Obscured by Jon Stewart’s well-publicized mockery of Texans’ reaction to Jade Helm 15—the US Army’s two-month-long exercise across nine states scheduled to begin in July—is the fact that the criticisms may not all be deranged droolings.
The Daily Show‘s Stewart made headlines earlier in May when he ridiculed Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s decision ordering the State Guard to “monitor” Jade Helm. The comedian-cum-newsman called Jade Helm critics “Lone Star lunatics.” But are they? Or is there more to the story? As always, WhoWhatWhy has remained agnostic while asking questions. Now, we provide a few initial answers. More will undoubtedly come.
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Jade Helm will be conducted in the states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, Mississippi, Florida and Louisiana. One other state, Colorado, has dropped off the list, as have at least two counties in Texas, in response to the controversy.
Criticisms of the exercise range from panicked, extreme scenarios, such as imminent martial law and mass arrests, to more nuanced concerns—for example, that military exercises on this scale could desensitize civilian populations to martial law tactics and governance.
The massive exercise, led by the US Army’s Special Operations Command (USASOC) under Lt. General Charles T. Cleveland, will include unconventional warfare units from all service branches, including US Army Special Forces, US Navy SEALS, US Air Force Special Operations, and USMC Marine Special Operations Command.
According to Jade Helm’s official PowerPoint presentation, other participating units are USMC Marine Expeditionary Units, the Army’s 82nd Airborne, and last but not necessarily least, civilian “Interagency Partners.” The latter refers to a range of domestic law enforcement agencies including the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, and Department of Homeland Security.
One contingent, Special Operations, is of particular interest. Special operations units are highly trained elites that specialize, among other things, in assassinations and “extractions” of human targets. In a 2013 article titled “5 Takeaways from the US Special Ops Raids in Somalia and Libya,” published by the Washington DC-based defense trade journal DefenseOne.com, an analyst heaped praise upon “small, multi-agency task forces led by Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) that target individual terrorist and insurgent leaders for death or capture.”
“Infiltrating” Towns and Cities
Jade Helm presenters have stated that troops will “infiltrate” towns and cities, and rove among the civilian population, both in uniform and in civilian clothes. Roy Boyd, chief deputy of the Victoria County Sheriff’s Office, told the Houston Chronicle: “They’re going to set up cells of people and test how well they’re able to move around without getting too noticed in the community… They’re testing their abilities basically [to] blend in with the local environment and not stand out and blow their cover.”
Elaborating further, Thomas Mead, a contractor hired by USASOC, said in a presentation to the Big Spring, Texas, City Council in March that special forces “operators,” as Special Ops soldiers are called, will enlist local roleplayers as informants. Mead told the City Council that operators will be looking for “someone who gives a little nugget of information for them to build an intelligence picture.”
It is these kinds of activities, resembling counter-insurgency, that set Jade Helm apart from the previous exercises that the Army cites as similar to Jade Helm. This argument hinges on what is meant by “similar.” The scripts in those previous exercises called for Special Ops “operators” to assist local insurgents or “freedom fighters” in resisting tyrannical authorities. In Jade Helm, the US operators will apparently be working to suppress an insurgency. This will involve activities more in keeping with law enforcement, such as information-gathering from locals, moving about undercover in communities, and assaults on selected “targets.” Residents have been told to expect “increased aircraft in the area at night.”
Critics of Jade Helm note that the military is not intended nor designed to function as a law enforcement body, and that soldiers are not trained to evaluate the legal nuances of probable cause or to safeguard the rights of civilian detainees.
Is This Something New?
Stewart, and other influential media figures, have assured the public that there’s no basis for concern because “similar” exercises have been conducted for years without any undue harm.
One exercise, just recently concluded in May, took place in Richland, South Carolina. In it, the 3rd Special Forces Group out of Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, trained with Richland County deputies for two weeks, in “late-night and pre-dawn exercises.” WLTX 19 News relayed the Sheriff’s Department’s message that residents should not be alarmed at hearing “ordnance being set off or shots being fired.”
Given that the South Carolina exercise passed virtually unnoticed, why is Jade Helm setting off so many alarm bells? Is this business as usual—or practice for martial law, as Jade Helm critics contend? What makes Jade Helm different from previous military exercises carried out on US civilian soil?
