By Sending the Marines Into LA, Trump Is Creating a Perfect Recipe for Chaos. I Should Know.

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News broke yesterday that 700 United States Marines from 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, 1st Marine Division would deploy from their base at Twentynine Palms to Los Angeles. This is in addition to the 4,100 National Guard troops already operating there to quell at-times violent but relatively small protests against Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents in the city conducting federal immigration sweeps. The conflict has resulted in multiple injuries so far, including to at least four journalists and several police officers and protesters.

The resulting political firestorm around the Marines' presence is doing little to calm tempers. Gov. Gavin Newsom is calling the deployment illegal and suing to stop it , Trump is suggesting the governor should be arrested , and even former vice president and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris is weighing in as a native Californian (she called the protests “overwhelmingly peaceful”). Meanwhile, the Marines are shipping out in an eerie echo of Sen. Tom Cotton's famous 2020 editorial “ Send in the Troops ,” which called for a similar move in the wake of the George Floyd protests and ultimately resulted in the forced resignation of the New York Times' editorial page editor, James Bennet.

Whether or not you agree with the decision to deploy troops to Los Angeles, President Donald Trump is technically allowed to do it. Newsom's response is likely on shaky legal grounds, and Trump's use of the National Guard will be a matter that the courts will now decide. But lawful or no, the deployment of the Marines from Twentynine Palms is an intensely risky move. First, in the way it raises the chances of a deadly encounter between active-duty troops and American citizens, and second, in how it shifts the Overton window for the deployment of such troops on American soil. We do not want to live in a country where this happens at all, much less on anything even approaching a regular basis.

Let's dig into some specifics. The National Guard is mostly a state resource, usually deploying under Title 32 of the US Code at the behest of the governor. Trump circumvented Newsom by deploying them under Title 10 , which governs federally controlled active-duty troops, on the grounds that “ there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States. ” This places these National Guard members on active duty, and is the first time a president has activated the National Guard without a governor's consent in 60 years. The active-duty Marines are also deployed under Title 10; what this means is that even without invoking the Insurrection Act, which Trump has not, he can deploy active-duty troops on US soil to protect federal property and personnel. There should be safeguards here: Title 10 activations are strictly curtailed by the Posse Comitatus Act, which states that in neither instance do the National Guard or the Marines have police powers over American citizens.

But you can see how little that might matter in the chaos of Americans confronting armed troops in their own city. National Guard soldiers receive some training in civilian riot control, but the Marines deploying from Twentynine Palms are warfighters, not peacekeepers. Some Marines have indeed received riot-control training , but we don't have reporting indicating that the 700 deploying to Los Angeles have, and while Northern Command states they have been trained in de-escalation and crowd control, some reports describe the Pentagon as “ scrambling Monday to establish rules to guide ” the troops as they take on this unfamiliar mission. The counterinsurgency doctrine made famous by Gen. David Petraeus governed operations during my time in Iraq. It absolutely promoted de-escalation and using violence only with due care—one of its most memorable tenets was that “ sometimes, the more you protect your force, the less secure you may be. ”

There is a mile of daylight between protecting a forward operating base in Iraq and a federal immigration agent in Los Angeles, especially when the Posse Comitatus Act prevents law enforcement action by American troops domestically. How, then, shall a US Marine handle a rioter who attacks them? Can they detain them to turn them over to the LA Police Department? Can they search them for weapons as Marines are instructed to do with captives, and indeed any sensitive law enforcement officer should do when detaining a suspect? Equipped with only their firearms, and not with less-lethal ammunition , how might they react to a thrown object with only a split second to make a decision? A water bottle and a Molotov cocktail look very much alike when they're making their way toward your face. It's equally hard to distinguish between a TV remote, which will splinter against your gas mask's face piece, and a brick, which will stave it in.

Indeed, there are past examples of American military crowd-control efforts going disastrously wrong, including the 2003 killing of at least 13 civilians in Baghdad during a protest that violated a curfew. While the US Army troops claimed they opened fire in self-defense, responding to incoming gunfire, that account was disputed by the Iraqis . The Marines themselves were involved in a massacre of civilians just two years later, when a roadside bombing triggered a series of revenge killings in Haditha that were the subject of controversy and coverage even up to last year . Elsewhere in Iraq, the same year as the Haditha massacre, two parents driving home from the hospital with their children were gunned down by American troops when they were mistaken for suicide bombers attempting to drive into a military position. Their children, witnessing their parents' deaths, were badly wounded.

Stories like these are not told to impugn the professionalism and ethics of the American military. I have personally experienced the commitment most service members have to doing what's right. Rather, recognizing what can happen when things go awry underscores the chaos of conflict. In particular, there is a confused, protean nature of conducting operations among a civilian population you are sworn to defend while simultaneously seeking to prevent them from harming you or others. In such conditions, it's painfully easy to make a mistake. Or, if you're angry or hurting enough, to not make one. Service members are professionals. They are also human beings.