I'd like to mention that while I was in the Marines, we did urban training in cities all the time. LA, Guam, Honolulu. We were plain-clothed, but we had rifles, pistols, radios, the whole 9. We stayed inside for 3 days, sometimes in abandoned buildings, and ran surveillance for whatever mission we were on. No one knew we were there. I guarantee that in some city you've lived in, there's been military training. As long as you coordinate with local law enforcement, people won't freak out. They'll just think it's odd, assuming they notice at all.

That being said, someone going to town on a 240G (with blanks) would alarm the populace. I think that public announcements would solve any potential problems. Maybe even bring out a few demonstrators.

Huh. 1/24. That's our sister Bn. When I was in 2/24 we did a big urban FX with some Dutch Marines in Omaha. The city let us use a few old abandoned office buildings, in the slummy part of town. It was great training in a trash filled wreck of a building with simnition. Way better than those cookie cutter combat-towns.

The thing about the mayor's excuse is, it sounds reasonable. Until you remember that this was planned weeks (months?) in advance, and that the mayor had plenty of advance notice. Lots of time to contact the businesses with offices downtown (or wherever the training was supposed to take place) and say, "Hey, on such-and-such a date the Marines are going to be doing a training exercise downtown. Don't be alarmed if you see them, there's no terrorist threat to the city, it's just an exercise." Businesses could have put up notices in employee break rooms, etc.

The fact that he only now comes up with this excuse means either: a) he never thought of giving such a notice and is therefore incompetent, or b) he's lying about his excuse. Note that that's not an exclusive-or: he could well be both lying and incompetent. But at least one of the above must be true.

Here is the video. You decide who if the Mayor is telling the truth.

Only in Toledo.

Finkbeiner's story keeps getting larger every time he talks. It was bad enough Finkbeiner used all 14,000 CBD workers going home as the excuse for those affected when the actual area of operations for the exercise from staging at Promenade Park to a building near Madison and Erie, three short blocks away. (Googlemap those criteria and check where it is in the city.) But now he's bringing up school children transferring buses.

I'm sure the permit is publicly available and would layout what was to happen. A talk with A Company would help in defining what exactly would be going on and when. These Marine exercises have been done before, and I doubt they, in conjunction with Toledo's own Police Department would arrange something that would measurably affect either rush hour or school busing activities. As it was, the original Fox Toledo story noted the Marines hadn't done anything by 3 PM and were still packing up around 5 PM.

I wonder if anything was going to happen at all on Friday, much less before rush hour ended. My guess is a Friday afternoon/early evening setup camp, an all day Saturday exercise and a Sunday pack and go home. Based on reading about Iraq patroling, maybe they'd do a late evening exercise ending by 11PM or something, but it'd probably be done without firing their weapons.