Donald Trump vs. the military: Top brass must think hard about the danger ahead

The prospective return of Donald Trump to office as president and commander in chief may — and in fact should — prompt a fundamental rethinking of civil-military relations in this country. Rather than a call to action, I offer here an appeal for preventive reflection by the military establishment on a matter of utmost domestic and international, strategic and ethical consequence.

Think of civil-military relations as a tacit but binding social contract of mutual rights, obligations and expectations among the three parties to this ideally harmonious but inevitably sometimes discordant relationship: the uniformed military, the military’s civilian overseers in Congress and the executive branch, and the general public. In the ideal version of this tripartite relationship, all parties have recognized institutional roles they are expected to fulfill for the common good. But if and when any of the parties fails to perform their roles correctly, the contract is broken and democracy is jeopardized, at least in some measure.

When we consider Trump’s past dealings with the military; his disdain for particular generals (and others of lesser rank, dead and alive), even as he embraces unprofessional malefactors in uniform accused of war crimes and other serious misconduct; his selection of bottom-feeding loyalists to run the Pentagon in the waning days of his administration; his self-indulgent obsession with personal loyalty at the expense of all else; and his openly stated plans for autocratic rule, score-settling and the undermining of democratic institutions if he returns to office, we must conclude that traditional precepts of civil-military relations seem demonstrably outmoded and ill-equipped to counter any such enemy from within.

As a longtime observer and teacher of civil-military relations myself, I have been forced to question some of the most deeply held tenets of this field. For one thing, I have long accepted the proposition that civilian control of the military is possible without democracy, but democracy isn’t possible without civilian control of the military. Dictators obviously maintain unilateral control of their militaries, employed as they invariably are as praetorian protectors and coercive extensions of their autocratic overlords.

But the leaders of inherently pluralistic democracies, by contrast, exercise control of their militaries only to the extent, generally unacknowledged, that those militaries allow themselves to be controlled — out of loyalty to higher-order principles and institutions. In every case, civilian control, whether loose or restrictive, is an independent variable upon which democracy depends. The survival and viability of democracy in the face of impending internal tyranny would require the military to effectively manage how much control it will submit to, and perhaps to push back openly against improper or unconstitutional commands from above. The question to be answered is whether democracy would be enhanced or undermined by the forced loosening of civilian control by the military itself.

There is also a second sense in which I have rethought my views on civil-military relations in the face of a civilian “Man on Horseback” scenario. It is best reflected in President Harry Truman’s oft-referenced dismissal of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, following MacArthur’s public statements that directly conflicted with the Truman administration’s policies in the Korean War. MacArthur made his views on the affair known almost immediately after he was relieved, in a July 1951 speech before the Massachusetts state legislature:

I find in existence a new and heretofore unknown and dangerous concept that the members of our armed forces owe primary allegiance and loyalty to those who temporarily exercise the authority of the executive branch of government, rather than to the country and its Constitution which they are sworn to defend. No proposition could be more dangerous. None could cast greater doubt upon the integrity of the armed services. For its application would at once convert them from their traditional and constitutional role as the instrument for the defense of the Republic into something partaking of the nature of a praetorian guard, owing sole allegiance to the political master of the hour.

Truman would make his countervailing position clear later, in the second volume of his memoirs:

If there is one basic element in our Constitution, it is civilian control of the military. Policies are to be made by the elected political officials, not by generals or admirals. . . . We have always guarded the constitutional provision that prevents the military from taking over the government from the authorities, elected by the people, in whom the power resides. . . . Any man who has come up through the process of political selection, as it functions in our country, knows that success is a mixture of principles steadfastly maintained and adjustments made at the proper time and place — adjustments to conditions, not adjustment of principles. These are things a military officer is not likely to learn in the course of his profession. The words that dominate his thinking are “command” and “obedience,” and the military definitions of these words are not definitions for use in a republic.

I have long sided unreservedly with Truman on the issue — not so much on principle, I must admit, as because of MacArthur’s overweening, self-aggrandizing arrogance. Now, however, faced with the prospect of another Trump presidency a year hence, I am surprised to find myself siding with MacArthur in the belief that under a commander in chief like Trump, the military must become a guardian of the democratic constitutional order.

