Ever since Gen. Colin Powell took to the pages of the New York Times at the beginning of the Clinton administration to lecture the incoming president on the perils of intervening in the Balkans, commentators have warned of a “crisis” in U.S. civil-military relations. In the words of the eminent military historian Richard Kohn, civil-military relations during the 1990s were “extraordinarily poor, in many respects as low as in any period of American peacetime history.”
Those tensions persisted during the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. But despite the perennial claim of a crisis, all of the instances of tensions during their presidencies were within the broad American tradition of a civil-military bargain being continuously renegotiated. As Andrew Bacevich has argued, “the dirty little secret of American civil-military relations … is that the commander-in-chief does not command the military establishment; he cajoles it, negotiates with it, and, as necessary, appeases it.”
The early part of the Trump administration fit this model. But in the run-up to the 2020 election and in its aftermath, civil-military relations have taken a dark turn. Indeed, they have reached such a toxic level that they are in danger of triggering a constitutional crisis unlike any since the presidency of Andrew Johnson.
Succeeding to the presidency following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Johnson was at odds with Republicans in Congress over Reconstruction legislation and the enforcement of the 13th and 14th Amendments. The Army was placed in the untenable position of having to choose between Congress and the president. It chose to execute the law as passed by Congress, placing the military in conflict with Johnson.
At one point, Johnson proposed the organization of a unit of 5,000-7,000 men to be stationed in the capital under the command of Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, whose position on race issues was similar to Johnson’s. Sherman extricated himself from the predicament by going west to fight the Indians. Would Johnson have used the Army to suppress Congress? No one knows for certain, but the consequences for the future of the American republic would have been devastating.
What has made recent weeks so dangerous for healthy civil-military relations, indeed for the very survival of the republic, is the call by both the president’s supporters and opponents for the military to involve itself in resolving the disputed election. On the one hand, President Trump’s opponents have suggested that the military be deployed to remove Trump from office forcibly should he fail to accept electoral defeat. On the other, his supporters have called for the imposition of martial law in response to an alleged fraudulent 2020 election. The latter is the more dangerous gambit, but it’s useful to pay attention to how such a crisis escalates.
As I noted in an earlier article for the Washington Examiner, in August 2020, two retired Army officers wrote an “open letter” to Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, arguing that he should be prepared to deploy active duty troops to remove Trump if he refused to concede. The letter was both factually inaccurate and politically hazardous. As the senior military adviser to the president, the chairman has no command authority, no power to issue orders to any members of the armed services. That duty rests solely with the service chiefs and combatant commanders. More generally, this is not the military’s role. No military officer is permitted to exercise such unconstitutional discretion.
Fortunately, the letter was roundly denounced for suggesting that the military should anoint itself the final arbiter of a political question by calling for the chairman to exercise unconstitutional discretion. But the idea of employing the military to remove Trump from office was taken seriously by then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. In an interview, he said: “You have so many rank-and-file military personnel saying, ‘Whoa, we’re not a military state. That is not who we are.’ I promise you, I am absolutely convinced they will escort him from the White House with great dispatch.”
Now, Trump’s supporters are calling for military intervention, arguing that the election was illegitimate. In many ways, their arguments are more dangerous to the health of the republic.
For example, retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and Trump’s first national security adviser, recently circulated an online petition calling for Trump to suspend the Constitution, declare martial law, and have the Pentagon oversee a “re-vote” of the presidential election. Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney has also called for martial law and investigations of Trump’s opponents for treason.
To his credit, Milley pushed back strongly against any use of the military in the event of a dispute over the outcome of the election. “I believe deeply in the principle of an apolitical U.S. military,” he said in written responses to questions posed by two Democratic members of the House Armed Services Committee. “In the event of a dispute over some aspect of the elections, by law U.S. courts and the U.S. Congress are required to resolve any disputes, not the U.S. military. I foresee no role for the U.S. armed forces in this process.” This is the proper response: Helping to determine the outcome of an election would be the most open political interference possible from a military that takes pride in its ostensibly apolitical character.
As citizens, retired officers are entitled to voice their opinions. However, they should be circumspect in how they do so. Even though retired officers claim to speak only for themselves and not for the active military, they are, as Kohn once observed, akin to the cardinals of the Catholic Church. Their words carry weight.
Accordingly, they should take into account the public impact of their statements both on the relationship between the military and civilian authorities and public trust in the military as an institution. Is the military truly a nonpartisan profession in service to the Constitution or just another interest group at the service of a political party? Let us return to the traditional norm that expects stoic regard for lawful civilian orders into retirement years, finding virtue in silence.
Mackubin Owens is a senior fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia and author of U.S. Civil-Military Relations After 9/11: Renegotiating the Civil-Military Bargain. He is currently writing a history of U.S. civil-military relations.
