Mike Waltz wants answers on nebulous National Guard D.C. deployment

Mike Waltz supports the additional 1,000 troops to the Middle East as tension with Iran escalate.

Members of the National Guard had hours’ notice earlier this month before a deployment to Washington D.C. that may not end for months, and Republicans continue to rail about an open-ended mission without end or current justification.

U.S. Rep. Mike Waltz, a Colonel in that fighting force, prosecuted the case Saturday morning on the Fox News Channel, calling for a formalized justification of a mission that may not end for some until March as currently constructed.

“I want to know what mission analysis, what threat reporting is driving this presence. To have five times in D.C. what we have in Afghanistan and what we have in Iraq. We have two and a half divisions sitting in the nation’s Capitol,” Waltz said, before pointing out that this command decision has torn people from their lives with no clear objective.

“This isn’t active duty military. This isn’t their day job. This is men and women who have lives, they have jobs, they have businesses. Many of them are single parents that had to make arrangements for their kids. And they did this on just a few hours’ notice,” the second-term Congressman representing the Daytona Beach area said.

Florida Guard members will not be there, regardless of the fate of the mission at large.

Gov. Ron DeSantis recalled the Sunshine State contingent last week, a move made contemporaneously with Waltz and other Congressional Republicans blasting the treatment of the troops. The Governor decried the “half-cocked mission” and groused that these were “soldiers” and not “Pelosi’s servants.”

Waltz likewise contended that the thousands of troops still securing the Capitol “are not Nancy Pelosi’s private police force.”

“They should be an option of last resort,” Waltz told hosts Pete Hegseth, Jedidiah Bila and Will Cain. “Is it an appropriate use of our military to have them standing fifteen feet apart literally staring at a fence? That’s what they’re doing.”

Waltz, who blasted moves to vet the political beliefs of Guard members deployed to D.C. days ago to secure the inauguration, clearly continues to find reasons to doubt the logic beyond the continued deployment and treatment of these forces.