Officials are working out various scenarios as they prepare to rebuild the Pentagon.
The Pentagon is thinking about how to work with Trump / photo REUTERS
Pentagon officials are informally discussing how they would respond if President-elect Donald Trump orders a domestic deployment of troops and the firing of apolitical employees.
As he writes CNN Citing Defense Department sources, Trump hinted that he would be open to using troops for domestic law enforcement and mass deportations, and signaled that he wanted to fill the government with loyalists and “cleanse out corrupt actors” in the US national security establishment.
Now officials are working out various scenarios as they prepare to rebuild the Pentagon. “We are preparing and planning for the worst-case scenario, but the reality is that we don’t know yet how everything will happen,” one military official said.
Trump’s election also raised questions at the Pentagon about what would happen if the president issued an illegal order, especially if his political appointees inside the department did not recant.
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“Troops are required by law not to obey illegal orders. But the question is what will happen then – will we see the resignation of senior military leaders? Or will they consider this an abandonment of their people?” another source said.
It’s unclear who Trump will choose to lead the Pentagon, although officials believe he will try to avoid the “adversarial” relationship he already had with the military, said a former military officer who served during Trump’s first administration.
“The relationship between the White House and the Department of Defense has been really, really bad, and so… I know the number one question right now is how they’re going to select the people that they put into the Department of Defense now,” the former official said.
What’s on many Defense Department officials’ minds is how Trump plans to use American military power at home.
There is little the Pentagon can do to proactively protect the force from potential abuses of power by the commander in chief. Defense Department lawyers can and do do so for military leaders regarding the legality of the orders, but there are no real legal safeguards that would prevent Trump from sending American soldiers to patrol US streets.
US presidential election
After Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election, Washington’s policy towards supporting Ukraine will almost certainly change. But it is still impossible to say exactly how, the publication wrote on November 6 The New York Times.
