WASHINGTON — Fresh into the White House, President Donald Trump has told the Pentagon to reassess its stance on homeland defense and reorient the US Northern Command to “seal” America’s borders.
“I will send troops to the Southern border to repel the disastrous invasion of our country,” he said during his inaugural address on Monday.
Hours after being sworn in as the 47th president, Trump began signing a flurry of executive orders and actions, including one presidential action declaring a national emergency on the Southern border and then an executive action calling on the Pentagon to clarify the military’s role “protecting the territorial integrity of the United States.” In that second one, he gives the Secretary of Defense 10 days to deliver a Unified Command Plan tasking US Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) with the border mission.
Following delivery of that plan, USNORTHCOM head Gen. Gregory Guillot will have an additional 30 days to craft a commander’s estimate of just what it will take to “seal the borders and maintain the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and security of the United States by repelling forms of invasion, including unlawful mass migration, narcotics trafficking, human smuggling and trafficking, and other criminal activities.”
Historically NORTHCOM, along with NORAD, has been responsible for air and missile defense in case of an attack on the United States, but the Department of Homeland Defense is normally in charge of border security.
The directives come as the Pentagon is temporarily under the leadership of Robert Salesses, formerly a relatively low-level official in an acting secretary of defense role as Fox News host Pete Hegseth’s congressional confirmation proceeds. The Pentagon previously told reporters that it is “fully committed” to carrying out Trump’s orders.
This specific executive order could potentially lead to an influx of troops along the southern border, adding to those already there as part of the Texas National Guard’s Operation Lone Star and the approximate 2,500 soldiers supporting the Customs and Border Patrol mission, according to one military official.
A former senior military official told Breaking Defense today that while drafting such a plan is “doable” in 10 days, it will be the implementation that proves tricky.
“It will likely challenge” the entire department, the former official said, as these “are major decisions” that will “require people.”
The issue is that NORTHCOM does not have standing forces per se; rather troops are allocated to the command for exercises and any deployments deemed necessary. So shifting personnel from another military service or another combatant command “is a zero sum game,” meaning that “someone will have to pay in readiness or future response,” said the former official, speaking candidly on the condition of anonymity.
This doesn’t mean that DoD should not shift the personnel, the former military official stressed. DoD’s job at this point is to “provide options” to fulfill the president’s executive order in the best way possible for the mission and the US military.
Interestingly, it is Indo-Pacific Command which has the bulk of US military forces within the United States — both along the West Coast and in Alaska.
There are different ways to provide troops in an emergency situation: direct military forces to undertake law enforcement duties and thus temporarily override Posse Comitatus via the Insurrection Act of 1807; call up of the National Guard by governors, or use of Title 32 that allows federal activation of the National Guard for emergencies or national disasters with Department of Defense (DoD) covering the cost.
Trump’s executive order calls on the secretaries of defense and homeland security to provide within 90 days a report detailing “the conditions at the southern border of the United States and any recommendations regarding additional actions that may be necessary to obtain complete operational control of the southern border, including whether to invoke the Insurrection Act.”
The Insurrection Act allows the president to both federalize the National Guard and call up military troops to restore civilian order and suppress an insurrection or rebellion.
There is precedent for use of the Insurrection Act in a civil emergency. In 1992, then-President George H.W. Bush did so in response to the riots in Los Angeles over the acquittal of four police officers involved in the excessive beating of Rodney King. In addition, then-President Dwight Eisenhower used the Insurrection Act to send federal troops to oversee the desegregation of the schools in Little Rock, Ark., in 1957 over the objections of the
That said, there are likely to be legal challenges to the president’s order, which may complicate any deployment.