Why the US military cannot suppress the protests of millions of people ...

Washington DC Summer of 2020: Calling in the National Guard does not
always work out the way the government plans.

Sending troops into the streets -- regardless of the issue -- is always trying to solve a political problem with a military solution, which is why you tend to see it done most often by authoritarian governments.

But there is a specific calculus for that: authoritarians try to move in fast, crush dissent quickly, ruthlessly, and publicly to strike terror in the hearts of those who might consider joining the protests because ...

Even authoritarians know the 3.5% rule, as noted by the Harvard Kennedy School:

Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.

"In 1986, millions of Filipinos took to the streets of Manila in peaceful protest and prayer in the People Power movement. The Marcos regime folded on the fourth day.

In 2003, the people of Georgia ousted Eduard Shevardnadze through the bloodless Rose Revolution, in which protestors stormed the parliament building holding the flowers in their hands."

In a country of 340 million people like the US, this means that we need 12 million people in the streets, protesting non-violently, and sustained for multiple continuous days -- in effect an ongoing general strike to topple the government (we can discuss the mechanics of that later).

It turns out that while this will be a big challenge for the various organizations like Indivisible or the 50501 Movement, achieving that over the next few months is far from impossible, and there is surprisingly little the government can do to stop it with force.

Let's start with a political-military analysis of what President Trump is trying to achieve domestically and within our hemispher, and whether the resources at hand are up to the many tasks.

Domestically: securing the Mexican border from immigration through use of the US military; potentially occupying and suppressing dissent in cities around the country, operating the logistical base to refit and re-arm ground, air, and naval forces as they cycle through the Continental US (CONUS) from deployments abroad.

Within North and Central America: acquiring/garrisoning Greenland; maintaining a credible military threat to Canada to pursue acquisition; conducting tactic airstrikes and deep penetration raids into northern Mexico; and retaking the Panama Canal.

There are roughly 1.1 Million active US troops split between these two areas, with 365K Army, 277K Navy, 244K Air Force, 135K Marines, and the remaining few split between Coast Guard and Space Force.

It sounds like a lot, but it's really not.

This calculation also leaves out about 728,000 reserve component personnel, and possibly as many as another one million individual reservists available in Presidential, Partial, or Full Mobilizations, as well as maybe another 200,000 people of quite dubious quality in 22 "state guard forces."

So what does all this mean?

It means that the Republicans cannot repeal physical laws, the logistical constraints of military operations, or the restraints of not having enough trained personnel to do all of these things sequentially, let alone simultaneously.

Let's give some examples:

The "invasion" of Greenland will need at least 3,000 troops, both for initial move-in (even if unopposed), establishment of new bases, and occupation. In reality it will tie up (either on site or in the supply chain) at least 9,000 troops for a year.

"Taking back" the Panama Canal is not an easy task. When G W H Bush invaded Panama in 1989 to overthrow the Noriega government the US had to put 27,000 troops on the ground, not only because the Panamanian defense forces number 16,000 (and nobody knew how strongly they would fight), but because the military had to be prepared to occupy the entire Canal Zone and all key installations. Projecting 27,000 troops into Panama would require up to four times that number of support personnel to get them there and support them just for the short term, so that was at least 78,000 additional troops committed for a total of 105,000 troops tied up in the operation. [This is called "Teeth to Tail Ratio"]

Today that number would have to be higher, in part because the Panamanian Public Forces (police and paramilitary units) number not 16,000, but 30,000, with a reserve force of 50,000 -- mostly because the Panamanian government learned the lesson of 1989. So to move in swiftly and take control of the Canal Zone now -- no matter what fevered alcoholic dreams Pete Hegseth is sharing on Signal -- would require a commitment of at least 50,000 combat and support troops with the supply chain multiplier making that eqaul 200,000 troops. And that's for a short operation. The reality is that we would have to commit a minimum of 20,000 - 25,000 troops to garrison duty there, which (again) ties up a total of 60-75,000 troops.

That's 18% of the available forces in CONUS for the invasion and 5.5% on an ongoing basis for the occupation.

Operating special forces elements and airstrikes into northern Mexico would be logistically far easier (we have plenty of nearby bases in Texas, Louisiana, etc., but still would require a manpower allocation of at least 25-30,000 troops to sustain ongoing operations.

So now, between the three [Greenland 9,000, Panama 200,000, and Mexico 25,000] we are up 234,000 troops, which is now up to about 21% of the available troops in CONUS. This leaves out the calculations of equipment, fuel, ammunition, and all the "soft" supplies.

