Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling: Expanding Guard Deployment After D.C. Shooting Is ‘Absolutely Not’ Necessary

RUSH EXCERPT:

HERTLING: “No. Absolutely not Antonio. And in fact, I’ll say a couple of things about what The New York Times article says. But, you know, there’s a lot of contrarian views that whether or not these national guardsmen should be reinforcing local law enforcement. What I’d suggest the times was reporting on is something that’s in any given military order. It’s called a threat assessment. It talks about all the things that could possibly happen, some of the most dangerous, some of the most likely. And that’s how I read the article. These are all considered force protection measures for the forces that are going into an environment. The thing that concerns me the most in reading other parts of the article was the conversation about presence patrols and the conversation between those who had performed this mission in Los Angeles, telling others what they should expect. When you’re talking about presence patrols and interestingly enough, I tweeted or text about that a few months ago when these things first started occurring, saying that when when I was in combat in Iraq, we banned the term presence patrol. We wanted to have something specific there. You have the the tweet up there, but it’s specifically should be given troops should be given a specific mission with a task and purpose. It isn’t just hanging around a street corner. Now when you talk about what happened, especially backstrom and sergeant wolf a few days ago, nothing in their mission suggested they would die on a street corner. What was considered performing this thing called presence patrol there? It’s it’s designed to deter crime and to show that there are active people watching any kind of criminal activities. But they were never to they were never intended to resemble combat. So when you’re talking about these two soldiers, one of which, spectrum, was a military police woman, I’m sure she has some training in what to look for in her environment. But in giving this mission to National Guard, they are not allowed by law to police. They can’t arrest people. They can’t detain People. They’re just there for presence, which in my view is very dangerous.”