“I am not wasting a day standing and marching around in my freaking uniform so that somebody can get their rocks off,” one Navy vet said.
For the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who would be tasked with making it happen, a military parade like the one President Donald Trump reportedly envisions would be a colossal pain in the rear guard.
Trump has long fantasized about being in the center of a celebration involving thousands of soldiers marching in formation alongside tanks and missile launchers. And in January, after watching 6,000 soldiers march through Paris last summer to commemorate a turning point in the French Revolution, he told military brass to start planning a parade “like the one in France,” The Washington Post reported Tuesday.
Unlike France, the U.S. is ill-prepared to host a massive display of military might — in large part because it doesn’t do so very often. With the exception of small local celebrations, the last military parade in this country was at the end of the Persian Gulf War nearly 30 years ago. The one before that was to celebrate the end of World War II.
HuffPost asked some current and former members of the military what they thought of a potential parade. Their views aren’t necessarily representative of everyone in the military, but the people who were willing to talk thought the parade was a pretty dumb idea — and that it would be much harder to pull off than the commander in chief might imagine.
U.S. troops are out of practice marching in formation
For Trump to have a huge parade in Washington, D.C., the military would likely have to shuttle in units from other parts of the country, find places for them to stay, provide them with meals, and secure their weapons. The U.S. military employs lots of people — about 2 million active duty and reserve service members — so it’s possible to cobble together a few thousand troops to match France’s parade. But those people all have jobs that don’t involve marching around in a straight line for the president’s amusement.
