The National Guard's Anti-You Quick Reaction Force

Edited by Sam Thielman

I HAVE BEEN deep in book-writing mode, because it's book-writing crunchtime until the end of the year. My manuscript due-date is staring up at me from the pit of my stomach. I have been diligent in filling the pit: Since July 1, I have fed it 13,581 words, divided into three chapters. Two of those chapters I have written this month alone.

When I have not focused on book-writing, I have watched the U.S.-Israeli genocide in Gaza unfold on my phone. On Monday, the IDF brazenly murdered five journalists—Maryam Abu Daqqa, Moaz Abu Taha, Hossam al-Masri, Mohammed Salama and Ahmed Abu Aziz—in a double-tap strike on the Nasser Hospital. A double-tap is familiar from the drone strikes of the War on Terror. It is meant to kill responders at the scene of a strike, whether rescue workers, medical personnel, reporters or even relatives of the initial target. Israel is lying and saying it didn't mean to do what it obviously meant to do. Its current flimsy line is that it was out to destroy a "Hamas camera." 

I say all that to explain why I missed a significant turn of the domestic-repression ratchet and had to learn about it from Hamilton Nolan's newsletter. Tucked into an executive order President Trump issued Monday intending to consolidate his hold over D.C., Trump instructed Pete Hegseth to cobble together from compliant state National Guards a "standing" Quick Reaction Force "for civil disturbances." Anytime you hear Quick Reaction Force (QRF) or Immediate Response Force (IRF), the model is the 82nd Airborne Division out of Fort Bragg, built to respond to crises worldwide within hours. This is the relevant section of the order, with my emphasis:

The Secretary of Defense shall immediately begin ensuring that each State's Army National Guard and Air National Guard are resourced, trained, organized, and available to assist Federal, State, and local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances and ensuring the public safety and order whenever the circumstances necessitate, as appropriate under law.  In coordination with the respective adjutants general, the Secretary of Defense shall designate an appropriate number of each State's trained National Guard members to be reasonably available for rapid mobilization for such purposes.  In addition, the Secretary of Defense shall ensure the availability of a standing National Guard quick reaction force that shall be resourced, trained, and available for rapid nationwide deployment. 

This has transformative potential for the National Guard and for the presidency. 

Presaged by Trump's military improvisations in Los Angeles and D.C., his executive order hollows out Posse Comitatus, the 19th century law that prevents the military from usurping the functions of local law enforcement, the preservation of which was a rallying cry for the nativist right before the nativist right achieved presidential power. Trump learned in 2020 there were political and institutional limits on his ability to use military force against public demonstrations by nonwhite and leftwing groups, prompting him to fall back on the use of Homeland Security spec-ops forces in Portland. One locus of opposition was within the Pentagon, so Trump purged the Pentagon leadership at the end of his first term and stocked it with cronies at the beginning of his second. (And continues purging it.)

Hegseth, the lead crony, will now establish what is meant to be an enduring military force intended to target disfavored Americans in disfavored cities. The executive order makes the National Guard into a feeder force for presidentially-directed operations against their neighbors. The whole point of state National Guards is the relationships those units have with their communities, bonds that make civil-military relations real, not just lines on a chain-of-command org chart. Now the Guard's recruitment, training, equipping and resourcing will involve severing those bonds through actions against civilians in the QRF's home state; or in deployment out of state, to do the work of domestic repression that state Guard units might flinch at performing under orders. 

Trump and Hegseth are creating an Anti-You QRF. An Anti-You RF, if we're portmanteauxing. 

In the mainstream media, the Democratic Party and the venues where "national security" discourse occurs, the pervasive reaction to all of this is avoidance. When Trump soft-pitched a military takeover of Chicago, House Democratic Leader Rep. Hakeem "AIPAC Shakur" Jeffries, called it "a distraction." All Jeffries is communicating is that he stands for monied interests who are willing to sacrifice you because they think compliance will ensure their wealth and safety. If you read the New York Times, you would come away with all the sanguinity of its preferred readership: elites who will not be run up on for smoking on their porches. And while I want to say more on this in its own right in its own time, the "national security" commentariat is deeply allergic to the reality that the tools, institutions, operations and authorities they devote themselves to, and not Russia or China or Iran, are the primary threat to Americans' safety and freedom. But what do I know—I’m sure I’ve just been too deep in book-writing to see the robust, effective opposition to Trump developing amongst those elites.

There is no non-abusive reason for this QRF to exist. It addresses no genuine problem and is oriented entirely to address pretextual ones. To let it stand unchallenged will guarantee its use against whatever this or any other president considers (in Adrien Vermeuele's phrase) "pervasive social disorder." That is an ominous military tool for a president who unambiguously wishes to use it. I wrote in late 2020 that Trump was out to create a loyalist Deep State within the already-nigh-unaccountable Security State, and while I didn't have this specifically in mind, it's certainly fit for purpose. The REIGN OF TERROR thesis is, unfortunately, powerfully explanatory and predictive. 

83 PERCENT of those killed by the IDF in Gaza are civilians, according to its own data. I don't know what else anyone could say after nearly 23 months to convince a skeptic that this is a genocide. But those are rates of slaughter that rival Srebrenica's and exceed Aleppo's—both of which I was led to understand were signal moments shaping the consciences of the American liberal hawks who deny the genocide in Gaza, or even those who served it. [This week The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner interviewed Biden’s Israel ambassador Jack Lew, who simply said it was fine for Israel to murder children so long as their parents were Hamas fighters. Chotiner tried to lay out several times that this was a war crime and Lew explained that he didn’t care.—Sam]

THE TRAC DATABASE of financial transactions between Mexico and several southwestern U.S. states has been primed for abuse. Lo and behold, The Intercept recently found through court records that ICE has been using its access to the Arizona database to identify migrants to target. And Palantir's mega-migrant tracker, ImmigrationOS, is coming next month. Oh, and speaking of Palantir…

IT'S NOT ONLY a U.S-Israeli genocide in Gaza. It's a U.S.-Israeli settlement of the West Bank, as Carolina Sophia Predrazzi details for The Nation. I've been meaning to write a piece on this from a different angle, but I've got this book to finish…

MERCH TEXT