This is where the misinformation is flying fast and furious. In his presentation in Big Springs, USASOC contractor Mead acknowledged that the exercise is actually the first of its kind. He told the audience that the closest he could come to identifying an operation somewhat resembling Jade Helm is the Army’s much smaller, annual exercise known as Robin Sage.
In Robin Sage, “The People’s Republic of Pineland” is a fictitious country spanning 15 counties in North Carolina, where US Special Forces soldiers seek out “insurgents” (played by actors) who, for the purposes of the exercise, are treated as US-backed freedom fighters. Special Forces set up “base camps” for these fighters, with the goal of “liberating” Pineland. As such, Robin Sage is a proactive insurgency exercise. Jade Helm seems to be precisely the opposite: a counter-insurgency exercise.
Despite this difference, Robin Sage does offer a stark illustration of what can go wrong when armies are set loose in a civilian countryside. In 2002, one soldier was killed and another wounded when a local police officer opened fire on them, not knowing they were part of the Robin Sage exercise.
Under the Pretext of Defending
A bedrock principle of American law since the Civil War, and even prior, has been the clear prohibition against the use of federal troops—as opposed to National Guard operating under the authority of the various states—for domestic law enforcement. This dates back to the Posse Comitatus Act, which in turn is grounded in the Founding Fathers’ warning against “standing armies.”
The relevant text of the Posse Comitatus, which roughly means ‘deputized force,’ in 18 U.S.C. § 1385 reads (as amended in 1956):
“Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army or the Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.”
Posse Comitatus does not preclude the military from conducting exercises on civilian soil, which, as detractors of “paranoid” Texans point out, takes place all the time. The law does however prohibit the US military from engaging in direct law enforcement activities. This would certainly include the capture on US soil of US citizens suspected of breaking the law in any way, shape, or form.
Interestingly, as an institution, the US military seems to agree with and abide by the spirit of Posse Comitatus. In a 2001 paper for the School of Advanced Military Studies at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, “Posse Comitatus: A Nineteenth Century Law Worthy of Review For the Future?” the author notes:
“The desire to separate the military from policing activities within the US can be traced to the very origins of the republic itself. The perception is that a standing military force attempting to enforce civil laws allows for despots to retain power by force of arms rather than by the consent of the governed.”
The author, a US Army Major, concludes that: “There are still today, many good and valid reasons behind the Posse Comitatus Act.” In referring to the “origins of the republic,” the Major may have had in mind James Madison, a Founding Father vociferously distrustful of large “standing armies.” Madison wrote: “Throughout all Europe, the armies, kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.”
In Jade Helm, a litmus test of success will be how well Special Forces “operators” move about within civilian populations without being noticed, or at least calling too much attention to themselves. “If you’re able to notice our guys, we’re probably doing something wrong,” Mead, the USASOC contractor, told the Big Spring City Council.
In the Big Spring City Council meeting, residents were told to expect activity to occur “between 11p.m. and 4a.m.” During the question-and-answer period, to a packed house, an assistant to Mead revealed: “we come in doing the hit, and extracting. Time on the ground may be 15 to 20 minutes of exposure, then that’s it.” (Emphasis added.)
The word “extracting” is critical. In special operations parlance, extracting a “high value target” can mean to take that “target” (a person) away from his home or location, willingly or unwillingly. Here’s how Wikipedia, describes “military extraction”: “Essentially, it is kidnapping by military or intelligence forces.”
How Real is Real?
To critics, one of the most disturbing aspects of the exercise is USA SOC’s openly stated desire to conduct the exercise in a “realistic” environment. In recent years hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent creating realistic facsimiles of foreign towns and even small cities on military bases in the US; the purpose of this program is to give soldiers a taste of what they might encounter during urban warfare operations overseas. A new $90 million training center In Northern Virginia a boasts stores, a gas station, school, soccer field, church, mosque tunnels, and a subway platform.
But what might the military mean by “realistic environment” in the context of Jade Helm? In terms of culture and physical setting, only English-speaking America resembles English-speaking America. As a concerned resident of one of the affected small towns in Texas told a newspaper: “What place looks like this—except this?” Put another way, if Special Ops were to prowl the coffee shops of North Korea, Ukraine, or Tehran questioning locals for information, they would be rounded up within an hour. So, as Jon Stewart might have asked if he had looked a little deeper into the Jade Helm scenario, whom is America fixing to invade? Canada?
