President Trump just vastly expanded the role of the military in U.S. law enforcement across the country. On Monday, he signed an
executive order creating a “quick reaction force” of National Guard troops tasked with “quelling civil disturbances” and “ensuring the public safety and order.”
The order calls upon Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to ensure troops in the National Guard of every state “are resourced, trained, organized, and available to assist Federal, State, and local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances and ensuring the public safety” and directs the secretary to establish “a standing National Guard quick reaction force” for “nationwide deployment.” Hegseth will also work with adjutant generals to decide a number of each state’s Guard “to be reasonably available for rapid mobilization for such purposes,” the order says.
Notable: State National Guard units are generally controlled by the state’s governor, except in emergencies, Jacob Fischler writes for States Newsroom.
Also: “It is unusual…for National Guard troops to just live on standby waiting for the president to decide he wants to target crime in a city of his choosing,” the New York Times reports. “Guard troops train part time, often one weekend a month and two weeks a year, to respond to emergencies. They do not sit around waiting for the president to deploy them as a law enforcement arm.”
After threatening to send troops to Chicago on Friday, Trump took several swipes at Illinois Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker on Monday, calling him a “slob” and describing the city of Chicago as a “disaster” and a “killing field.”
“A lot of people are saying maybe we like a dictator,” Trump said Monday. “I don't like a dictator. I'm not a dictator. I'm a man with great common sense and a smart person. And when I see what's happening to our cities, and then you send in troops instead of being praised, they're saying you're trying to take over the Republic. These people are sick.”
“Donald Trump has been planning for quite a while now to deploy armed military personnel to the streets of Chicago,” Gov. Pritzker told reporters at a press conference Monday in Chicago, alluding to weekend reporting from the Washington Post on Pentagon plans that have been weeks in the making. “This is exactly the type of overreach that our country's founders warned against. And it’s the reason that they established a federal system with a separation of powers built on checks and balances. What President Trump is doing is unprecedented and unwarranted. It is illegal, it is unconstitutional. It is un-American.”
“This is not about fighting crime,” Pritzker said. “This is about Donald Trump searching for any justification to deploy the military in a blue city in a blue state to try and intimidate his political rivals,” he said. “This is about the president of the United States and his complicit lackey Stephen Miller searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities, and end elections. There is no emergency in Chicago that calls for armed military intervention. There is no insurrection.”
Pritzker also noted the rate of violent crime is higher in Republican-dominated states than in those run by Democrats. “Thirteen of the top twenty cities in homicide rates have Republican governors,” he said. “None of these cities is Chicago. Eight of the top ten states with the highest homicide rates are led by Republicans. None of those states is Illinois.”
Regarding National Guard troops, Pritzker said: “It is insulting to their integrity and to the extraordinary sacrifices that they make to serve in the guard, to use them as a political prop, where they could be put in situations where they will be at odds with their local communities, the ones that they seek to serve.” He also warned troops against protesting such deployments, noting “they can be court martialed, and their lives ruined, if they resist deployment.”
“The state of Illinois is ready to stand against this military deployment with every peaceful tool we have,” the Illinois governor said. “We will see the Trump administration in court. We will use every lever in our disposal to protect the people of Illinois and their rights.”
Legal-expert reax: “Trump is trying to normalize the militarization of our country. This is where it starts, not where it will end,” said Joyce Vance, former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama. “Trump is dropping the pretense of abiding by the rule of law,” she warned. “A national emergency here, an invasion there. No matter what the truth is, he makes it up as he goes along, shamelessly lying about crime going up, when it’s in fact going down, and accusing agencies that release the statistics that contradict him of fraud when he’s called on the lies.”
“This isn’t just about Trump’s ‘crime emergency in the District of Columbia.’ It’s about the entire country,” Vance said Monday. “Force and intimidation are not strategies we associate with American presidents. Those are not constitutional prerogatives the Founding Fathers assigned to the president. That is how dictators operate. That is how Trump operates.”
Developing: Trump to nationalize defense firms? After shaking down Intel for a 10% equity stake in the company on Friday, Trump’s commerce secretary said there’s a “monstrous discussion” in the administration about partially nationalizing U.S. defense firms like Lockheed Martin. “Lockheed Martin makes 97% of their revenue from the U.S. government,” Howard Lutnick told CNBC on Tuesday. “They are basically an arm of the U.S. government,” he said. “But I tell you what, there’s a lot of talking that needs to be had about ‘how do we finance our munitions acquisitions?’” And those discussions are ongoing, he said.
