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Walking down the famous National Mall in the US capital Washington, it is quite easy to spot different groups of reserve military units dotted around.

The presence of the US National Guard — a state-based military reserve force that can be called up to serve together when on federal missions — is indeed hard to miss.

Some 2,200 armed personnel, mostly sent in from six states, are stationed around Washington’s many metro stations and public sites.

At first glance, their presence does not seem dissimilar from that of the streets of Brussels, Paris or London, where military units visibly patrol key institutions, landmarks and transportation hubs.

Yet Carrie Lee, senior fellow with the German Marshall Fund and one of the foremost experts on military-civilian matters in the US, said that the situation is very different across the Atlantic.

“The American public is just not used to seeing soldiers on the streets,” she told Euronews.

“And so that is what makes it very jarring for a lot of us when you are walking by the metro and you see, you know, four guys in their National Guard uniforms from South Carolina carrying M-16s,” Lee, also a former associate professor at the US Army War College, said.

'Crime, crime, crime'

When announcing his decision to send the National Guard into the nation’s capital at a White House press briefing on 11 August, US President Donald Trump said he was responding to different fears of the public, namely of getting “mugged and raped and shot and killed.”

In Trump's words, the decision was to “help reestablish law, order and public safety in Washington.”

"This is Liberation Day in DC, and we're going to take our capital back — we're taking it back," Trump said. "I'm announcing a historic action to rescue our nation's capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor, and worse."

At the press conference, the US president also announced he was taking control of the capital’s police department and sending in federal immigration and drug enforcement officers.

“You all know people and friends of yours” who had been victims of violent crime, Trump told reporters. “You can be anything you want, but you want to have safety in the streets.”

The head of the Republican Party in Washington, Patrick Mara, agreed with this approach.

“Most House (of Representatives) members have a story about how crime has impacted their lives… I mean, an intern has been killed, murdered in the last few months," he told Euronews.

A 21-year-old congressional intern from Massachusetts Eric Tarpinian-Jachym was shot dead by stray gunfire in June, and former Trump official Michael Gill was killed in an apparent carjacking in 2024.