This unorthodox suggestion that the military must be an ultimate guardian of the Constitution prompts us to recall the oaths of allegiance that all uniformed service members swear to that document. Officers swear to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and to bear true faith and allegiance to the same.

Before being commissioned, though, officers also take the enlistment oath that all enlisted personnel are guided by throughout their time in service. To the imperatives for supporting and defending the Constitution, and bearing true faith and allegiance to it, that oath adds the pointed injunction to “obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.”

These must be understood as pledges of unconditional allegiance to principles, values, processes and institutional prerogatives and arrangements, not as a pledge of loyalty to any particular individual. This presumably includes upholding such precepts as the rule of law, popular sovereignty, popular consent, public accountability, separate and shared powers, and checks and balances.

The president, on the other hand, is accorded much more license in the oath he takes under Article II of the Constitution: to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution to the best of his ability. That phrase alone provides abundant discretionary license (even in the face of impeachment) — especially if ability is defined in terms of will or intention.

All of these oaths are codified in law, so we must trust that the democratic institutions we have established, as well as the socialization that accompanies those institutions, will ensure that no initiative to change the law in favor of personal loyalty oaths will ever gain traction in this country.

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A third sense, then, in which I have come to revisit the traditional tenets of civil-military relations in the face of Trump’s potential return concerns a reversal of the widely held belief that a healthy state of civil-military relations in a healthy democracy enjoins the military to defer unconditionally to properly constituted civilian authority, regardless of the latter’s political affiliation or ideological orientation. That requires service members of all ranks to be apolitical, deferential, obedient, compliant, and silent, whatever the circumstances and without expectation of compensatory favor or disfavor. This is not to suggest that those in uniform don’t make judgments and harbor personal opinions about their civilian masters as a matter of course, but that they regularly subordinate such views in the interest of professional integrity.

But Donald Trump’s return suggests that such self-imposed inhibitions and constraints may warrant urgent reconsideration, contingent on the ability and willingness of the military’s civilian overseers to demonstrate strategic literacy, strategic competence and exemplary strategic leadership. When the commander in chief and his appointed officials demonstrate vision, courage, competence, integrity, accountability and empathy, for example, they are upholding their end of the contractual bargain, thereby making themselves worthy of the limits the military has imposed on itself. But when the reality is the opposite — when those civilian officials demonstrate obvious myopia, cowardice, incompetence, hypocritical expediency, unaccountability and intolerance — the military is arguably justified in being neither silent nor compliant.

If such a posture seems too dangerous even to contemplate or discuss, that reflects the military’s self-imposed socialization during more normal times with the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which threatens heavy personal sanctions for speaking out in public and resisting direction, even improper direction, from above. For example, Article 90 of the UCMJ (10 USC 890), concerning anyone in uniform who willfully disobeys a lawful command from a superior commissioned officer, Article 92 (10 USC 892), concerning anyone failing to obey an order or regulation, and Article 94 (10 USC 894), concerning intended mutiny or sedition of lawful authority, all call for court-martial and attendant punishment. There also are the catchall prohibitions of Article 133 (10 USC 933) and 134 (10 USC 934), which respectively prescribe courts-martial for “conduct unbecoming an officer” and “acts that prejudice good order and discipline that thereby bring discredit upon the armed forces.”

The military, let us remember, is a hierarchical, authoritarian institution that paradoxically exists within a democracy and is sworn to uphold democracy. Its strengths as an institution — including the norm of unquestioning obedience to authority — also tend to be its weaknesses. They could in fact lead to its undoing come January 2025, if military leaders do not give adequate thought in advance to the changing contours of dissent, disobedience, politicization, democratic rule, constitutionalism and the ethics of public service that are in play. The imperative for the military under a Trump regime seems clear and distinct from established practice: to demand that orders be bona fide orders, not mere suggestions or expectations; that such orders emanate directly from the commander in chief, not from staff aides ostensibly speaking for him; and that the orders be in writing, openly transmitted, thereby depriving the president the cover of deniability that has become so commonplace.

No less a soldier-statesman than Dwight D. Eisenhower, in a 1954 speech at Columbia University’s bicentennial, offered words that may or may not have been meant to include those in uniform: “Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels — men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.” Certainly, an idea of such cardinal import should include those in uniform today, especially in the face of what may lie ahead.