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General Franks, who is retired, was citing what would probably happen.

Martial Law was declared several times in the last century, often during dangerous race riots in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921, then in Detroit, Watts, and in the DC area during riots after MKL was killed.

In DC the military with Douglas McArthur in charge was called out to control the veterans marching and rioting after WWI.

Below is the result of the search for Martial Law in the USA.

http://search.yahoo.com/search?x=op&va=Watts+Riots%2C+Martial+Law&va_vt=any&vst=0&vd=all&fl=0&ei=ISO-8859-1&vm=p&n=20

Law and order was reclaimed. The bad situation cooled off and people started to return to their normal life. The troops were then sent home.

The link below has a limited review of the use of Martial in the last century:

http://www.culture-of-peace.info/intervention/chapter4-10.html

Internal military interventions have continued at a high rate since World War II, but the target has shifted. Labor interventions have continued, but at a lower rate, and the most massive interventions have been against urban rioters. As shown in Table III, over 200,000 troops were used during the period 1961-8 to control what was called 'civil disturbances', and probably almost as many more during the period 1969- 76, when detailed records were not published.

Interventions against urban riots are not new. In 1919, martial law was declared in order to control riots in Washington, DC, and by 27 July the force had grown to 12,000 troops under the command of Army General Haan (High, 1969, p. 121). Similarly, in 1943 about 6,000 federal troops and 5,000 National Guard were deployed after urban riots struck Detroit (Lee & Humphrey, 1943, p. 44).

However, the extent of riot interventions in recent years surpasses anything seen before in US history: 13,398 National Guard in Watts in 1965, 10,253 National Guard and 4, 700 federal troops in Detroit in 1967, and the list goes on. In the Los Angeles riots of 1992, the government deployed 2,800 National Guard with another 3,200 standby, and 4,000 marines and US Army troops.

Two other types of internal military intervention have also been prominent in the recent period: civil rights enforcement, and control of anti-war demonstrations. During the 19505 and 19605 over 100,000 troops were engaged in enforcing civil rights legislation and protecting civil rights demonstrators in the South. And during the 1960s and 1970s, tens of thousands of troops were used to control anti-war activities, largely associated with the student movements at the time of the war in Vietnam.

The rate of use of troops since 1943 has been somewhat higher than the rate in earlier periods. The average of 14,000 troops per year from 1943 to 1990 compares to an average of over 10,000 per year from 1886 to 1895 and an average of 8,000 per year for the years in which data were available from 1921 to 1935. Of course, the increase may be related to the population increase, since the US population has expanded fourfold in these years.

Despite the decrease in the quantity of interventions in labor disputes in recent years, there is still an important qualitative effect. The 1970 intervention of 30,000 federal troops to take over the jobs of striking postal workers sent a message to government employees that all means would be used to break their strikes. And the 1982 intervention of 1,248 military air traffic controllers to replace strikers was seen by organized labor as a signal from the incoming Reagan Administration that it would not hesitate to use the military not only to break a strike, but to destroy a national trade union.

One may argue that the shift from labor to urban riot interventions reflects the consequences of the victory of capital over organized labor and the extension of class warfare from organized labor to the unemployed. There is no question that urban riots are related to the unemployment and under-employment that has resulted from the flight of industry out of the unionized Northern cities toward non-union areas in the South, rural areas, and overseas. During this time the strength of organized labor has declined greatly, to the point that today less than half the proportion of workers are in unions as compared to the period immediately after World War II. As Robin Higham puts it in his introduction to Bayonets in the Streets (1969, pp. 1-2), although 'money has not been everything' :

Money has, of course, been at the heart of most of the problems in which the military have been used in civil peacekeeping roles. Money and working conditions have been at the heart of labor disturbances. Money has been a major ingredient of the complex problems of the inner cities. Money has been a major factor in the expansion and equipping of police forces to deal with the increasingly sophisticated and complex problems of the protection of property and the control of crime in the United States.