Trump asks Pentagon to plan military parade for Veterans Day
US President Donald Trump says he has asked the Pentagon to stage a large-scale military parade in Washington on Veterans Day.
During a call to a Fox News television show on Saturday night, Trump said he was hopeful that the parade would be held “with a lot of plane flyovers.”
However, he acknowledged that the costs of the parade, estimated to be between $10 million and $30 million, would be a problem.
“We’ll see if we can do it at a reasonable cost, and if we can’t, we won’t do it, but the generals would love to do it, I can tell you, and so would I,” Trump said.
Trump initially discussed the matter with senior military leaders in a meeting last month after witnessing a French military parade on Bastille Day last year.
Trump told French President Emmanuel Macron that when he went back to the US he wanted a military parade on the Fourth of July in Washington.
“I was at the Bastille Day parade in France with the president of France, very good guy, and it was quite something, and frankly I think it’s great for spirit,” he told on Fox News.
Meanwhile, officials in Washington have criticized the plan at a time when the Defense Department wants more stable funding for an overstretched military.
“A military parade in DC would shut down the nation’s capital and waste taxpayer dollars just to feed Trump’s ego,” said Eleanor Holmes Norton, a non-voting delegate to the US Congress for the District of Columbia earlier this month.
The parade is expected to be held on Pennsylvania Avenue, the 1.2-mile (1.9-km) stretch between Congress and the White House that is also the site of the Trump International Hotel.
Military parades in the United States are generally rare. Such parades in other countries are usually staged to celebrate victories in battle or showcase military might.
The last US military parade was in 1991, when tanks and thousands of troops paraded through Washington to celebrate the ousting of Iraqi forces from Kuwait during the reign of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
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