Tanks, fighting vehicles, howitzers and other equipment have been rolling into the US capital since this weekend in preparation for an unprecedented military parade to honor the 250th anniversary of the founding of the first US Army and, incidentally, the birthday of US President Donald Trump.
It is the first such parade in the capital in 34 years and the first to fall conveniently on a US president’s birthday.
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Trump said, “It’s time we celebrate,” noting that “we won two world wars” and that the parade “is going to be paid by me, I don’t know if you know that.”
The June 14 evening parade will involve thousands of troops wearing uniforms representing every American conflict dating to the Revolutionary War. Over 100 military vehicles will be involved, from M1A2/Abrams tanks to Black Hawk, Apache, and Chinook helicopters, to Bradley fighting vehicles, a US Army statement said. US warplanes will also appear in “fly-by” sorties of combat aircraft from the US Air Force (USAF) and US Navy (USN).
The commitment of thousands of troops and equipment to a birthday celebration comes at a time when the National Guard has been deployed to secure the border with Mexico and quell protests in Los Angeles. The Trump regime and Republicans in Congress have launched efforts to drastically cut government budgets, including those to the US Department of Veterans Affairs, which provides lifelong healthcare services to US military veterans.
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The parade, which the Army projects to cost between $25 and $45 million before security and clean-up costs, plus the additional cost for USAF and USN formation flights, is ostensibly planned around the 250th birthday of the US Army, pegged to the official creation of the Continental Army at Independence Hall in Philadelphia in 1775. (Those troops first physically assembled in a park in Cambridge, MA, under General George Washington, a month later, to fight the British forces arriving in that colony.)
Saturday, June 14 also happens to be Trump’s 79th birthday. At a press conference on Monday, Trump effervesced at the prospect of such a show of American military power, something the US capital has not seen since June 8, 1991, when a smaller parade celebrated the conclusion of the Gulf War in Iraq. That was the largest American military parade since World War II.
“It’s such a, I think, important moment for this country,” Trump told reporters on Monday. “You know, two weeks ago, I was calling people and back and forth with leaders, including President Putin, including French president, including lots of different people, and all of them said, we’re celebrating victory in World War Two, and I said, ‘Wow, isn’t that amazing?’ We’re the only one that wasn’t celebrating and we’re the ones that won the war.”
“Now, Russia did help,” Trump went on. “They did lose 51 million people. In all fairness, people would say, ‘Oh, he’s sticking up for Russia.’ No, they lost 51 million people.”
Some eight million Soviet Ukrainians lost their lives in the “Great Patriotic War”.
His explanation for the controversial, dictator-style military parade went on:
“We won two world wars, and then we go out and change the name of the forts where we won the wars… from Fort Robert E Lee, from Fort Bragg, from all the different forts. And what do we do? We change the name of the forts because we want to be politically correct.
“No, I think it’s time that we celebrate”, he continued. “Well, you know, you’re going to spend a lot of money. A lot of that money is being paid for by me and people that make donations. I don’t know if you know that, a lot of it won’t even come out of the military.”
“We have the greatest military in the world. Nobody can beat us, as long as we have our right leadership. Nobody can beat us [unless] we have stupid people running it like you had in Afghanistan… It’s going to be a beautiful day, I think,” he said.
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