General Terrence O'Shaughnessy: Secret plan to install general if law breaks down
The Trump administration has issued secret orders to facilitate a military takeover of the US in the event that civilian leadership is incapacitated during the coronavirus crisis, a report says.
The orders would kick in if disease or violence arising from the pandemic rendered Washington impotent and prevented devolution of power to civilian leaders in the regions as envisaged in decades of contingency planning.
The United States would then be placed under the authority of Terrence O'Shaughnessy, a four-star general and former fighter pilot who is the designated "combatant commander", according to Newsweek.
General O' Shaughnessy, 56, leads the US Northern Command (Northcom), a military authority responsible for homeland defence, created after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
On February 1 Mark Esper, the defence secretary, signed standby orders instructing Northcom to execute plans for a pandemic and alerting it and east coast military units to "prepare to deploy" for possible "extraordinary" missions, including the imposition of some form of martial law.
Of the seven plans drawn up to conduct these missions, three are transport-orientated: they lay out how the military would rescue and evacuate President Trump, Mike Pence, the vice-president, and their families, move the secretary of defence and other national security leaders to a secure location, ferry congressional leaders and the supreme court to emergency sites and maintain government operations from a bunker in Maryland.
A fourth plan, codenamed Granite Shadow, relates to domestic missions involving weapons of mass destruction.
Three others — Octagon, Freejack and Zodiac — outline how "continuity of government" would be maintained by circumventing the succession sequence laid out in the constitution and placing military commanders in control until a new civilian leader could be installed.
In October 2018 the joint chiefs of staff reminded military commanders that they could "engage temporarily" in military control on their own authority "where prior authorisation by the president is impossible" or where local authorities "are unable to control the situation". Eligible conditions include "large scale unexpected civil disturbances" involving "significant loss of life or wanton destruction of property".
In the final year of his administration President Obama issued an order clarifying the "national essential functions" of government that needed to be maintained in an emergency.
The catastrophe response programme began in the Eisenhower era, when the possibility emerged of an enemy power obliterating the White House in a nuclear attack.
Imposing martial law temporarily is a "pretty straightforward process" when only one city or region has been devastated, a military planner told William Arkin, the journalist and former soldier who wrote the Newsweek piece. "But with coronavirus, where the effect is nationwide, we're in territory we've never been in before."
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