On the other side of the Pacific, Beijing is watching keenly as President Donald Trump uses the might of the U.S. military not to posture against China, but to posture against the American people.
While the United States negotiated a trade deal with China, the target-of-the-moment in Trump’s trade war against the world, the U.S. president sent an active-duty Marine infantry unit to help quell heated protests against immigration enforcement agents in Los Angeles. These two things seem hardly related, but the Marine deployment is yet another indication that regardless of what he says, Trump is fundamentally unserious about being “tough on China.”
At 168,000-strong, the Marine Corps is a small branch, about half the Navy’s and one-third the Army’s size. More importantly, the Marines are in the midst of a major force redesign in preparation for a high-end, large-scale war with a peer or near-peer competitor, China, involving forward naval and amphibious operations and extensive littoral maneuver, with contested command of the sea.
The political theater of sending Marines to Los Angeles subtly eats at force readiness and signals domestic vulnerability. There is no reason to send Marines – or the National Guard, for that matter – when local and regional police forces could do the job. Nor have they been given sufficient opportunity, as Trump pre-empted a regional police response by unnecessarily escalating the situation almost immediately.
Under the Armed Forces Act, the Marines are not authorized to engage in riot control, only protection of federal agents and federal property. Even if the Insurrection Act were invoked and Marines were granted policing power, they would be subject to law enforcement’s legal and constitutional constraints and rules of engagement.
Military training in non-lethal weaponry and crowd control and de-escalation techniques is primarily for foreign, wartime environments whose rules of engagement differ from those for domestic police. The president may intend this incompatibility, in order to incrementally make domestic policing rules of engagement more permissive, as he desired during his first term.
Critically, however, the Marines will not conduct riot control or even counterinsurgency, as they have in recent wars, in a future war with China. As such, this mission in Los Angeles is simply a distraction.
The Marine Corps has taken a bold, risky, and not-uncontroversial commitment to its conception of the future fight and its specific role in that future war. The demands of the redesigned strategy and the relatively small size of the Marine Corps require singular focus on developing capabilities for a large-scale, complex, distant war in which it will be the tip of the spear.
To posture politically with active-duty troops from any service, much less the Marine Corps, at this time is irresponsible at best.
The long-term implications for civil-military relations will also hamper capacity for peer or near-peer conflict. The Marine Corps would prefer to stay focused on its strategic mission, instead of providing security and logistical services for domestic law enforcement. This unnecessary deployment amplifies other more and less blatant attempts to politicize the military and secure its personal loyalty to Trump, including what could have been an innocuous military parade on Saturday that has forced some units to cancel critical training activities in order to participate in the pageantry.
U.S. military personnel are professionals who retain deep respect for the office of commander-in-chief, whatever they might think of the person occupying that office. But repeated and systematic attempts by an officeholder to collapse that distinction will eventually erode the distinction in the minds of those who answer to that office.
As professional as U.S. military personnel are, loss of confidence in one’s boss will damage morale and affect job performance, even if only at the margins.
But in a war against a peer competitor like China, the margins will matter. And in the long term, corroding proper civil-military relations will endanger the republic.
One of the U.S. military’s great strengths is to be able to fight for an ideal, to plausibly hold the belief that the United States, its government, and its people are special. That conviction becomes harder to retain if the U.S. proves not so different after all, as Trump himself has claimed, in comparing the U.S. to Russia.
Engaging in political theater and/or domestic repression akin to that of the United States’ historical enemies instead of focusing on its strategic and operational missions is not what the Marine Corps wants to do or should be doing. This current clash over federalism and civil-military relations plays games with U.S. national security and military readiness.
Undoubtedly, many will enjoy the dashing spectacle of uniformed Marines in the streets, exhibiting their rightful reputation for fierce and courageous fighting. And deploying 700 infantry troops in a supporting role for 60 days to the tune of $134 million – chump change for the Pentagon, but notable when the Department of Defense has been told to cut 8 percent of its budget annually for the next five years – alone will not make or break U.S. capabilities in a future war against China. With this deployment, Trump thinks he signals strength to his adversaries, foreign and domestic.
But this vanity project also signals to domestic audiences and foreign enemies that Trump is willing to neglect long-term military capability and readiness for the sake of personal political gain – and that is a sign of weakness. The Chinese Communist Party almost certainly reads it that way.