9 questions about Trump’s military parade

By some measures, President Donald Trump’s military parade has been years in the making.

The event planned for Saturday will mark the U.S. Army’s 250th birthday, with thousands of soldiers and dozens of massive military vehicles and aircraft descending on the National Mall. The estimated cost: up to $45 million.

Trump has reportedly long sought this kind of celebration. Eight years ago, he witnessed France’s Bastille Day parade and said the United States is “going to have to try and top it.”

“For two and a half centuries, our brave soldiers have fought, bled, and died to keep us FREE, and now we will honor them with a wonderful Parade, one that is worthy of their service and sacrifice,” the president, who is expected to attend the parade, said on his Truth Social account late last month.

Army spokesperson Heather Hagan called the celebration a “once-in-a-lifetime” occasion.

“This is America’s Army,” she told PBS News. “It’s a free festival, free parade, free opportunity for all to participate in and come meet your Army.”

Military parades of this scale are uncommon in the U.S. The last one happened decades ago, in 1991, to celebrate the American and allied forces’ victory in the first Gulf War.

Trump has gotten political blowback over the parade, including from Democrats who say the event is to celebrate himself. (The president’s 79th birthday is on Saturday). Veterans are divided over the parade, with some viewing the military parade as a commemoration of the institution’s history. Others have balked at the parade’s price tag and how the event papers over the Trump administration’s cuts to the Department of Veterans Affairs and an ongoing effort to remove transgender troops from service.

Roughly 6 in 10 U.S. adults, including 80% of Democrats, 72% of independents and 35% of Republicans, said the military parade was not a good use of government money, according to a poll conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research earlier this month.

“It’s his typical personalization of national life — it’s all about him, it’s all about his ego, it’s all about his prominence, his success at becoming president of the United States,” said Richard Kohn, an emeritus professor of history and peace, war and defense at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “To adopt the military for political and egotistical terms is really, to me, a mark of weakness — weakness of his self-regard, weakness of his position in American life, and it diminishes the importance of the Army’s 250 years of success.”

Peter Feaver, a political science and public policy professor at Duke University, said that while a parade like this is unusual, there is something “deeper” and “legitimate” worth celebrating.

“This is a chance to remind the American people that, for 250 years, America’s freedoms have been protected by men and women who are willing to serve and answer the call of duty when they’re called. That’s partly why we have the free republic we have today that’s worth celebrating,” he said. “With that in mind, that goes a long way to mollifying some of the concerns I think people might otherwise have.”

When and where is Trump’s military parade happening?

The parade kicks off at 6:30 p.m. Eastern on Saturday as part of the U.S. Army’s 250th birthday celebration on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

The parade is scheduled to start at 23rd Street NW, near the Lincoln Memorial, and travel approximately 1 mile east along Constitution Avenue to 15th Street NW, near the Ellipse in front of the White House. The parade is set to last around one hour.

Latest forecasts show rain and possible thunderstorms in D.C. on the day of the parade. The Army said the weather “is being closely monitored and taken into consideration, but at this point nothing has changed.”

Who will attend?

Trump and Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll are expected to be among the VIPs in attendance. While the Army has not made a list of attendees publicly available, the White House’s Instagram page includes a video from Army veteran and retired mixed martial arts fighter Tim Kennedy, who shares where Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth will be standing during the parade.

Why is the military parade being held on June 14?

The Army calls June 14, 1775, the official date of its establishment.

The Second Continental Congress adopted a resolution on that day that called for “six companies of expert riflemen, be immediately raised in Pennsylvania, two in Maryland, and two in Virginia” to join a New England regional army, called the Army of Observation, near Boston, according to the transcribed journals of the Continental Congress available through the Library of Congress.

About two weeks later, “on the 3rd of July, George Washington makes it up there and assumes command of what is now called the Continental Army,” made up of the units established on June 14 and the Army of Observation, said Lee Reynolds, the public affairs officer for the U.S. Army Center of Military History.

June 14 is also Flag Day, a commemoration of the day in 1777 when the Continental Congress decided what the official American flag would look like.

How many troops are participating in the parade?

Some 6,700 soldiers will take part in the parade, representing different eras and units from the Army’s history.

Many of the troops will be dressed in historic and present-day uniforms, and be accompanied by equipment and vehicles from those eras. For instance, as soldiers representing the 82d and 101st Airborne divisions from World War II march down Constitution Ave., at least one Ford GPW 1/4 Ton Jeep and one M4A1 Sherman tank are expected to ride alongside them. Aircraft from that era – the B-25 Mitchell bomber, P-51 Mustang and C-47 Skytrain transport plane – will fly over the parade.

