Over 20,000 National Guard Troops Stationed at the U.S Capitol Following Insurrection: Is it too much?

By: ELLIOTT GARSKE

One of the many things to come out of the insurrection at the United States Capitol on January 6th, was the movement of thousands of members of the National Guard to stop the insurrection and protect the Capitol up until President Joe Biden was inaugurated. As of January 13th, upwards of 20,000 National Guard Soldiers are stationed at Washington DC. Now, you may be wondering as to why there needs to be so many soldiers stationed there, which is about half of how many are stationed overseas in Japan.

It all started on January 6th, when a large group of domestic terrorists broke into the Capitol in an attempt to take members of the government hostage. Since then, more and more members of the National Guard have been called in to protect the Capitol, but as more and more come in, people are bringing up the question of whether or not there really needs to be this many soldiers stationed at and around the capitol. In fact, there hasn’t actually been a good reason from anybody as to why there needs to be so many troops stationed outside of them wanting to prevent another event like what happened on the 6th from happening again.

But then again, does there really need to be 20,000+ troops stationed to prevent this? I personally really don’t think so. If they were protecting the entirety of Washington D.C then yeah that would seem at least somewhat reasonable, but this is all just for the Capitol Building. In fact, there are only 7,000 actually protecting the main building and the National Mall with a huge unscalable fence until January 21st, which just makes it more confusing as to why the extra 13,000 were needed in the first place.