“Trump accused Kamala Harris of being a socialist, but the Biden Administration never nationalized companies,” the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board warned Monday. “Why aren’t Republicans pushing back on Mr. Trump’s Intel deal?” they asked. “Not long ago it would have been hard to imagine a Republican President demanding government ownership in a private company, but here we are.”
Second opinion: “Hard to convince younger generations, but for decades, Republicans went on and on about how two of the worst things imaginable were (1) state intervention in the market and (2) DC using federal troops against US states; both so bad the people should be ready for armed rebellion in case it happens,” said University of Illinois international relations professor Nicholas Grossman.
But are chips different? Ben Thompson, a tech-industry analyst based in Taiwan, writes in his Stratechery column that “chips generally, and foundries specifically, really are a unique case.” With the world’s most advanced chips made by TSMC on an island less than 100 miles off the Chinese coast, Thompson argues, U.S. national security demands extraordinary measures to onshore chipmaking. Read that, here.
Ominous signs: “Something is materially different in our country this week than last,” writes historian and author Garrett Graff. “The president’s military occupation of the capital has escalated in recent days into something not seen since British troops marched the streets of colonial Boston—even though precisely nothing has happened to warrant it.”
“Saying that our country has tipped over an invisible edge into an authoritarian state plainly is important—and easier than most in the media and pundit class will pretend it is,” he warns. “American fascism looks like the president using armed military units from governors loyal to his regime to seize cities run by opposition political figures and it looks like the president using federal law enforcement to target regime opponents,” Graff says, and emphasizes, “American fascism looks like the would-be self-proclaimed king deploying the military on US soil not only not in response to requests by local or state officials but over—and almost specifically to spite—their vociferous objections.”
“Armed soldiers patrol the streets of the nation’s capital, with more cities apparently to come,” media watchdog Dan Froomkin wrote Monday in a piece he titled, “We have become an authoritarian state, and our top newsrooms are in denial.” He elaborated: “Immigrants who have done nobody any harm are abducted and disappeared by masked agents. The state is seizing stakes of national companies. Election integrity is under attack. Political opponents are targeted with criminal probes. Federal judges’ orders are ignored. Educational institutions are extorted into obedience. Key functions of the government are politicized and degraded. Expertise and science are devalued.”
“Every outrage is just one more thing Trump has done, rather than the ever-mounting evidence of a corrupt dictatorship,” Froomkin warns. “And our dominant media institutions won’t call him out. Rather, they obscure reality under a haze of incremental stories, each one presented as if what is going on is fairly normal. As if it’s just politics…The coverage is a play-by-play as the burners click upward, rather than a check to see if the frog is still alive, which it is not.”
Welcome to this Tuesday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1920, the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution was certified, giving women the right to vote.
Around the Defense Department
New: The Pentagon’s DIU director Doug Beck has resigned, Reuters reported Monday. According to the wire service, three sources said “officials at the Department of Defense had previously raised concerns about political donations made by Beck to Democrats.” Beck had been in the Defense Innovation Unit position since 2023.
Background: “The DIU was launched in 2015 to speed up the U.S. military's adoption of technology coming out of Silicon Valley. The unit, which last year received close to $1 billion from the National Defense Authorization Act, primarily grants contracts to smaller startup companies with less-proven track records with the goal of transitioning them to larger contracts across the Pentagon.” More, here.
New CNO vows new “engine of naval dominance.” It’s “the foundry”: the Navy’s shipyards, training centers, shore facilities, weapons production lines, and logistics networks, Adm. Daryl Caudle said as he assumed command of the service at a Washington Navy Yard ceremony on Monday morning. “For too long, we’ve treated this interconnected network of force generation as background noise. No longer…From reducing maintenance delays to ensuring spare parts and ordnance flow on time, the foundry will become the engine of naval dominance.” Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams has more, here.
The 34th CNO fills a job left vacant for six months by Hegseth, who fired Adm. Lisa Franchetti without explanation in February.
Navy to consolidate several acquisition offices into a Rapid Capabilities Office. “The NRCO will serve as the single accountable organization spanning all naval warfare domains, responsible for the rapid assessment, execution, fielding and transition of urgent solutions within a three-year timeframe to ensure U.S. maritime supremacy,” SecNav John Phelan ordered in an Aug. 19 memo obtained by Breaking Defense. Read on, here.