This also means that the available troop basis in CONUS is reduced from 1.1 million to 866,000. Of those remaining, at least 60% are not usable for any sort of field operations under any conditions -- staffs at fixed installaions, training cadres, purely administrative personnel, etc., meaning that there would only be about 275,000 troops, and that sounds like a lot, until you realize that only 45% of THOSE are potentially ground troops of the Army and Marine Corps, which reduces the available numbers to about 125,000.

But that includes all sorts of units that you really don't want to use for something like suppressing an insurrection. You might use combat engineers (they like to blow shit up), but medical units? Truck transportation units? Nope. Moreover, if you use these troops in American cities, they are not available if there is, say, a disaster in Asia or the Middle East.

So that means that dealing with an "insurrection" would be up to reserve components, primarily the Army National Guard and Army Reserve, primarily the National Guard, which is 325,000 strong and probably more full of veterans and up to date equipment in its 8 combat divisions and 37 multifunctional support brigades than ever before. It's a very respectable force.

And it doesn't fucking matter.

Why?

Modern doctrine says that to take control of an urban area in the number necessary to suppress resistance and riots and protests and etc, require about 20 troops to every 1,000 residents.

So let's consider Boston, where about 100,000 people turned out for the April 5 protests. Boston has a population of 653,000, which means that doctrine suggests that 32,000 troops (more than a division) would have to move in to occupy it. That alone is 5% of the total available NG troop strength. But it's worse than that, because the Boston metro area boasts 4.9 MILLION people, and THAT would require nearly 250,000 troops for effective occupation ... while bringing almost all economic activity to a halt.

You think this unreasonable? Immediately after the Boston Marathon bombing, when the police cordoned off just a 20-block square area to go house to house, this operation required 2,500 police and military troops -- and if you read the after action reports, you will find out they were seriously undermanned.

There are approximately 570 city blocks in Boston -- the city alone, not the metro area.

You could probably patchwork something together with 70,000 troops for a short time if they were very brutal, but even so, let me share a really disquieting thought if. you are a US military planner:

THE BOSTON METRO AREA IS ONLY THE 11TH LARGEST IN THE NATION.

Here is what military planners for widespread civil disturbances have to plan for:

Largest metro areas in US

We can look at it another way to reach similar conclusions. We know that the most conservative estimates of the number of people protesting on April 5, 2025 was about 3.3 million, with the median about 42 million, and the high end at 5.1 million.

Let's take the low estimate: if you need to suppress 3.3 million protesters, you are going to need to deploy at least 165,000 troops (not counting logistical supports), but here's the rub -- those 3.3 million people were protesting in 30 different major metropolitan areas and over 1,000 sites nationwide.

There is a worthwhile comparison here between the first day of the "Hands Off" protests on April 5, 2025 and the BLM protests during the summer of 2020. Take a look at this graphic:

There is a long history of mass protest in America; this is not the only 
example that pertains.

What we see here is that over the summer of 2020 the BLM protests DID turn out more than 3.5% of the population in total -- but never at the same time, and never sustained at anything close to the necessary threshold. On the other hand, the "Hands Off" protest launched two-thirds as many events on day one as BLM did in three months -- albeit the April 5 protests, individually, tended to be significantly smaller.

As it was, the National Guard had to struggle to deploy 43,000 troops (never all at once) against BLM in various locations across America, and they rarely did that much good, except in direct street fights for a few blocks on various urban downtowns.

What DID hamper BLM protests was the public perception (carefully constructed by right wing media) that the protests were mostly riots, when in fact over 92% of the protests remained completely peaceful. This eventually ate into public support for the movement:

Yet, despite data indicating that demonstrations associated with the BLM movement are overwhelmingly peaceful, one recent poll suggested that 42% of respondents believe “most protesters [associated with the BLM movement] are trying to incite violence or destroy property,” This is in line with the Civiqs tracking poll which finds that “net approval for the Black Lives Matter movement peaked back on June 3 [the week following the killing of George Floyd when riots first began to be reported] and has fallen sharply since."

So far, regarding the April 5 protests, there were no violent incidents, and the best framing the right could manage (which appears to have been unconvincing) was that the protesters were paid to be there:

“The problem is the puppetmasters, not the puppets, as the latter have no idea why they are even there." -- Elon Musk

“ANTI-TRUMP & ANTI-MUSK PROTESTERS EXPOSED! Woke-Left protesters UNABLE to explain why President Trump is a Facist, pulls out a paper handout he was given with talking points AND still can’t explain himself!” -- Rudi Giuliani

No data supports this talking point (not even the video they were both commenting on), and the left seems somewhat better prepared for it, with some wag even creating a great fake Donald Trump post supposedly from Truth Social that has gotten reams of hysterical coverage:

None of this means that (a) the Right will not attempt to "BLM" the anti-Trump movement by either capitalizing on any violence (no matter how insignificant) or planting people to generate it; and (b) following that up with a relatively massive deployment of troops to "make an example" out that city or town in (honestly) the bloodiest way possible -- as Miami Police Chief Walter Headley said in 1967, and which was picked up (this time for real) by President Trump "When the looting starts, the shooting starts":

A final consideration before we wrap up: what would the military actually do if ordered into such situations?

