Retired Army Major General Randy Manner, former acting vice chair of the National Guard Bureau and member of National Security Leaders for America (NSL4A).

Manner criticized the Trump administration's use of the National Guard on the streets of American cities, emphasizing that National Guard deployments should be for legitimate emergencies, not political theater.

"This administration is not just running between the guardrails, they are running over and destroying the guardrails that past administrations have, quite frankly, respected," Manner told WCPT.

"Step one: The governor controls the National Guard in peacetime, and that means that the governor uses the National Guard predominantly, by the way, to help save citizens, meaning that, for example, it might be with earthquakes or forest fires, or it might be with a tornado or a hurricane. In other words, it's all about helping to keep their citizens safe within the community. A very distant and last type of use of the National Guard by the governor is to back up the state and local police when asked for by a mayor or other individual within his or her state. That is rarely used through history, and I mean rarely used.

"Now, the president has the ability to call out any National Guard that he wants and make them part of the active duty military for the period that they are there. So calling them National Guard, yes, they are National Guardsmen, but they are serving as active duty military reporting to a dual status commander. It's called Title 10. They are full-time military reporting indirectly but, eventually, to the president.

"For Chicago there's a couple of issues here. One is, is it appropriate? Of course it's absolutely not appropriate, whatsoever. These are made-up emergencies. The one in D.C. is made up. The one in Los Angeles was made up. This is a misuse of this resource that is very scarce. It is diminishing readiness, because every day that these soldiers are not back at their regular civilian jobs in their communities, they're not available to their governor, and they are not training on combat missions like they should be, back in their home state, for overseas deployment. So it it's inappropriate to have U.S. military on the streets of America. There is no way ever this should be viewed as normal, and there should be an absolute black and white that unless those soldiers are there at the governor's request to help save lives, we don't need them watching our population. They're not trained for it. It is not their mission. They should absolutely, positively not be doing this kind of a role."

Catch "Joan Esposito: Live, Local and Progressive" weekdays from 2:00 to 5:00 p.m. Central on WCPT (heartlandsignal.com/programs/live-local-progressive).

And find the Joan Esposito (Full Episodes) podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, TuneIn, iHeartRadio, YouTube, and Amazon.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.