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.”
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.(correcting myself on this point; the US did draw up National Guard units as part of the Iraq invasion, though as best I can tell their role was almost entirely restricted to support, logistics, and rear line security, not frontline combat. Still, those are essential components of any successful military operation and I’m sure they made significant contributions there.).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.
And I’ll add: I wonder, are you going to sign up? Know anybody who would? You gotta be seriously stupid to go to war for Trump.
Sure. Bare numbers explain nothing. US troops are already committed to over 750 military bases and ships at sea in over 80 countries. Pull them out of those places and see what happens. Tension in the middle east, pull them out to go to Venezuela, what happens? Tension in Taiwan, pull them out and an invite Chinese aggression … etc. etc. etc. Why, if you are old enough to remember, did the US rely so heavily on Reserve and National Guard troops during the Iraq war?
Now, Venezuela is not Iraq where you can just steam roll tanks across the desert. It’s Viet Nam. How many were killed on the ground when Russia decided to just go blundering into Ukraine? It’s a lot easier to defend than attack. Masses of US soldiers would die in any protracted ground assault on Venezuela b/c as soon as it gets hot, Russia and China are shadow arming them to the teeth just like we’re doing in Ukraine.
Every man is valuable when if it goes boots on the ground. Are you beginning to get it now?
Just to use your Iraq example there, over 250,000 national guard were deployed to Iraq. And once again, the mission in DC, just to use one example from Trump’s domestic deployments, is only 800 troops. That is multiple orders of magnitude smaller. Quite literally a drop in the bucket. They would easily be capable of making up those numbers from elsewhere.
For someone who came out swinging so hard about providing facts, you seem to be deeply adverse to actually looking at them. Absolutely none of the numbers for your argument add up.
Would invading Venezuela be an intensely stupid idea? Yes, absolutely. But 800 soldiers wouldn’t have solved Vietnam and it won’t solve this either. These are simply entirely different orders of scale.