As Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and his police chief were frantically calling Governor Tim Walz in the summer of 2020 to save a besieged police precinct, Governor Tim Walz refused to send National Guard soldiers to help the beleaguered police officers. Later, in rationalizing and justifying his conscious decision to let riots metastasize, Walz said the Guard wasn't up to the task.

Mayor Jacob Frey wanted the Governor to send in the National Guard to restore the peace in Minneapolis.

Tim Walz mocked his fellow Guardsmen as “19 year-old cooks.” Which is ridiculous.

My cousin deployed with the National Guard in Minneapolis and he was an Army Ranger. pic.twitter.com/E3D44W9TMx

— Dustin Grage (@GrageDustin) August 8, 2024

I don’t think the mayor knew what he was asking for. He wanted the National Guard, and what does that mean? I think the mayor said, 'I request the National Guard, whew, this is great. We’re going to have massively trained troops.' No, you’re going to have 19-year-olds who are cooks, in some cases.

He went on to say, "Putting a young troop with limited experience in the military with a loaded automatic weapon in the middle of a system with no one giving him direction -- they don’t have zip ties. They don’t have legal authority," 

That was on Wednesday, by the time Walz finally authorized the deployment of "19-year-old" cooks, the Minneapolis Third Precinct had been sacked, and the riots were widespread.

As a former National Guardsman, Walz's answers and responses sound blatantly dishonest. He should have trained in crowd control at some point in his career and would have known that you don't put troops on the streets with automatic weapons until things have gone pear-shaped in a major way. From personal experience, I was deployed as part of an Operation GARDEN PLOT exercise to secure a real nuclear weapons storage facility against a sizeable force of role-players. Even under those circumstances, I had a strict progression in the use of force to follow. You didn't load weapons until you were in extremis. I find it hard to believe that an organization that has managing civil disturbances as a primary mission would not have rules on the use of force.

According to a disgustingly servile "fact check" by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune that is supposed to prove that Walz did all he could to stop the riots, the Minneapolis mayor asked for troops at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday; the police chief contacted Minnesota Public Safety Commissioner John Harrington shortly after 8 p.m., asking for the Guard and providing “mission plan” details. The first Guardsmen arrived at around 3:45 a.m. on Friday. What happened? Did the 19-year-old cooks get replaced?

When Walz bailed out of his National Guard unit rather than deploy to Iraq, his unit, a field artillery battalion, was tasked with providing convoy security. Among them were 19-year-olds who had been trained for something entirely different. And some of the men Walz abandoned didn't come home. Including at least one 19-year-old.

Walz’s old unit, whose main job was running security for US convoys in Iraq, suffered three casualties during the deployment he missed — including Kyle Miller, 19, who joined the National Guard while still in high school, and David Berry, 37.

Soldiers are as good as their leaders. When you find a leader who is not willing to trust his troops with a mission, that judgment is rendered on the leader, not on the troops. The Guardsmen who successfully performed their mission in Minneapolis were the same troops that Walz refused to send on Wednesday. They were no better trained and no better led. Walz denigrated their ability to do their job as an excuse not to do his. As it turns out, that is on-brand for Walz.