Pentagon says it can’t obey orders to attack fellow Americans at current funding levels
WASHINGTON — Facing the possibility of orders from a second Trump administration to attack fellow American citizens, senior defense officials are privately sharing their concerns about obeying such orders at current funding levels, sources confirmed today.
“These orders are not something that we would ever…could ever…do”, said an Army official speaking on condition of anonymity. “…without additional funding for capabilities beyond what is currently budgeted.”
He added: “These hypothetical orders would present a more complex human terrain mapping problem than Iraq or Afghanistan. And when you consider that we’re talking about not only our fellow American citizens but potentially the families of our fellow servicemembers, we just don’t currently have the resources to do this.”
Those comments were echoed by members of the Navy.
“I cannot even fathom the idea that we might be asked to round up fellow Americans, strip them of their citizenship, and ship them off to countries they’ve never known,” said a senior naval officer affiliated with The Joint Staff. “I mean, Military Sealift Command doesn’t have the ships for that. Even if it had the money to buy them, it doesn’t have the facilities to build them. And even if it had both, who will crew these ships?”
The Air Force has been particularly emphatic, with many privately grumbling that to obey orders to attack fellow Americans they would require a substantially larger F-35 buy, though it remains unclear how the Air Force would use them to support the orders in question.
Outside the Beltway, there is also growing pushback from military leaders at bases in communities nationwide.
“That we’re even talking about this flies in the face of norms much older than anyone currently wearing the uniform,” said one base facilities director. “The Defense Base Realignment and Closure Act got passed in what? 1990? We’ve been closing facilities since then, and now we’re talking about detaining hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of Americans? That isn’t just a switch you can flip. It would take conservatively $583 million to establish these detention facilities, though potentially less if we reactivated sites on current bases that were previously used for things like World War II internment, for example, at Fort McCoy.”
“Do you just have $583 million lying around, or the additional $162 million the authors of a future CONPLAN might conclude it would require to buy non-lethal weapons? Well, do you?” he asked.
“No, of course not. That money would have to come from less than three hundred places in the discretionary budget. It would require some hard choices by the administration that would be inherently political and thus inappropriate for me to speculate about,” he added.
Only the Marines, with their motto “Semper Fidelis,” have declined to join other services and have instead swiftly aligned behind a position laid out by the Commandant.
“The Marine Corps shall not break from its traditions under any circumstances,” wrote Gen. Eric Smith in a widely circulated white letter. “If the president orders the Marine Corps to attack or imprison our fellow citizens on a massive scale, we will draw on our culture of thrift and doing more with less to find a way to meet his intent within current fiscal constraints.”
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