Outside the Beltway

Reports Suggest Pentagon Shifting Focus To Domestic Defense

Another day, another step closer towards military policing in the US.

Matt Bernius · Wednesday, September 10, 2025 · 4 comments

In a move that shouldn’t surprise anyone who has been following the trajectory of the Second Trump Administration, Politico reports that the latest National Defense Strategy plan, currently under review by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, will shift the Pentagon’s focus from China to “homeland defense.”

A draft of the newest National Defense Strategy, which landed on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s desk last week, places domestic and regional missions above countering adversaries such as Beijing and Moscow, according to three people briefed on early versions of the report. […]

The report usually comes out at the start of each administration, and Hegseth could still make changes to the plan. But in many ways, the shift is already occurring. The Pentagon has activated thousands of National Guard troops to support law enforcement in Los Angeles and Washington, and dispatched multiple warships and F-35 fighter planes to the Caribbean to interdict the flow of drugs to the U.S.

A U.S. military strike this week allegedly killed 11 suspected members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang in international waters, a major step in using the military to kill noncombatants.

The Pentagon also has established a militarized zone across the southern border with Mexico that allows troops to detain civilians, a job normally reserved for law enforcement.

The new strategy would largely overturn the focus of the first Trump administration’s 2018 National Defense Strategy, which placed deterring China at the forefront of the Pentagon’s efforts.

[source]

Some may argue that this is just another move in the overall isolationist position that Trump and, in particular, Vice President J. D. Vance have been advancing since the 2024 campaign. That view is flawed because to accept it, you need to ignore all the evidence surrounding this Administration’s vision for using the military for law enforcement activities.

That evidence is not hard to find. We know that Trump expressed the desire to use the military as domestic peacekeepers during his first administration. And he deployed them in several States in response to protests and civil unrest in the immediate aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd:

During his first administration, President Trump ordered National Guard units from 15 states deployed to Washington, D.C., to respond to civil rights protests following the murder of George Floyd. As this was an attempted “hybrid” deployment, states could choose to refuse it, and four states did so.

[Emphasis mine, M.B.]

[source]

During his first time, President Trump also deployed the National Guard to the Southern Border. However, as NPR notes in more recent reporting, during that deployment, the Guard members were “in support roles to the Border Patrol, such as providing equipment, logistics, and surveillance.”

The guard and other military forces were also deployed to assist with disaster recovery (in keeping with their use under other Presidents) and during the initial phase of the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak.

There were insider reports that surfaced after Trump left office that, behind closed doors, he wanted to use the military for more direct domestic law enforcement, but was dissuaded by his advisers. By 2023, he was announcing his intent on social media and on the campaign trail:

According to a CREW analysis of over 13,000 of Trump’s Truth Social posts from January 1, 2023 to April 1, 2024, Trump has vowed at least 19 times to weaponize law enforcement against civilians. This includes deploying state and local police, multiple branches of the military and federal law enforcement agents from the Drug Enforcement Agency, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, FBI and Homeland Security agencies against people crossing the southern border, homeless people and protestors. Trump has a niche audience on Truth Social so the full extent of these plans—and the violence they promise—have flown under the radar. [source]

[From the Trump Campaign Website]: There is no higher priority than quickly restoring law and order and public safety in America. President Trump stands with the heroes of law enforcement. The Harris-Biden Administration and the radical left politicians have defunded, defamed, and dismantled police forces across America. Murders spiked to all-time highs in Democrat-run cities and radical prosecutors and District Attorneys have given free rein to violent criminals who threaten our citizens. The streets of our once-great cities are now controlled by gangs and cartels, and plagued with mentally ill and drug-addicted homeless. President Trump will revitalize police departments and reclaim safety, dignity, and peace for law-abiding Americans. He will deliver record funding to hire and retrain police officers, strengthen qualified immunity and other protections for police officers, increase penalties for assaults on law enforcement, put violent offenders and career criminals behind bars, and surge federal prosecutors and the National Guard into high-crime communities.

[emphasis mine, MB. – source]

And then there was his Fox News Sunday interview aired on October 12th:

In an interview aired on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures,” Trump was asked about the potential of “outside agitators” disrupting Election Day and he pivoted to what he called “the enemy from within.”

“I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within,” Trump said. He added: “We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they’re the big — and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”

[emphasis mine, MB. – source]

At the time, this language was dismissed as “typical Trump hyperbole” by anti-anti-Trumpers and heterodox thinkers. They suggested we should take a wait and see attitude because he never did anything like that during the first administration.

8 months into the new Trump administration, we’ve seen a growing direct use of the military for law enforcement. Those include:

• National Guard deployed to the border and given the ability to search and detain “suspicious” people.
• The deployment of the National Guard to LA and Washington. Federal Judges have found that during the deployments, which Trump referred to as “a template of things to come”, Guard Members were illegally participating in law enforcement activities.
• The Navy’s extrajudicial destruction of what the Administration claims was a drugboat, killing the 11 people on board.

Additionally, we have the administration promising to mobilize the guard to assist with federal law enforcement in more cities (without, as in 2020, giving governors the ability to decline the offer). We also have seen the President post memes that signal the use of Vietnam-levels of military violence in future Guard deployments. And Sec Hegseth declares that under this administration, the US military will “go on offense, not just on defense, maximum lethality, not tepid legality; violent effect, not politically correct.“

Again, I suspect some people will be inclined to be thinking something along the lines of “well, so far we’ve only seen a few edge cases of this happening, you’re just engaging in hyperbole and guessing at their intent.”

Elsewhere today, I posted about the importance of looking to IMPACT rather than intent. While I have some notion of what President Trump’s intent is (let’s face it, he’s pretty much been saying it out loud for at least two years… which BTW is an action we can consider too), I think we need to be focused on his actions and their impact. To be clear, what I just cataloged is a pattern of actions (all of which have had very clear impacts).

And those actions and impacts have a pretty clear trajectory. That trajectory becomes even more chilling when you take into account that this is apparently a military that emphasizes maximum lethality, not tepid legality, AND will be increasingly focused on homeland security. Add to that a President who, less than a year ago, was actively using phrases like “the enemy from within,” and it gets scarier.

Additionally, if refocusing the US Military on homeland defense comes to pass, the decision to rename “The Department of Defense” to “The Department of War” gets even stranger. Unless, of course, the plan is to wage war on residents of the US, this administration decides are enemies from within. But that can’t be the case!

Here’s the tl;dr version of this post: