The military must stop ignoring the Southern border  

When the brass opines they would rather head overseas to deter adversaries, the president and lawmakers should remind them that the gangs trafficking drugs and humans across our border are our adversaries.

Gen. Daniel Hokanson, outgoing chief of the National Guard Bureau, recently told senators that assigning troops to the southern border has “no military training value” and was detrimental to military readiness. 

That attitude among four-star officers is not new: In 2019, Commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Robert Neller, declared his service was facing "rapidly accelerating risks" from, among other things, operations along the Southwest border. 

But Hokanson and Neller are confused. Deploying to the Southern border isn’t training — it’s what military training is for.

Hokanson sees the Guard as no longer primarily concerned with support to civil authorities at the state and local level but as a second reserve force and a federally deployable asset to deter and fight “our adversaries.”

Neller’s concern about the Southwest border mission may be rooted in the expeditionary mission of the Marine Corps, which has typically deployed overseas as part of the naval forces. “Marine Corps Operations,” describing the roles of the Marine Corps expeditionary forces, doesn’t mention U.S. borders or defending the homeland, though it does explain that an attribute of successful foreign counterinsurgency operations is “Securing host nation borders.”  

The Army, on the other hand, is no stranger to the Southwest border. It fought Mexican forces in the Mexican–American War of 1846-1848, and the Mexican Expedition of 1916-1917, which required almost the entire Regular Army. Current Army doctrine recognizes operations within the United States are in support of the civil authorities. Specifically, “Within the United States, we support civil authorities through DSCA [defense support of civil authorities]. If hostile powers threaten the homeland, we combine defensive and offensive tasks with DSCA.” 

Thus, the generals’ concerns reflect the military’s shift from fighting Islamist militants in the counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to “great power competition,” which will require an expensive and lengthy refashioning to address new challenges. They apparently understand the enormity of the task as a management issue, but may not grasp America’s true needs. The U.S. military is unique in that it doesn’t prioritize the mission of defending the country’s borders. 

The fiscal 2025 national defense budget is projected to be over $900 billion, and the generals’ comments probably accurately depict Pentagon thinking, and may be a surprise to many taxpayers at a time when the Pentagon budget is second only to interest on the national debt. Much of that debt was incurred in the losing campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, representative of where military leaders would rather be instead of the Southern border.  

Just as the fight in Iraq and Afghanistan involved more than just killing militants, “defending the homeland” may mean a significant commitment to supporting civil authorities in the border security mission. Dismissing the border mission with, “We need to get them over there before they come here” is nonsense, given the absence of any subsequent Islamic State or Taliban attacks in the U.S. after the retreats from Iraq and Afghanistan.  

Then there’s exposing the military to the pervasive corruption along the border — a real concern, considering the ethical lapses in the special operations forces, the Navy’s “Fat Leonard” scandal, and the bribery arrest of the Navy’s former number two officer. There’s just so much money that even the federal law enforcement agencies charged with keeping illegal narcotics out, Customs and Border Protection and the Drug Enforcement Administration, haven’t stayed clean.  

The cartels' two-pronged strategy for corrupting public officials is that of "plata o plomo" — “silver or lead.” In other words, if bribery doesn’t work, there’s the hard option. 

For all the talk about terror groups being a threat to “the homeland,” they have no viable reach in the U.S. The cartels are another matter, as they are connected to gangs that are in every military town. In Mexico, they kill judges and broadcast the executions of their prisoners. A revenge attack in Fayetteville or Oceanside isn’t out of the question. Concern about the safety of troops and their families is legitimate, but should that be the reason to retreat from a mission to try to stop the greatest threat to America today?  

“In 2022, 107,941 drug overdose deaths occurred,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which added that the age-adjusted rate of drug overdose deaths nearly quadrupled from 2002 to 2022. The U.S. started two wars after the 9/11 attacks, which killed 2,977 Americans — about 2.8 percent of 2022’s overdose deaths. But the brass seems pretty casual about casualties doing uncounted damage to the nation’s social fabric.  

And, unlike terror groups, the cartels have friends (aka “customers”) in America. According to the 2020 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. “Among people aged 12 or older in 2020, 21.4 percent (or 59.3 million people) used illicit drugs in the past year.” The cartels also smuggle people; the Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates “illegal immigration costs American taxpayers a net of at least $150.7 billion annually.”  

The U.S. Commission on Combating Synthetic Opioid Trafficking estimates that drug overdoses cost the U.S. more than $1 trillion a year — more than the national defense budget. The commission also reported that “overdoses have been responsible for more than 1 million deaths in the U.S. since 1999.” 

Supporting the civil authorities is a complicated issue with many moving parts, and legislation unique to the various branches of the military (i.e., National Guard, Reserves and active-duty forces). An improvement will require more than a change of heart in the Pentagon; the lawmakers will have to do their part, but Pentagon reticence should not hold things up. 

Being able to recognize a threat in a timely manner is a critical skill in a military leader. So, when the brass opines they would rather head overseas to deter adversaries, the president and lawmakers should remind them that the gangs trafficking drugs and humans across our border are “our adversaries.” Then they should fire the officers who cannot recognize a real threat to America. 

James Durso served in the U.S. Navy for 20 years and has worked in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq.