Lawfare Archive: The Dangers of Deploying the Military on U.S. Soil

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🗓️ 8 November 2025

⏱️ 94 minutes

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Summary

From November 6, 2024: For today’s special episode, Lawfare General Counsel and Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson held a series of conversations with contributors to a special series of articles on “The Dangers of Deploying the Military on U.S. Soil” that Lawfare recently published on its website, in coordination with our friends at Protect Democracy.

Participants include: Alex Tausanovitch, Policy Advocate at Protect Democracy; Laura Dickinson, a Professor at George Washington University Law School; Joseph Nunn, Counsel in the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center; Chris Mirasola, an Assistant Professor at the University of Houston Law Center; Mark Nevitt, a Professor at Emory University School of Law; Elaine McCusker, a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute; and Lindsay P. Cohn, a Professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College.

Together, they discussed how and why domestic deployments are being used, the complex set of legal authorities allowing presidents and governors to do so, and what the consequences might be, both for U.S. national security and for U.S. civil-military relations more generally.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Isabella Roya, Internet Lawfare, with an episode from the Lawfare
0:13.0	for November 8, 2025. Since June, President Trump has deployed thousands of National Guard
0:19.0	troops to Los Angeles, Chicago, Memphis, and Washington, D.C., as well as 700 Marines to Los Angeles during summer immigration protests.
0:26.6	Similar efforts to deploy the National Guard in Portland over the objection of Oregon's governor are currently under litigation.
0:32.6	In speeches to military leadership and active duty service members, the President has contemplated sending, quote, more than the National Guard, end quote, to curb crime and illegal immigration in American cities,
0:42.3	and suggested that dangerous cities could serve as training grounds for the military.
0:46.9	For today's archive, I chose an episode from November 6, 2004, in which Scott R. Anderson spoke with seven
0:52.9	contributors to Lawfare's essay series on the dangers of deploying the military on U.S. soil.
0:58.0	They discussed the expanding range of uses for which the military has been domestically deployed in recent decades,
1:03.4	the history and evolution of posse comitatus restrictions,
1:06.5	the consequences of domestic deployments for civil military relations and the separation of powers and more.
1:22.3	It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm senior editor Scott R. Anderson. For today's special episode, I sat down with the
1:28.7	contributors to a special series on the dangers of deploying the military on U.S. soil that we
1:32.6	recently published on our website, which examines the growth in domestic deployments of the U.S.
1:36.5	military and what it may mean for U.S. national security moving forward.
1:41.0	The American public is certainly less averse to the idea of deploying the military domestically than the military is,
1:50.8	but they would still probably rather see a more local and more law enforcement response if possible.
1:58.3	Over the past several weeks, Lawfare has collaborated with our friends at Protect Democracy
2:01.9	to publish a special series of articles on an important topic, the increasingly common
2:06.3	practice of deploying the U.S. military domestically, on missions ranging from national
2:10.4	disaster relief to supporting law enforcement.
2:13.4	Both presidents and governors have pursued domestic deployments more often and for an
	...

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