National Guard Scraps Plans to Invade Rural Town

National Guard scraps plans to invade rural town
wnd
DES MOINES, Iowa
Following publicized reports that the Army National Guard was planning a military training exercise on the streets of a rural Iowa town, the commanding officers have called off the mock “invasion.”
The Guard had planned a four-day urban military operation in tiny Arcadia, Iowa, population 443, sending troops to take over the town and search door-to-door for a suspected weapons dealer.
The exercise was designed as a mock scenario to give soldiers the skills needed for deployment in an urban environment, and military officials stressed that only households that consented to be part of the drill would be searched.

“It will be important for us to gain the trust and confidence of the residents of Arcadia,” Sgt. Mike Kots, readiness NCO for Alpha Company, told Carroll’s Daily Times Herald. “We will need to identify individuals that are willing to assist us in training by allowing us to search their homes and vehicles and to participate in role-playing.

“We really want to get as much information out there as possible,” Kots continued, “because this operation could be pretty intrusive to the people of Arcadia.”

Military spokesman Lt. Col. Greg Hapgood, however, told WND that the operation has now been “scaled back” and no longer involves an “invasion” of Arcadia.

And while Hapgood confirmed the Guard had been inundated with objections from citizens concerned about soldiers patrolling the streets of an American town, he said most came from people out of state and unfamiliar with the operation. Iowans, he explained, typically cooperate with the Guard. The change in plans was based on troop evaluation, he said, not public outcry.

“Higher headquarters leadership,” Hapgood told WND, “given the unit’s status of training proficiency, made a decision to scale back the exercise.”

Kots described the original operation to the Herald as set to begin on Thursday, April 2, with reconnaissance and exploratory patrols. On April 4 convoys were to be deployed from the armory in Carroll to nearby Arcadia, where soldiers would knock on doors, showing a picture of the invented “arms dealer.”

“Once credible intelligence has been gathered,” said Kots, “portions of the town will be road-blocked and more in-depth searches of homes and vehicles will be conducted in accordance with the residents’ wishes.

“One of the techniques we use in today’s political environment is cordon and knock,” Kots explained. “We ask for the head of the household, get permission to search, then have them open doors and cupboards. The homeowner maintains control. We peer over their shoulder, and the soldier uses the homeowner’s body language and position to protect him.”

The planned drill had also included overhead supervision from a Blackhawk helicopter, crowd-control measures and simulated extraction of “injured” people, culminating in capture of the “arms dealer.”

“This exercise will improve the real-life operational skills of the unit,” said Kots. “And it will hopefully improve the public’s understanding of military operations.”

“There are no active duty bases in Iowa, so there are no urban warfare training areas of any size,” Hopgood said. “In order to get that larger neighborhood feel or city feel, we have to be creative and partner with our communities.”

Hopgood further told WND that in past cooperative exercises with the community, the people of Iowa have welcomed learning how their sons and daughters operate in action.
Plans for the urban operation training, Hopgood explained, are still set to continue, but will be conducted in a smaller, platoon-by-platoon basis in the near vicinity of the Carroll armory.

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Here is a story from a few months ago regarding an exercise of the same kind in Indianapolis:
Indianapolis To Become “Mock Battlefield”
Circle City to be site of three week long urban warfare training
Indianapolis will become a “mock battlefield” for the next three weeks according to local press, as over two thousand marines will stage a huge urban warfare training exercise in and around the city.
About 2,300 Marines from the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, based at Camp Lejeune, N.C., will conduct urban warfare training from Wednesday through June 19 in and around Indianapolis, reports the Indy Star.
The Marines have been granted permission by state, federal and local authorities to fire weapons, conduct patrols, run vehicle checkpoints, react to ambushes and employ nonlethal weapons after landing helicopters and deploying throughout various parks, stadiums and fairgrounds.

“We don’t want anyone thinking that there’s an invasion happening or that we declared martial law or something like that,” Debbi Fletcher of the Indianapolis/Marion County Emergency Management Agency commented.

“Our aim in Indianapolis is to expose our Marines to realistic scenarios and stresses posed by operating in an actual urban community, thereby increasing their proficiency in built-up areas,” Col. Mark J. Desens, commander of the 26th MEU, said in a statement. “While some of the activity will take place around Camp Atterbury, residents in many areas can expect to see helicopters flying overhead, military vehicles on the roads and Marines patrolling on foot,” Desens said.

~ snipet ~
There have been literally thousands of these kind of operations in the planning and going on for years now. Many designed to use the military on the streets of American cities in direct violation of Posse Comitatus. The Pentagon has a full Command in operation working on these activities, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).
We have seen how new provisions will effectively nullify the U.S. constitution, and a recent spate of executive orders, in particular PDD 51, outline preparations for the implementation of open martial law in the event of a declared national emergency.

The Pentagon has “War Plans” drafted in the event of any type of terror attack, which would be coordinated by Northcom in conjunction with the Department of Homeland Security and would involve martial law and thousands of troops on the streets.

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Wild Thing’s comment………
“Hopgood further told WND that in past cooperative exercises with the community, the people of Iowa have welcomed learning how their sons and daughters operate in action.”
Well except for one thing, one huge thing. In the past we did not have a man named Barack Hussein Obama in the White House and his fellow travelers communists and thugs in his administration. It is very different today than four years ago. Today, the stimulus bill has opened up Pandora’s box. Four years ago, we had a moral President, now we how a Nietzsche specialist in the WH.
Whoever commissioned this can develop some baselines for his study, which is the genuine point of this drill.
Let’s say forinstance the questions as, “The percentage of homeowners who will comply with a voluntary search of their home for firearms.”
This is a crucial bit of information, for those who would disarm us. IMO

….Thank you Mark for sending this to me.
Mark
3rd Mar.Div. 1st Battalion 9th Marine Regiment
1/9 Marines aka The Walking Dead
VN 66-67