Administration officials were warned of potential risks posed by President Donald Trump's deployment of National Guard troops for law enforcement purposes, but they downplayed those concerns.
The warnings proved to be prescient after an Afghan refugee shot two West Virginia National Guard members Wednesday in Washington, D.C., where they were carrying out "high visibility patrols" as part of the president's so-called crackdown on crime, reported The Atlantic.
"Military commanders had warned that their deployment represented an easy 'target of opportunity' for grievance-based violence," reported contributing write Juliette Kayyem. "The troops, deployed in an effort to reduce crime, are untrained in law enforcement; their days are spent cleaning up trash and walking the streets in uniform. Commanders, in a memo that was included in litigation challenging the high-visibility mission in D.C., argued that this could put them in danger."
"The Justice Department countered that the risk was merely 'speculative,'" she added. "It wasn’t. There are costs to performatively deploying members of the military — one of which is the risk of endangering them."
Guard member Sarah Beckstrom, 20, died from her injuries Thursday, while fellow guardsman Andrew Wolfe, 24, is reportedly "fighting for his life," and the suspect, 29-year-old Rahmanullah Lakanwal, is expected to be charged with first-degree murder and other crimes related to the shooting.
"Trump yesterday also ordered additional troops to D.C.," Kayyem wrote, "on the theory that more troops are always better than fewer ones, even though a federal judge had ruled just last week that the entire deployment would have to be halted because it was probably illegal."
"More troops is not the answer," she added. "The National Guard has been deployed as part of the White House’s political attacks on cities run by Democrats, and the Guard members are vulnerable because politics is not a military mission."
The military devotes much of its work to training and preparation, but Kayyem said readiness cannot be solved by pouring more troops into a mission – that gets solved by clearly outlining the mission and its purpose.
"Even if the deployments to D.C. were legal, they lack a clear mandate and metrics of success, and have vague rules of engagement and ill-defined operating procedures," Kayyem wrote. "And morale is low among part-time volunteer soldiers, who have had to leave home to patrol the streets of an American city that Trump doesn’t like."
The suspected gunman worked alongside CIA-backed units in his home country before seeking asylum following the U.S. withdrawal, and Kayyem said the president's plan repeated an error previously made in Afghanistan.
"Ironically, deploying more National Guardsmen to increase the force protection for National Guardsmen is a very Afghanistan-style military error," she wrote. "The sunk-cost fallacy describes a phenomenon whereby individuals irrationally decide to continue investing in a flawed decision as a way to try to justify the original bad decision. We sent more and more troops to Afghanistan because we had already lost troops there, instead of pausing to reassess the war itself."