Former Army sec. says DC National Guard had no plan for Capitol riot beyond local traffic control

[Lovegan]

Source: CNN

Former Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy told a House panel on Tuesday that the National Guard only planned to deal with traffic in Washington, DC, the day the deadly US Capitol insurrection occurred, with "no contingency" in place if things escalated in the city, according to a copy of his prepared testimony obtained by CNN.

But McCarthy also told Congress that alternate plans would only have happened if the US Capitol Police or local authorities in Washington requested it.
"114 citizen soldiers ... were spread out over 20 city blocks ... with no contingency or recall plan for a change of mission in place," his statement reads.
A relatively small number of guardsmen were in DC on January 6 to assist the city's police force with traffic control in an effort to allow the local authorities to focus on anything related to demonstrations planned in the city. McCarthy's statement underscores the lack of preparedness on the part of the government and federal law enforcement agencies to aggressively respond to a crisis that day, which ultimately saw a violent attack on the Capitol that resulted in the death of five people, including a US Capitol Police officer.

(Snip)

Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/26/politics/dc-national-guard-plan-riot-ryan-mccarthy/index.html

[DeminPennswoods]

1. Seems to be a lot of conflicting accounts here

among Capitol Police, DC Natl Guard and the US Army. Will take awhile to get to the bottom of what happened and how.

[COL Mustard]

4. Erm....If I Recall Correctly

The DC Guard works for the SecArmy (I know, delegated from POTUS through SECDEF), but he's the authority. Why, again, were there no conplans, Mr. Secretary?

[DeminPennswoods]

6. DC Natl Guard commander

said he was denied authority to act on his own if circumstances became dire. SecArmy says essentially there were no hitches or glitches. There certainly were multiple failures and inconsistencies in the accounts on record by the various players.

[IronLionZion]

2. Maybe it's time for some new plans and processes

American institutions shouldn't be left defenseless like this. There is way too much power in only the executive branch. The legislative branch should be able to authorize the national guard or MPD or whoever to come in to protect the capitol as a fail safe.

[LiberalArkie]

3. Just face it, no one in the Trump administration had a plan for anything.

[TomSlick]

9. With all due respect, I think that is not correct.

The Trump administration had extensive planning to incite and support an insurrection. These plans included ensuring the DC Guard was not able to respond

[Ford_Prefect]

5. All of the gaps in Capitol security sound like the excuses made after 9/11

for similar 'coincidences' and dis-connections in national intelligence, security strategy, planning and response. 1 or 2 gaffs might be bad judgement. A dozen or more sounds like someone, or several people, planned it that way.

We are talking about professionals whose job is to expect situations to go wrong in a number of ways and at any point in the proceedings. They are supposed to be prepared for exactly the kinds of situations that did happen on Jan. 6th. A perfect storm of errors in judgement of underestimating the crowd's actions, especially in light of the intelligence prior to the event, is simply not possible nor acceptable. The people who do this in DC have been dealing with such for a long time and frequently during the last 4 years. They have NO excuses. Neither do those who apparently interfered with the orders to release troops once things got dangerous.

The simple answer is that there was a trap set to capture the Capitol while the joint session was convened. Those in charge of guarding the Capitol were either told to look the other way because the "President's people" were not to be treated as a mob (unlike BLM protesters), or were set up be under strength and overwhelmed, or both.

The more we hear about who did what, who paid for and coordinated it happening, and who inside the Capitol were party to the plan, the more ugly and ominous the threat appears to have been. This is to say nothing of the degree of collusion among GOP members who were there to vote against accepting the will of the people. It now seems quite clear that a number of them anticipated the attack and had some part in arranging it.

None of this happened by accident or resulted from coincidence or "Intelligence Failure".

[halfulglas]

7. The Trump administration knew nothing about governing.

Trump didn't want to govern, he wanted to reign. The cabinet heads, department heads all promoted over their ability didn't have plans other than to keep Trump happy. Trump knew nothing of governing and just didn't want them spending too much of "his" money. With all the chaos it was perfect for Trump's putsch. It's scary when you think how close we came.

[Mawspam2]

8. So Tom Carper's DC statehood bill was filed today.

Good timing.