The active-duty military, honestly, wants to stay as far away from this scenario as possible:

According to nearly a dozen retired officers and current military lawyers, as well as scholars who teach at West Point and Annapolis, an intense if quiet debate is underway inside the U.S. military community about what orders it would be obliged to obey if President-elect Donald Trump decides to follow through on his previous warnings that he might deploy troops against what he deems domestic threats, including political enemies, dissenters and immigrants. ...

“Everything I hear is that our training is in the shitter,” says retired Army Lt. Gen. Marvin Covault, who commanded the 7th Infantry Division in 1992 in what was called “Joint Task Force LA.” “I’m not sure we have the kind of discipline now, and at every leader level, that we had 32 years ago. That concerns me about the people you’re going to put on the ground.”

The National Guard, on the other hand, was actually initially created to put down class-oriented uprisings in the 19th Century, and has a long sordid history of bad actions from the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 to the Kent State shootings in 1970. It often manages to make situations far worse than they would otherwise be, if only because of poor training for such actions.

That, and the fact that many National Guard soldiers believe that such a mission against their fellow citizens might well be both illegal and immoral:

Several articles have been posted about plans for state-on-state military action under questionable circumstances. I’m extremely disturbed by this as a Guardsman. I didn’t sign up to use force against my fellow citizens. I signed up to protect the constitution and to help my fellow citizens in times of crisis.

I’m worried that too many Guardsmen, even myself, will be unable to distinguish between a lawful and unlawful order after rapid changes come down the pike. I will not degrade my uniform by violating civil rights for these toads. I do not believe that there is “an enemy within” as described by Trump or Stephen Miller. I do not believe that mass deportations require military intervention. I believe that if the goal is to deport people, there are diplomatic ways to do it, like going after root causes (employer penalties, benefits reductions, etc.)

I do not want to see another Kent State unfold, except this time it would probably be 1000x worse. I do not want to be seen in public as a pariah or as someone who might turn on you on Trump’s command.

If MILLIONS of Americans are in the streets protesting peacefully, WILL National Guard soldiers even show up when their units alert them? Will they comply when ordered to fire? Nobody quite knows.

THE BOTTOM LINE:

1. Non-violent protest, sustained, and increasing in numbers to at least 12 million participants, represents the best chance not only of blunting the attack on the Constitution and civil rights, but of forcing President Trump out of office and/or wresting control of at least the House of Representatives from the Republican Party. The April 5 protests represented a great start, but the effort has to become national and be sustained throughout the summer, come what may. As for what may come ...
2. With or without violence on the part of the protesters or attributed to them, President Trump will invoke the Insurrection Act probably not later than July 1 -- and possibly much earlier. The initial effort will be threefold: (a) targeted actions to break up protests and arrest the participants in key areas; (b) increased police state activities (stop calling it "law enforcement," it isn't) to identify leaders and speakers for arrest and disappearance; (c) a massive propaganda effort to demonize "those who hate America and don't deserve to live here." This means ...
3. That those who participate, those who encourage, those who fund, those who publicize are all at risk of harassment and arrest. It is probable that thousands of us will be arrested. It is inevitable that some of those will be horribly mistreated, may be deported, may even die. This is the risk that has to be accepted by at least 12 million people. This is a Bloody Sunday risk. John Lewis and the first five ranks of the marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge KNEW they would be assaulted, wounded, possibly maimed and even killed, but that facing that fate was necessary, and was the core definition of GOOD TROUBLE. We have to be prepared to be hurt ...
4. Without hitting back, The core movement MUST remain nonviolent, because if it does, their violence becomes our weapon. At the same time we must accept that ...
5. There will be those seeking the same goals -- fellow travelers -- who will NOT foreswear the use of violence, especially defensive violence. And while we must not associate our tactics with theirs, we NEED them, and we don't rat them out. The Civil Rights movement needed the Panthers, like the anti-war movement needed the SDS.
6. Eventually there comes a day of no return, when we don't stop protesting until the changes come ... and a lot of people are going to have a very difficult time with that.

1970.