Trump's long term intent for the U.S. Military, and puts his withdrawal of the Nat'l Guard in clearer perspective:
" putting troops on the streets of Los Angeles is a training exercise for the army, a form of reorientation...
In his Fort Bragg speech, Trump invited the troops to see protesters in Los Angeles as invaders...
They’re fighting for us, they’re stopping an invasion just like you’d stop an invasion. The big difference is most of the time when you stop an invasion, they’re wearing a uniform. In many ways, it’s tougher when they’re not wearing a uniform because you don’t know exactly who they are
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If the army doesn’t know exactly who “they” are, it has to be told.
Trump reminded the troops that their purpose is to spread fear: “For our adversaries, there is no greater fear than the United States Army.” Its job now is to spread that fear to an ununiformed and thus unknowable mass of internal enemies. Just as Trump transforms actual rebellion into the vague but omnipresent “danger of a rebellion,” he makes the invading army invisible, amorphous, and fluid.
Traditional military doctrine demands a clear understanding of the nature of the threat and the shape of the opposing forces.
Contrariwise, in the Trump doctrine the threat must be as nebulous as possible, and the opposing forces must be formless. Thus only the commander-in-chief can say at any given time what they are. The enemy the army must learn to face is one that he, and he alone, can conjure...
...In this light, it actually suits Trump’s purposes if his federalization of the National Guard is understood to be illegal. His deployment of troops in Los Angeles is intended to dissolve boundaries—between domestic disputes and foreign wars, between reality and performance, and above all between a law-bound democracy and arbitrary rule. Getting soldiers used to following illegal orders and to disregarding their “duty to disobey” is a big step toward autocracy...."
https://archive.ph/1VfK4
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