The parade will also include the Army’s parachute team, the Golden Knights, jumping onto the Ellipse in front of the White House.

Future members of the military will also be included. Cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, those in Army basic training and students in ROTC programs at Virginia Military Institute, the Citadel and Texas A&M University will march with people who are getting ready to enlist in the Army.

How many tanks and aircraft will take part in the parade?

The Defense Department, writing in May about preparations for the parade, noted that “officials anticipate approximately 150 vehicles” and “50 aircraft” will take part in the parade.

Included in the Army’s list of equipment for the parade: the M1A2/Abrams tank, UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, Bradley Fighting Vehicle and AH-64 Apache helicopter.

The birthday celebration festival will be located on a stretch of the National Mall near the Smithsonian Castle. It will also include equipment on display, including drones.

How much will the festival and parade cost?

The entire day of festivities is expected to cost between $25 million and $45 million, Hagan told PBS News.

During a House Armed Services Committee hearing last week, Driscoll said the parade offers an opportunity to boost recruitment.

“Our marketing budget we would spend to recruit those soldiers, I think our team believes that the investment of these dollars to tell that story will directly lead to a good, measurable, quantitative outcome for the Army,” he said. “It would be a massive tragedy to let this moment pass where we can tell this story and inculcate an entire generation of youth into this amazing story that is the United States Army.”

How are federal and D.C. officials preparing for the event?

The parade is a National Security Special Event, the highest federal security designation. This means it is getting the same security treatment as the Super Bowl, Trump’s inauguration, and the state funeral of the late President Jimmy Carter.

“We’re preparing for an enormous turnout — hundreds of thousands of attendees,” Matt McCool, the special agent-in-charge for the U.S. Secret Service’s Washington, D.C., field office, said at a security briefing on Monday.

Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport said in a statement that the Federal Aviation Administration “is expected to suspend airline operations” at the airport, the closest to the National Mall and the site of a deadly collision between a military helicopter and a commercial flight earlier this year.

“Customers with flight reservations for the evening of June 14 should check the status of their flights directly with their airline,” the statement read.

The Army Corps of Engineers is using temporary metal plates and soft asphalt, held down with railroad ties, at key places along the parade route to mitigate damage caused by tanks and other vehicles.

“Part of our contract here is to, when this is done, to remove these plates, to remove the asphalt, and to return every place on the roadway that we put these down back to exactly what it was before,” Col. Jesse Curry, director of the Office of the Chief of Engineers, said in a video posted on the Corps website. “Once the parade is complete, we want to return these roadways fully to the D.C. commuters and all those that use these roads to get to and from work and to visit our capital city.”

Curry also noted during the Monday security briefing that the tanks have new rubber track pads to minimize any damage to the road.

Are protests planned at Trump’s military parade?

As protests against the Trump administration’s immigration raids continued in Los Angeles and other cities across the country, federal law enforcement officials said Monday they were monitoring and preparing for possible unrest if it happens near the parade and festival.

“We have no intelligence about that happening here. But if it does, we have the resources to handle it,” McCool said.

Several cities across the nation will be the sites of “No Kings” protests against the Trump administration on Saturday. But protest organizers said there will not be a demonstration in Washington, D.C.

“Instead of allowing this birthday parade to be the center of gravity, we will make action everywhere else the story of America that day: people coming together in communities across the country to reject strongman politics and corruption,” the movement wrote on its website.

While there is no specific designated zone for protests and First Amendment activity, the National Park Service has several permits pending, and, thus far, there have been no significant concerns, U.S. Park Police Chief Jessica Taylor told reporters Monday.

Meanwhile, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday that “those people who want to protest” are “going to be met with very big force.”

When was the last time the U.S. held a similar military parade?

On June 8, 1991, approximately 200,000 people gathered on the National Mall for a parade to celebrate the United States’ and its allies’ victory in the Gulf War.

The New York Times reported the next day that the parade was “the largest military exhibition in the capital” since Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Allied commander during World War II, led a parade down Pennsylvania Avenue after the war ended. The newspaper also called the celebration “the most impressive display of war technology in recent history.”

Kohn said that parade had a reason behind it – the “astounding” victory in Operation Desert Storm.

The U.S. does military parades “to build morale and to build a kind of showcase for the military to the American people. But it has to be done carefully. It has to be done tastefully. It has to be done economically,” he said. “But to make a splash with it that’s corrupted by the president of the United States’ age and birthday, strikes many of us as both inappropriate and ridiculous.”

Dan Sagalyn contributed reporting for this story.