South Dakota National Guard now mercenaries

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loomer
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South Dakota National Guard now mercenaries

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Noem’s Use of Private Money to Deploy Guard Troops Raises Questions

South Dakota officials from both parties, as well as military historians, cited legal and ethical worries about the governor’s use of a donation from a Tennessee billionaire to send troops to the border.


South Dakota taxpayers have subsidized the state National Guard’s operations in world wars, the Middle East, Panama and the Caribbean. Now Gov. Kristi Noem has come up with a novel way of paying for it.

Ms. Noem, a Republican, announced Tuesday that she would deploy up to 50 of the state’s 3,100 Guard members to Texas, where they will help “secure the border between the United States and Mexico.” But unlike other Republican governors, who have dispatched troops to secure both the border and photo-ops for themselves, Ms. Noem found a private donor to provide the money for the deployment.

“The border is a national security crisis that requires the kind of sustained response only the National Guard can provide,” Ms. Noem said in a statement.

The move prompted an array of questions in South Dakota about the legality of privately funding National Guard operations, a fuzzy area of the law that officials in the state said had never before been contemplated. It comes as Ms. Noem is busy building a national profile ahead of the 2024 Republican presidential primary contest.

Ms. Noem’s spokesman, Ian Fury, said the governor was not available to be interviewed because she was with a newborn grandchild. The donor, Willis Johnson, a Tennessee billionaire who sent the money through his family’s foundation, declined to say how much he was sending to South Dakota to subsidize the Guard’s deployment.

“You’ve got illegals coming in and I just think they ought to follow the rules of America,” Mr. Johnson said. “South Dakota is a small state. They want to help America, I want to help them.”

Mr. Fury also declined to say how much the deployment would cost.

Mr. Johnson said he and Ms. Noem had both cleared the arrangement with their lawyers, but officials in South Dakota said they were unsure if it was legal.

“There are instances in South Dakota where we have private funding of government activities, but you see it more commonly in construction projections than in operations,” said Neil Fulton, who served as chief of staff to former Gov. Mike Rounds, a Republican, and is now the dean of the University of South Dakota School of Law.

The legal questions in South Dakota center on how the money would be transferred from Mr. Johnson through the state government to the National Guard. The State Legislature’s session has finished for the year, and no appropriations were set to consider a private donation to fund the state’s National Guard.

“I don’t have a clue if it’s legal,” said Roger Tellinghuisen, a Republican who served as South Dakota attorney general. “It’s a question in my own mind.”

Governors have wide authority to deploy National Guard units as they choose, and existing interstate compacts allow them to be sent to aid in recovery from natural disasters or events like the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by supporters of Donald J. Trump.

But Ms. Noem’s decision to accept private funding for the South Dakota National Guard’s deployment raised a number of ethical questions about the transparency of the state’s government and its use of the military.

“It’s basically money laundering, and it’s turning the state National Guard into a mercenary force,” said Rachel VanLandingham, a former Air Force lawyer who is a professor at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles. “She’s using troops there that are a resource and have been paid for by taxpayers that are being used for a political show by a high-powered donor because the governor thought it was a good idea.”

Private funding of state National Guard troops was common in the 19th century, when mining companies subsidized military deployments to crush labor uprisings during the Industrial Revolution. A dedicated federal funding stream for the National Guard was created with what is often known as the Dick Act of 1903, named for the Ohio congressman who was chairman of the House Militia Affairs Committee.

“In terms of a governor accepting private money, there’s no historic precedent because the Guard is funded by U.S. and state tax dollars,” said Joshua Kastenberg, a military historian who served as an Air Force judge and is now a law professor at the University of New Mexico.

Legality aside, Ms. Noem’s decision to accept private funding for military operations worried both South Dakota Democrats and military ethicists. State Senator Reynold Nesiba, one of three Democrats in the 35-member chamber, said Wednesday that deploying troops at a donor’s whim “sets a dangerous precedent.”

“We cannot be setting up our Guardsmen to be mercenaries,” Mr. Nesiba said. “These are not troops for hire by anyone who calls the governor. They are not hers to dispatch for partisan political purposes.”

Geoffrey Corn, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who is a professor at the South Texas College of Law Houston, said he had never heard of private funding for American military activity. Federal law, he said, would prohibit donors from directly subsidizing federal military activities, but it does not govern the funding of state National Guard units.

Like the National Guard troops deployed to the Texas border by Republican governors of other states, South Dakota’s troops, Professor Corn said, will largely serve ceremonial duties, though they will have the authority to make citizens’ arrests.

