Martial Flaw in LA

The comedy and tragedy of the military’s Los Angeles deployments

The U.S. military wants you to know — in spit-shined Pentagon statements, press releases, and social media posts — that it’s got everything under control in its deployments to Los Angeles. 

Except they don’t.

A military command misidentifying which of its units is being sent to LA, the Defense Department name calling elected officials on social media, farcical photo ops. The Pentagon’s response to the anti-ICE protests has been a parade of missteps and errors that would be funny if the ineptitude wasn’t so alarming.

Well, let’s be real: it’s funny, too. (Maybe not for the uniformed military which, sources tell me, are expending a lot of energy trying to comply with the orders from Washington without getting mired in the political quicksand Trump and Hegseth are doing backstrokes in.)

Take, for example, the U.S. Northern Command’s photo op today, depicting nine fearless warriors of the “79th Infantry Brigade” standing up to some lawless LA mob, “day and night,” per its official statement. 

There’s just one problem: the patches on the shoulders of the National Guard troops in the picture identify them as being members of the 81st Stryker Brigade, a unit from Washington state that has subunits spread out over Washington, Oregon and California.

You can see the same insignia on the flag for the 81st in the photo below.

It’s not the end of the world, but this doesn’t exactly instill confidence. Which unit is in Los Angeles? And where are the troops from?

(By the way, the 81st Brigade was also sent to Seattle in 1999 to respond to the protests against the World Trade Organization.)

Next on the list of absurdities is who the soldiers in the picture are facing down. Of the three civilians facing them, two are clearly members of the news media. So there’s nine soldiers in military fatigues, riot helmets and armed with automatic rifles for … one protester? Again, not alarming per se, but it’s the military’s own staged photo. This is the best they could do?

The sole protester is seemingly yelling at the soldiers, who are positioned in front of some federal building. The only other civilians are just milling about in the foreground. This is the “violent occupation,” in President Trump’s words, that would have “completely obliterated” Los Angeles had he not sent in the National Guard? 

As for the soldiers themselves, the tragedy of the military being used by the administration in its theatrical showdown is seen in the junior enlistees (judging from the patchy facial hair and other clues), who have been put on the streets. In one picture, you can see the rank insignia denoting a Private E-2, meaning he’s probably straight out of basic training and has been in the Army for less than a year. 

This is the tip of the spear guarding LA from its being “completely obliterated”? Lol.

Another photo released by Northern Command shows the “79th” standing in front of a larger crowd. But here again Trump’s rhetoric about a city “under siege” following a foreign “invasion” rings hollow. 

Here you get a better angle of the soldiers’ faces, which again, are very young. The oldest guy among them by far is not a soldier but a federal law enforcement officer.

Then there’s the crowd. The right half of the photo is dominated by people in neon yellow vests, one wearing a helmet seemingly labeled “PRESS.” Just like with the last photo, a sizable part of what they’re responding to seems to just be members of the news media. Which makes all of this look like a publicity stunt — especially considering how politically charged the rhetoric from the Pentagon has been.

Yesterday, an official Defense Department “rapid response” X (Twitter) feed posted a photo of the charred remnants of a car and a protester waving a Mexican flag around with the label: “Gavin Newscum’s California.”

The military people I’ve talked to about the post all agree: it is the most inappropriate, partisan, and maybe even unlawful statement the Pentagon has ever issued. (And it’s not even clever!) There’s good reason the Constitution was designed to keep the military and politics separate.

Especially alarming is the likelihood that the young men being deployed — and they are overwhelmingly young men — are glued to social media, and surely they see these posts and the message contained therein. How seriously will they take this rhetoric?

While Washington continues to debate the paperwork associated with the California deployment, the military is trying to project calm. But in this wash of weirdness, another message seems to be just as powerful: that the enemy is the people and they should be put down with force.

The troops’ mission is, for now, relatively limited; but if and when the Guard and the Marines are unleashed, you can expect them to go overboard.

— Edited by William M. Arkin