By Aeneas Leviné
PASADENA, California — A late-night U.S. military training exercise in northeast Pasadena shook residents awake last week as helicopters, simulated gunfire, flash grenades and controlled explosions hit a residential neighborhood with little public warning.
The drill took place June 3 at the long-vacant former St. Luke Medical Center in the 2600 block of East Washington Boulevard. Video from the scene showed helicopters flying low and troops rappelling onto the roof of the former hospital, while simulated gunfire and explosions could be heard throughout the surrounding neighborhood. The exercise continued until about 2 a.m., according to local reports.
Residents were jolted awake by the sounds of urban warfare in a city still recovering from disaster. Pasadena’s non-emergency line was flooded with calls from terrified residents still reeling from the 2025 Eaton Fire.
City officials later attempted to excuse the operation as routine preparation, but the content of the exercise was clear. A U.S. military urban warfare training exercise involving helicopters, troops rappelling onto the roof, simulated gunfire, flash bangs and controlled explosions. The city said it received only minimal details and had no control over the timing or operational specifics of the exercise.
The city’s official notice did not match the scale of what residents experienced. Residents instead endured a prolonged military operation in the middle of the night, carried out in a residential neighborhood.
California Rep. Judy Chu later said constituents had contacted her office about military training exercises conducted in Pasadena and other Southern California communities with limited community notice. After contacting the U.S. Army and FBI, Chu said federal officials told her the drills were routine exercises meant to prepare personnel for overseas operations in urban environments.
That explanation does nothing to soften the political content of the drill. The U.S. military used a working residential city as terrain for urban combat training, while residents were treated as obstacles to be notified, managed or ignored. Whether the target is overseas populations resisting U.S. Imperialism or oppressed communities inside the United States, the lesson is the same: the war machine treats cities as battlefields and civilians as obstacles.
The Pasadena drill shows how the militarization of public life is imposed. Local police were used to manage pedestrians and vehicles around the operation in which the local masses had no say. Instead, the former hospital, which sits inside a neighborhood where the masses live, sleep, work and raise families, was occupied, turning ordinary streets into a war zone.
The military’s presence in Pasadena must be understood as part of the broader fascicization of the U.S. Old State. Domestic policing and military training increasingly blur together, with local governments expected to accommodate federal force while residents are told after the fact that such operations are routine. The more the ruling class prepares for war abroad, the more it trains to manage unrest at home.
The deeper issue of the urban warfare drills in Pasadena is that the masses are being conditioned to accept armed occupation as normal, whether under the name of training, security, emergency preparation or public safety. Pasadena residents are right to be outraged. No community should be used as a training ground for imperialist war and urban counterinsurgency.