This year, Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, who is vying to rebuild his standing among Republican voters after a falling-out with Mr. Trump over the governor’s refusal to help overturn the results of the presidential election in Georgia, traveled to the border to take a boat tour of the Rio Grande and meet with members of the Georgia National Guard. The trip was documented on his social media feeds.

Mr. Johnson called Ms. Noem “an up-and-comer in the Republican Party” whom he met at the Republican Governors Association gathering in Nashville in May. He said that in the 2024 presidential race, he was “100 percent for Trump,” but that if the former president did not run, he would support Ms. Noem or Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida for the Republican nomination.

Mr. Fury declined to say where South Dakota’s troops would serve or when and if Ms. Noem would visit them there. Ms. Noem said in her statement that the initial deployment would last 30 to 60 days.
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Cool and normal! Not at all an attempt to see if it can be done or if it will be stopped!
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Re: South Dakota National Guard now mercenaries

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The classical way of funding public works and projects.
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Re: South Dakota National Guard now mercenaries

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Yeah, this can go absolutely nowhere good. Even if there's very little stopping a sufficiently wealthy private citizen from coming to an informal quid pro quo involving campaign contributions or just hiring mercenaries themselves, it's a pretty bad sign when they're not even bothering with a pretence anymore.
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Re: South Dakota National Guard now mercenaries

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Biden should federalize the South Dakota National Guard and make it clear he'll do likewise for any other state guard if the state tries to lease them out as hired guns.
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Re: South Dakota National Guard now mercenaries

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Elfdart wrote: 2021-07-04 10:28am Biden should federalize the South Dakota National Guard and make it clear he'll do likewise for any other state guard if the state tries to lease them out as hired guns.
What's the point of the National Guards anyway? Just fold them all into the US Army (or whatever branch is appropriate) and be done with it.
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Re: South Dakota National Guard now mercenaries

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was poking around on Wikipedia, turns out the National Guard has a history of entanglements with private interests:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_ ... bor_unrest
Industrialization and labor unrest

Labor unrest in the industrial and mining sections of the Northeast and Midwest led to demands for a stronger military force within the states. After the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, calls for military suppression of labor strikes grew louder, and National Guard units proliferated. In many states, large and elaborate armories, often built to resemble medieval castles, were constructed to house militia units. Businessmen and business associations donated monies for the construction of armories and to supplement funds of the local National Guard units. National Guard officers also came from the middle and upper classes.[35] National Guard troops were deployed to suppress strikers in some of the bloodiest and most significant conflicts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including the Homestead Strike, the Pullman Strike of 1894, and the Colorado Labor Wars.
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Re: South Dakota National Guard now mercenaries

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Re: South Dakota National Guard now mercenaries

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Solauren wrote: 2021-07-04 11:14am
Elfdart wrote: 2021-07-04 10:28am Biden should federalize the South Dakota National Guard and make it clear he'll do likewise for any other state guard if the state tries to lease them out as hired guns.
What's the point of the National Guards anyway? Just fold them all into the US Army (or whatever branch is appropriate) and be done with it.
They are members of the Army. Have been since Congress amended the National Defense Act in 1933. Basically, the whole point of the National Guard was to make the old Militias more efficient (in fact, the first act that lead to their creation is literally called the Efficiency in Militia Act of 1903) and to make it more clear when they could and could not be called upon by the federal government. However, making them a part of the Army meant that, as per the Second Amendment which establishes the regulation of a well regulated Militia as a right of the states, in 1940 they went ahead and gave the States permission to create State Defense Forces that are just the old Militias all over again, except they get equipment from the DOD. The reason you probably haven't heard of them is that most state legislatures either never saw a need to create a modern militia, or they actually disbanded their SDF over corruption scandals in the 80's! Right now, only half the states have one, even on paper, and fewer still are actually trained in the use of arms. Most just recruit retired National Guardsman anyway. Want to be a general in an SDF? In some cases, its as simple as asking the state governor, and even if you were at best a Lieutenant in the National Guard, he'll promote you if he likes your face.

So basically, the National Guard is a vestige of an attempt to regulate the militias, which ended up being reestablished anyway with problems that would have been all too familiar back in 1903 when the Guard was first created. And for legal purposes, they're just the damn Army, and get deployed in foreign countries all the time despite the name.
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Re: South Dakota National Guard now mercenaries

Post by Solauren »

So essentially, the National Guard is a part of the army that some state governors get to play with as they like?

Figures.
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Re: South Dakota National Guard now mercenaries

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As a longtime follower of the Youtube channel The Chieftain I found the following video quite interesting, particularly from a non-USA perspective.

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