Active-duty troops should be used only as a last resort in direct civilian law enforcement roles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Police should wear distinct uniform colors during protests when the military is present.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And troops should be careful about lending out equipment to law enforcement with the word \u201cmilitary\u201d to avoid confusing civilians.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Those are some of the lessons the nation\u2019s top military\u2019s top civilian and uniformed leaders<\/a> offered to Congress as the explained the DoD\u2019s role in the civil unrest that followed in the wake of what prosecutors say was the murder of a Black man, George Floyd, by a white Minneapolis police officer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Among other issues they addressed Thursday afternoon during a House Armed Services Committee hearing, Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Joint Chiefs Chairman Army Gen. Mark Milley tried to clarify the armed forces\u2019 role in support law enforcement<\/a> amid nationwide protest, particularly the confrontations outside the White House in early June.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tens of thousands of troops were mobilized around the country to help with crowd control,<\/a> including thousands from 11 states sent into the District of Columbia, and another 1,700 active-duty troops who were staged in Maryland and Virginia in case of emergency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cUsing active-duty forces in a direct civilian law enforcement role should remain a last resort, and exercised only in the most urgent and dire of situations,\u201d Esper said in his prepared statement, echoing a similar statement he made in a June 3 Pentagon briefing, two days after he accompanied the president for a much-criticized photo op outside the White House.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Committee chairman Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., stressed that he understood how fraught their testimony would be, but that he would try to suss out the truth of the situation without creating a political firestorm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cNow, it is absolutely impossible that anyone in either of your positions would agree 100 percent of the time with everything the president said,\u201d Smith said. \u201cHow do you handle those disagreements?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Though his question was rhetorical, Smith alluded to perceived tension between the White House and Defense Department, as the president threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act<\/a> to beat back protesters, while military officials stressed that troops were only acting in a support capacity, mostly unarmed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAdmittedly, you can\u2019t come out in public and say, \u2018Yeah, I think my boss is an idiot. I completely disagree with his decision.\u2018 That\u2019s not the way it works, and I\u2019m not looking for that,\u201d Smith said, adding that he hoped for more understanding about how the White House and DoD coordinate policy and messaging in situations like this.<\/p>\n\n\n\t