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As Donald Trump blusters about sending the National Guard to go stare at the southern (and, apparently, only southern) border, there is nobody of any expertise who considers the plan anything more than a publicity stunt. But like much of what Trump does, it would be a tremendously expensive publicity stunt. And it would do damage beyond merely costing money. It would hurt the troops.
“There is a significant opportunity cost,” said James G. Stavridis, a retired four-star admiral who commanded United States forces in Europe and Latin America and is now dean of The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, adding that troops sent to the border with Mexico — ostensibly an American ally — would “miss important training opportunities for their real primary mission — combat.”
Seems like weakening military readiness would be something fellow Republicans would get bent out of sorts over. But the move also, and more concretely, stands the risk of interfering with National Guard deployments to assist in natural disasters: Every vehicle wandering the border is one that will be out of position when the next hurricane, flood, or other catastrophe strikes.
There are Pentagon officials who fret about another risk, however.
At the Pentagon, several officials privately expressed concern about being seen as picking a fight with an ally at a time when the military has plenty of adversaries — the Islamic State, North Korea, Russia, Syria — to contend with. Massing American troops at another country’s border, several current and former Defense Department officials said, would send a message of hostility and raise the chances of provoking an all-out conflict.
That possibility seems ... unlikely, to be honest. For starters, the National Guard will almost certainly be unarmed during their excursions; Mexico's own military may find the show more amusing than hostile, though it will certainly do little to bolster Trump’s dismal reputation in the country. Those troops will also almost certainly be forbidden from performing any interceptions of would-be refugees, instead limited solely to observer status; the biggest danger may be driving over a remote border accidentally. Or, far more likely still, needing to be towed out after driving into a particularly soft patch of desert sand.
If Team Trump does intend them to be armed, presumably to battle off the swarms of drug dealers and migrating children that the man vows are crashing over the borders, but only when nobody is looking, that poses other dangers; as the Times points out, an innocent 18-year-old Texan was killed by Marines tasked with drug surveillance back during the Clinton administration, which was the end of that particular stupid experiment of sending untrained but armed American troops to do the duties of law enforcement. But the odds that any border state governor, even in Texas, is going to agree to arming those patrols would appear to be next to zero, because signing your name to a document allowing armed military patrols to thread through the towns of your own constituents is, if anything went even the slightest bit wrong, a ticket to pariah status. Texas conservatives went into full froth and fury mode over Jade Helm, a large-scale but conventional military training exercise; both along the border and in Texas towns nowhere near it, the kooks among the conservative population are not as eager to host armed military patrols as the rest of the Trump base may imagine.
So at the very, very best, the Trump action to put some unspecified number of National Guardsmen on the border in some as of yet undetermined number of states would rank as a pricy publicity stunt; at worst, it would take only a single incident to turn the entire endeavor from Trump publicity stunt to high-profile fiasco. A single truckload of guardsmen having to be rescued by Mexican troops after accidentally going somewhere they shouldn't; a single fatality, at any point, for any reason; a storm striking somewhere in America while even a token portion of the local guard is occupied with Trump's stunt.
Which is precisely why Trump's staff has been trying to talk him out of this notion from the outset, but he's determined. He's going to send American troops to make an example out of somewhere, damn it, and if that somewhere is a Denny's in El Paso, then by God that will have to do.