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Earlier this month President Donald Trump and Secretary of War Peter Hegseth met with over 800 senior military leaders. What happened afterward is a sign of our times. The media portrayed the meeting as unprecedented, when in fact such gatherings on a smaller scale are routine. The big takeaway created by the mainstream media was that American soldiers will be coming to invade your cities. The real news: It has already been done, by multiple administrations. Once again, libs have lost their mind over nothing new.
Speaking of losing their minds, it is worth wandering through some of the media memes surrounding this meeting before most everyone settled on the hometown invasion one. As soon as the plan was announced, Twitter historians exploded, referring to some meeting Hitler once held with his generals, proof Trump was calling the leaders together to have them swear an oath to him. That did not happen, so the meme switched to what a waste of money holding the meeting was, those busy generals having to fly in. Anyone who has been near the military is familiar with such gatherings to hear a commander's “intent” and so pass it downstream. People familiar with the military also might know how much the services spend everyday just existing: It costs well over $1.5 million a day to run a Nimitz-class carrier, but let’s clutch pearls over airline tickets for the brass. So that meme flopped.
For a few days social media focused on showing photos of the leaders and adding sound bubbles to them about things like Trump being a draft dodger and thus not to be respected. Media outrage ignored the long bipartisan history of draft deferments. No bubbles were seen for Joe Biden, a lifeguard in high school who got out of the military on a deferment for asthma. Bill Clinton used a college deferment. George W. Bush avoided Vietnam after his dad got him a domestic desk job in the Air National Guard. Obama just said no.
Never mind all the late-night TV jokes. The same comedians who thought Trump was Hitler last week will tell you this week it’s fascism to ask soldiers to do more push-ups.
What the media settled on as the final narrative was a line in Trump’s remarks about the military needing to watch for “enemies within” and perhaps using American cities for training. The media ignored the line in every government employee’s oath of office, the one that for a couple hundred years has referred to enemies foreign and domestic. They’re pretending it’s a revelation when it’s been actual boilerplate for decades. They also treated the idea of training in American cities as something new and terrible, another step towards fascism. The problem with that is this: The military has for many years deployed to cities, and has under many administrations, Republican and Democrat, regularly used our cities as kinetic training grounds.
We’ll leave for another time the details of the Posse Comitatus Act, an 1878 federal law prohibiting the use of the military to execute domestic law, except to note what libs bleat on about Trump violating has a sordid past. The Act was passed under pressure from the Southern states during the Civil War Reconstruction era to prevent the military from being used to oppose Jim Crow laws in the South. It is thus ironic that some of the most significant deployments (notice how things change when you write “deployment” instead of “occupation” or “invasion”?) were in the 1950s and ’60s, when the U.S. military and National Guard were sent to Southern states to enforce federal laws against racial discrimination when local law enforcement refused to do it.
The growing drug problem in the United States and the inability of federal and local law enforcement officials to meet the challenge of massive drug inflows led Congress in 1981 to enact legislation providing for military cooperation with civilian law enforcement officials. Although recognizing the posse comitatus restrictions, the law opens the door for extensive use of the military in civilian law enforcement. The libs seem unbothered by this use of American soldiers on our soil.
Looking back, troops were also used to suppress race riots in the 1960s and ’70s, and again in the ’90s to quell a multiday riot in Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict. Trump more recently deployed National Guard troops and Marines in Los Angeles and elsewhere to respond to protests set off by the administration’s immigration crackdown. All of this took place, over a period of decades and with many changes in the Oval Office and Congress, without leading the U.S. into authoritarianism, fascism, martial law, or ending our democracy. Some would even argue putting down a riot that paralyzed a whole city might have helped restore democracy, not smite it. So that should clear up Panic Number 1, the idea that troops in our cities is unprecedented.
That leaves Panic Number 2, that soldiers will use our cities as training grounds. Again, been there, done—actually currently doing—that.
The military, primarily special ops, regularly trains in major urban areas. It’s a chance for soldiers to practice in a real city while still safely in the U.S. It’s referred to as Realistic Urban Training, or RUT.
For example, in August 2022, black helicopters dove amid the buildings in downtown San Antonio as soldiers moved through parking lots wearing quad-lens night vision. Residents were told they may “hear low-flying helicopters, simulated gunfire, and controlled explosions during periods of darkness.” In September of that same year, police in Phoenix warned the public the city and nearby Peoria, Arizona, would be the scene of “air and ground operations” for “essential military training.” In August 2025, such training took place in Newnan, Georgia, consisting of “rotary wing and ground mobility operations and ground based close quarter battle training.” In 2019, U.S. Army Special Operations Command conducted an exercise near Raleigh, North Carolina that ended up being “louder and more disruptive to the nearby neighborhoods than the city anticipated.” That same year, an Army exercise over the Dallas-Fort Worth area had dozens of residents calling a local news station asking why so many military aircraft were flying over the city. Similar exercises took place in Los Angeles in 2019 and 2020, New York 2019 and Tampa the same year, Boston 2013, among other times and places. There is no master list but there are many examples.
There’s also the more well-known Robin Sage exercise, held four times a year since 1974 across 15 North Carolina counties and cities. Special Forces candidates not only conduct controlled assaults, but also live, eat, and sleep in these civilian areas. There was also the somewhat infamous Jade Helm exercise in 2015, which deployed 1,200 soldiers in areas spanning from Texas to California.
Elvia Kelly, a U.S. Army Special Operations Command spokesperson, said units training in “real world” locations like cities provide invaluable experience. “Training off of a military installation allows an exceptional level of realism while enhancing training value. It is meant to enhance soldiers’ skills by operating in an unfamiliar and realistic environment,” Kelly said. “Training in unfamiliar environments provides Army special operations forces new and different training experiences that help ensure they remain at the highest state of readiness.”
It must be exhausting to go through these kinds of freak-outs every week, no matter what happens large or small. So relax: There’s just nothing new to see here.