtained a copy of the memo.
Before mentioning China—long seen as the “pacing challenge” with which the U.S. is jockeying for influence in not only the Indo-Pacific, but Africa and Latin America—the guidance’s first listed priority is to “seal our borders, repel invasion, counter narcotics and trafficking, and support the Department of Homeland Security mission to deport illegal aliens.”
The language continues the current Trump administration’s departure from not just the Biden National Defense Strategy, but the president’s own first-term strategy, both of which placed deterring China as first priority.
It’s a shift in rhetoric that has borne out in action, as Trump has ordered the militarization of the southern border while deploying Marines and National Guardsmen to Los Angeles—illegally, according to the state’s governor—to dispel protests of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids.
It may be the best option in the short term, in the face of poorly resourced law-enforcement agencies, but it’s not what the Defense Department is designed to do, Glen VanHerck, a retired Air Force general and former head of U.S. Northern Command, told Defense One.
“I think ultimately, if our government had another option—such as with ICE and Customs and Border Protection, with more capacity, capability—that they would utilize it. They just don't have it,” VanHerck told Defense One.
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DHS has requested DOD support at the border every year since 2018. Though the number of requested troops dropped during the Biden administration from a high of 5,500 troops to 2,500 before Trump took office in January, the agency made the case every year that CBP was incapable of securing the border alone.
CBP has taken strides to fill its persistent staffing shortages, mainly by offering recruiting bonuses and streamlining the hiring process. But that takes time.
“And so if you're the president, you've got four years, you're not going to wait and build the capacity and capability within DHS or other agencies beyond DOD in that time, to execute what you need,” VanHerck said.
But supporting law enforcement shouldn’t be a core mission for the military, VanHerck said, echoing public statements he made during his tenure at NORTHCOM.
“I am concerned that DOD has become the ‘easy button’ for everything. So it doesn't matter if it's a Biden administration or a Trump administration—‘when you need capacity and capability, call on DOD’,” he said. “That, long-term, is not good for our nation, to have DOD in our streets. We need to resource those agencies, spelled out in law to enforce our laws, and to conduct crisis response, in our homeland.”
Asked for comment on the defense secretary’s planning guidance, Pentagon spokesman Joel Valdez referred questions to the White House.
None of Hegseth’s written documents or public statements suggest this is a short-term project. In April, the U.S. established a militarized zone across the border that allows troops to detain trespassers, a mission previously reserved to law-enforcement agencies. This month he created a new medal to be awarded to troops who serve at least 30 days on the border mission.
“In the meantime, when you're using DOD, what are you doing at DHS and DOJ to develop more capacity, more capability, to utilize technology better—not just the human—so the DOD doesn't have to do this long-term?” VanHerck said.
Beyond the border
Meanwhile, more than a dozen states are activating National Guard troops locally to help ICE, not only by processing paperwork and handling other administrative tasks, but by driving agents around.
"The story is, why haven’t we resourced law-enforcement agencies to enforce our laws that Congress puts on the books?” VanHerck said.
DHS’s 2026 budget request cuts $81 million from CBP’s 2025 levels while adding more than $800 million to ICE. They both benefit from $165 billion infused into DHS through the reconciliation bill, which includes funding for recruitment.
“We need a whole-nation strategy, led by DHS, that leads to lines of effort by department, that leads to funding for each of those lines of effort, that leads to training for those lines of effort,” VanHerck said.
That could include this newly codified counter-narcotics priority, which DOD has intermittently supported in the past and has continued into this year, which so far has included surveillance flights and ships deployed off the coast of Central America
"One of the challenges is that Mexico does not have the ability to conduct high-fidelity surveillance like we can,” VanHerck said. “We can help point them in the right direction if we’re willing to share information.”
But the administration has also been considering drone strikes against cartels operating in Mexico, though that country’s president has said, "The United States is not going to come to Mexico with the military.”
There are options aside from deploying troops into the country, VanHerck said.
“One of the things I advocated for, for a long time: help Mexico identify precursor materials coming in so they can seize them at their ports, those types of things,” he said.
And then there is the deployment of troops to major U.S. cities: Los Angeles; Washington, D.C.; and possibly Chicago and Baltimore.
While deploying the Guard to enforce local laws isn’t an explicit part of any national-security strategy yet, it’s becoming a go-to move.
“As you all know, Chicago’s a killing field right now,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday. (Hundreds have been killed in the past year, but the city’s murder rate is at a decade low.) He later added that he isn’t keen to “barge in on a city and then be treated horribly by corrupt politicians,” following reports the Pentagon had been working on Chicago deployment plans for weeks.
As these aren’t long-planned operations, it’s unclear what kind of readiness or financial impact they will have on the units themselves.
“Is the money going to prevent some units from drilling? I don't think anybody knows that at this particular point in time,” said John Goheen, spokesman for the National Guard Association of the United States. “The numbers would suggest no, but this is something the Pentagon is going to have to answer.”
The Guard’s primary mission is to train for war, Goheen said, with disaster relief a common additional mission.
They aren’t resourced to be continuously supporting law enforcement, said Gordon Adams, a professor emeritus in international affairs at American University’s School of International Service.
“From a budgetary perspective, it means that the domestic use of forces is not necessarily planned or budgeted,” Adams said. “If the special intervention units of the National Guard are actually created at DOD, at some point they will likely budget for them. But at present, the regime’s practice seems to be—‘act first, find the money later’.”
While Guard budgets are flexible enough to cover pay and travel costs of unplanned deployments, they are not funded to the level of an ongoing national-security priority. DOD also has small pots of money to support DHS’s border mission and the counter-trafficking mission.
The problem is, DOD’s current budget does not have enough money for a surge in these missions, which are now treated as a cornerstone of Hegseth’s strategy. The 2026 budget puts some money toward them, but it’s an open question every year of if or when a proper budget will be signed at all, much less on time.
“If it's something that you're going to prioritize and it's not a contingency, or it's not emergent, it's going to be in the budget,” said Elaine McCusker, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former Pentagon comptroller during Trump’s first administration.
In general, unplanned deployments like the border plus-up earlier this year or the current Guard deployment to D.C. can be covered by operations and maintenance funding.
“And that's pretty typical for any kind of unexpected operation that the department does, and the impacts also range based on the size, right?” McCusker said. “What were you planning on doing with that money that you're not able to do now? And how do you go about making that up?”
A prime example, during McCusker’s tenure at the Pentagon, was the reprogramming of billions in military construction funding to build the border fence, which pushed back planned projects including weapons ranges and training facilities.
“Every time a new mission is assigned to the Defense Department, it must manage, plan, execute, assess, and report on the activity,” McCusker wrote in an essay for Lawfare last year. “This draws personnel, management focus, and resources away from what should be the defense core mission: preparing for, fighting, and winning America’s wars.”
The reconciliation bill has some funding to cover these missions, she told Defense One, though the vast majority of it goes to DHS. DOD has $1 billion to spend over the next four years.
It’s not clear what homeland defense as the No. 1 DOD priority will look like in the 2026 budget.
“I think that that's going to, in part, depend on what the top line is, and if you have to actually divert resources from a second or third priority into a first priority, or if you have kind of an ongoing effort that you augment, based on what the what the requirement is,” McCusker said.
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