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The warning came up again and again in a North Texas Facebook thread this week that drew 500 comments. “We have no Navy. We have no Air Force. We are defenseless,” one commenter wrote. Another predicted that Mexico “would retake texas in a week.” A third asked the question plainly: “What would we do for a military?”
The answer starts with something most Texans drive past without noticing. Texas already has a military.
The Texas Military Department answers to the governor through the state’s adjutant general, and it has three branches: the Texas Army National Guard, the Texas Air National Guard, and the Texas State Guard. The first two are trained and equipped to federal standards today, with infantry, engineer, aviation and fighter units. The third is Texas’s own. Federal law allows states to keep defense forces like it and says such a force “may not be called, ordered, or drafted into the armed forces” of the United States. An independent Texas would not be inventing a military after a vote. It would be completing one that already stands.
Then there is the money. The Pentagon’s own Office of Local Defense Community Cooperation reports that the Department of Defense spent $47.4 billion in Texas in fiscal 2024, third among all the states. Compare that with what whole nations spend on their entire armed forces. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute puts Canada’s 2025 military budget at $37.5 billion and Australia’s at $35.3 billion. Both countries defend themselves, and both sit in the top 20 military spenders on Earth.
As for Mexico retaking Texas in a week, the same institute puts Mexico’s 2025 military spending at $13.6 billion, 30th in the world and down by a third from the year before. The defense dollars Washington already spends inside Texas are more than three times that.
None of this means an independent Texas would try to copy Washington. The Texas Nationalist Movement’s “Can Texas Make It?” report says it directly: “An independent Texas would not try to copy Washington’s roughly one-trillion-dollar global-posture budget. It would defend Texas.” That means a force sized to Texas’s real needs. Those needs are a long border, cartel violence, a Gulf coastline, and cyber attacks, not a war on another continent. It is the kind of defense Canada and Australia already buy, and Texas’s economy is larger than either of theirs.
Texas would not stand alone, either. Independence decided by a vote is settled by negotiation, and the bases, equipment and service members on Texas soil are among the first things on that table. The likeliest outcome is a mutual-defense treaty with the United States, the same kind of arrangement Washington already keeps with its closest neighbors. The United States and Canada have defended North American airspace together through NORAD for nearly 70 years. As the movement’s own answer to this question puts it, “A mutual-defense treaty is not Texas asking for protection it cannot provide itself.”
And the fear of invasion misreads what Texas independence is. The movement’s path is a vote of the people of Texas followed by a negotiated, orderly separation. It is decided at the ballot box, not on a battlefield, and no part of it involves Texas fighting anyone.
The question in the thread was what Texas would do for a military. It already has one, it already hosts one of the largest defense economies in the world, and it would negotiate the rest as a nation among friends.
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