President Donald Trump announced Wednesday that he’s withdrawing the National Guard from Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland but left the door open to sending federal forces “in a much different and stronger form.”
His announcement comes after the US Supreme Court last week rejected his request to allow him to deploy the guard to Chicago to protect ICE agents as part of the administration’s ongoing immigration crackdown.
“We are removing the National Guard from Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland, despite the fact that CRIME has been greatly reduced by having these great Patriots in those cities, and ONLY by that fact,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, arguing that those cities would be “gone if it weren’t for the Federal Government stepping in.”
If you think he needs to pull back the national guard to handle an invasion, you seriously underestimate how grotesquely oversized the US military is.
I always like to come with proof when sharing my opinions: https://www.hoover.org/research/military-recruiting-shortfalls-recurring-challenge
Wait, are you… Are you actually serious right now?
You think that an article saying the US military missed its yearly recruitment goal by 25% is proof that they need to recall the National Guard from Chicago in order to have the capacity to invade Venezuela?
Did you spend more than 10 seconds looking at the numbers before posting this nonsense?
They fell short of their yearly recruitment target by about 12,000 personnel. Between active duty and reserve forces, the total size of the US military is over 2 million. And there is absolutely no scenario where you would ever use a national guard unit in the initial wave of an invasion.
The US Marine Corps, on its own, is ~170k personnel. The entire Venezuelan military, across all branches, is estimated at around 337k personnel.
But no, please, do explain how the 800 national guard troops deployed to DC are absolutely vital to the success of a potential invasion.
It’s sized to fight two peer or near-peer adversaries at the same time, winning on one front and at least holding the other.