Speaking of acquisition shakeups: RIP, JCIDS. Pete Newell, former leader of the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force, applauds Hegseth’s Aug. 20 memo in which he orders the Pentagon to “commence the disestablishment of JCIDS and direct the Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC) to cease validating Component level requirement documents to the maximum extent permitted by law.”
JCIDS 101: The Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System, for those who don’t speak Pentagon, was established in 2003 and most recently updated four years ago to centralize the development of requirements and metrics for the military’s acquisition efforts.
Good riddance, Newell says: “We can continue a process that produces beautifully documented requirements for technology that is often out-of-date before it even reaches the hands of a soldier, or we can embrace a new methodology. The fundamental shift must be this: stop obsessing over requirements and start solving problems.” Read his thoughts at Defense One, here.
Developing: Trump wants a “War Department” instead of a Defense Department, and he said Monday he wants to officially change the name “over the next week or so,” he told reporters Monday at the White House during a meeting with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung.
“We're just going to do it,” Trump said when asked if he has considered lawmakers’ opinions on the matter. “I'm sure Congress will go along if we need that. I don't think we even need that,” he said. CBS News has a bit more on the history of the U.S. military’s name changes, which have been established by Congress.
Russia’s Ukraine invasion, cont.
The Pentagon has blocked Ukraine from attacking Russia with U.S.-provided long-range missiles, the Wall Street Journal reported Saturday. That includes all ATACMS, or Army Tactical Missile Systems, in a ban that’s been in place since the spring, U.S. officials said. As with many of the Trump administration’s decisions regarding Ukraine, the Pentagon’s #2 civilian Elbridge Colby is said to be behind the ban, which officials called a “review mechanism.”
“The review gives Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth final say over whether Ukraine can employ the [ATACMS], which have a range of nearly 190 miles, to strike Russia,” the Journal writes.
Ukraine has stepped up attacks on Russian oil refineries, knocking an estimated 13% of Russia’s fuel production offline, the Journal reported separately on Monday. “As a result, several regions, including Russian-occupied Crimea and parts of Siberia, have implemented rationing at gas stations,” Yaroslav Trofimov and Georgi Kantchev write.
“These strikes don’t have a direct impact on the military activity, but they do impact the Russian economy,” former Ukrainian foreign minister Pavlo Klimkin said. “And the Russian economy already has problems, so even a small push can create bottlenecks and multiply problems inside that system.”
Latest: “Ukrainian drones on Sunday set ablaze the strategic Ust-Luga facility on the Baltic Sea, a few days after the Druzhba pipeline that supplies Russian crude oil to Belarus, Hungary and Slovakia was disabled. More than a dozen Russian refineries have been hit over the past month, some several hundred miles from the border, as Ukrainian drones became more potent and more numerous.” More, here.
Commentary: What Western security guarantees for Ukraine might look like. After President Trump’s high-level meeting at the White House last week with President Zelenskyy and several European leaders, attention has turned to what security guarantees for Ukraine might look like if a peace deal is reached, Luke Coffey of the Hudson Institute writes for Defense One.
The most effective way to guarantee Ukraine’s long-term security is NATO membership, he writes. “But in the short term, President Trump has repeatedly stated that he does not support this idea, nor will he agree to U.S. troops on Ukrainian soil. With this political reality in mind, policymakers should consider a layered approach to guaranteeing Ukraine’s security,” Coffey advises. “No single measure is sufficient, but together they would provide the most robust protection currently possible.”
Step 1: Establish a civilian monitoring mission that can patrol both sides of a line of occupation, should a peace agreement leave Russian troops on Ukrainian soil.
Step 2: Formalize an ensemble of European governments willing to send troops to Ukraine to serve as a deterrent and as a visible demonstration of their commitment to its sovereignty. Several countries, including the UK, France, Canada, and Türkiye, have suggested they could contribute forces.
And “The third layer involves America,” Coffey writes. Exactly how? Read on, here.
Here’s Trump on security guarantees: “We haven’t even discussed the specifics,” he told reporters Monday. The president was asked, “You rule out boots on the ground in Ukraine, but how would air support as part of a security guarantee be any different?” He replied, “Well, you don't know what security guarantee is because we haven't even discussed the specifics of it, and we'll see. Number one, Europe is going to give them significant security guarantees and they should because they're right there, but we'll be involved. From the standpoint of backup, we're going to help them. And I think if we get a deal and I think we will, but if we get a deal, you're not going to—I don't believe you're going to have much of a problem.”
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