Coronavirus: Secret US plan to install general if law breaks down

The Trump administration has issued secret orders for a military takeover in the event that civilian leadership is incapacitated.

US General Terrence O’Shaughnessy would take over if martial law was declared.

The Trump administration has ­issued secret orders to facilitate a military takeover of the US in the event that civilian leadership is ­incapacitated during the corona­virus crisis, a report says.

The orders would kick in if disease or violence arising from the pandemic rendered Washington impotent and prevented devolution of power to civilian leaders in the regions as envisaged in decades of contingency planning.

The US would then be placed under the authority of Terrence O’Shaughnessy, a former fighter pilot and the designated “combatant commander”, according to Newsweek. General O’Shaughnessy, 56, leads Northern Command, responsible for homeland defence and created after the 9/11 attacks.

On February 1, Defence ­Secretary Mark Esper signed standby orders instructing Northcom to execute plans for a pandemic and alerting it and east coast military units to “prepare to deploy” for possible “extraordinary” missions, including the imposition of some form of martial law. Of the seven plans drawn up to conduct these missions, three are transport-orientated: they lay out how the military would rescue and evacuate President Donald Trump, Vice-President Mike Pence and their families, move national security leaders to a secure location, ferry congressional leaders and the Supreme Court to emergency sites and maintain government operations from a bunker in Maryland.

A fourth plan, codenamed Granite Shadow, relates to domestic missions involving weapons of mass destruction. Three others — Octagon, Freejack and Zodiac — outline how “continuity of government” would be maintained by circumventing the succession ­sequence laid out in the constitution and placing military commanders in control until a new civilian leader could be installed.

In October 2018 the joint chiefs of staff reminded commanders that they could “engage temporarily” in military control on their own authority “where prior authorisation by the president is impossible” or where local authorities “are unable to control the situation”. Eligible conditions include “large scale unexpected civil disturbances” involving “significant loss of life or wanton destruction of property”.

In his final year in office Barack Obama issued an order clarifying the “national essential functions” of government that needed to be maintained in an emergency.

The catastrophe response program began in the Eisenhower era, when the possibility emerged of a nuclear attack on the White House. Imposing martial law temporarily is a “pretty straightforward process” when only one city has been devastated, a military planner told William Arkin, who wrote the Newsweek piece. “But with coronavirus, where the effect is nationwide, we’re in territory we’ve never been in before.”

The Times