Presented with the plans Colonel Hunter had set in motion and the easy accessibility of their equipment, neither of which he had known about at the time, Secretary McCarthy conceded "you could have shaved minutes,"[375] and the speed of deployment "could have" been pushed up, but "[i]t depends."[376]
When the Guard finally arrived at the Capitol, "pretty much all the other fighting, per se, had stopped on the Capitol complex," according to Robert Glover, head of the MPD Special Operations Division.[377] Then-Inspector Glover received the Guard troops when they arrived.[378] "[T]he bus just kind of showed up. It was my decision at that point, looking at their numbers and their capabilities at that moment in time and what was the most pressing activity—and that was to make the arrests," he said.[379] He had them create a secure "prisoner cordon" where they could stand guard as arrested individuals waited transport to jail.[380] "They were the freshest personnel that we had at that moment in time. And, again, they didn't have any significant numbers to really do much else at that moment in time either," he said.[381] "[T]heir orders were basically, support us in whatever we told them to do . . ."[382]
Secretary McCarthy said that it was possible that DOD and DC National Guard leaders had simply not been coordinating their planning.[383] He acknowledged that "a lot of things were probably missed. It was tremendously confusing,"[384] and "that makes for a messy response."[385]
No one within the Department of Defense, Army, or Guard leveled accusations of an intentional delay. "I didn't see anybody trying to throw sand in the gearbox and slow things down," General Milley said.[386]
Major General Walker said the Army's reluctance to approve National Guard assistance to the Mayor during the planning for the anticipated January 6th events continued through January 6th itself.[387] "I don't know where the decision paralysis came from, but it was clearly there. The decision paralysis, decision avoidance," he said.[388]
CONCLUSION
Former President Trump's eagerness to engage the U.S. military to play a visible role in addressing domestic unrest during the late spring and summer of 2020 does appear to have prompted senior military leadership to take precautions, in preparing for the joint session, against the possibility that the DC Guard might be ordered to deploy for an improper purpose. Those precautions seem to have been prudential as much as legal in nature.
What that entailed in the unprecedented circumstances of the January 6th attack on the Capitol is, however, harder to accept: a 3 hour and 19
