Public attacks on an elected president by retired officers and the threat of resignation by high-ranking officers undermine trust.
Public attacks on an elected president by retired officers and the threat of resignation by high-ranking officers undermine trust.
T ensions between civilian authorities and the uniformed military are nothing new in American history. Indeed, civil-military tensions can be traced to the very beginning of the republic and have occurred during both times of peace and war. So we should not be surprised that civil-military tensions have flared in the wake of the recent rioting, arson, and looting across the United States. In the current case, one focus of these civil-military tensions is the proper relationship between federal and state authority during a domestic emergency. Is it proper to use regular troops to curtail domestic disorder? Under what circumstances?
A secondary question that has arisen in recent days is: What recourse does the military have in the event that its leadership disagrees with elected civilians? What do military leaders do if they believe that the military is being “politicized”? Is resignation by a high-ranking officer a valid response when there are disagreements between civilian authorities and the preferences of the uniformed military?
Use of the Military in Domestic Disorder
President Trump’s recent actions in response to domestic unrest following the despicable killing of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer have elicited condemnation from a number of prominent retired military officers. That condemnation is best summarized in a statement by retired Army lieutenant general Vincent Brooks, now a fellow of Harvard University’s Belfer Center.
Brooks said the recent actions by the president, in threatening the commitment of active-duty troops for law enforcement if governors were not tough and did not “dominate the streets,” and in maneuvering the two most senior leaders of the U.S. military — the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — into a position that politicized them by their presence during a time of active demonstrating and contested crowd control, breached this sacred trust. General Brooks is a patriot and, as an American citizen, he is entitled to his opinion. But is he right?
Although there are many reasons to limit the use of federal troops in domestic law enforcement, the fact is that they have been so used in many instances since the American Founding. As Richard Kohn, the eminent military historian, remarked recently in the Christian Science Monitor, the U.S. Army Historical Center has published three 400-page volumes on the use of the Army in domestic affairs.
The authority of the president to use force in response to domestic disorder arises from the Constitution itself. Section 4 of Article IV reads: “The United States shall guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government, and shall protect each of them against invasion; and on application of the legislature, or of the executive (when the legislature cannot be convened) against domestic violence.” Although the First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” it does not protect riot, arson, and looting.
Under Article II of the Constitution, the president — as commander-in-chief of the Army and the Navy, and of the militia (National Guard) when under federal control — has the authority to act against enemies, both foreign and domestic. Of course, as a federal republic, our first line of defense against domestic disorder is local law enforcement, supplemented as necessary by the resources of the states, including the National Guard. But if mayors and governors are unable or unwilling to quell disorder, the federal government has the responsibility to act.
The president’s authority is supplemented by the Insurrection Act of 1807 (Chapter 15, Title 10, U.S.C.), by which Congress explicitly authorized the U.S. Army to enforce domestic law.
Although intended as a tool for suppressing rebellion when circumstances “make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State or Territory by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings,” presidents used this power on five occasions during the 1950s and ’60s to counter resistance to desegregation decrees in the South. It was also the basis for federal support in California during the Los Angeles riots of 1992, when elements of a U.S. Army division and a Marine division augmented the California National Guard. More recently, active-duty forces have deployed in response to Hurricane Katrina.
Those who have criticized President Trump for threatening to use the National Guard “against the will of state governors” might want to consider this example. After school integration was mandated by the Supreme Court in 1954, some Southern governors refused to execute the law. In 1957, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus deployed the National Guard to defy federal authority by preventing the integration of a high school in Little Rock.
President Eisenhower responded by placing the Arkansas National Guard under federal control and deploying soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division to enforce the law. In view of the invective directed against President Trump for his threat to use federal troops to quell domestic disorder, it is interesting to note that, in a letter to Eisenhower, Georgia Democratic senator Richard Russell explicitly compared soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division to Hitler’s “storm troopers.”
Some will contend that these cases differ not just in degree but in their very essence. But the fact is that whether one agrees with President Eisenhower and disagrees with President Trump, both involve a response to the violation of the law, and the latter as much as the former possesses the authority to employ the military to quell domestic disorder if state officials are unable or unwilling to do so.
A “Politicized” Military?
One of the concerns most cited by those who study U.S. civil-military relations is a fear that as an institution, the military will become “politicized.” Trump’s critics claim that this is exactly what Trump has done. As a recent example of his politicization, they point to Trump’s actions after he delivered a short address in the Rose Garden about the ongoing domestic disorder.
Following his address, Trump, accompanied by secretary of defense Mark Esper and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, walked from the White House to St. John’s Church, which had recently been attacked by arsonists. According to Trump’s critics, by participating — knowingly or not — in the president’s “photo op,” General Milley had contributed to Trump’s continuing attempt to politicize the military. General Milley has since apologized for accompanying the president on his walk to the church, stating that his presence “created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics.” Nonetheless, there are reports that some retired officers have suggested to General Milley that he resign in order to maintain the integrity of the military as an apolitical institution. To do so would be a serious mistake.
Concerns about the politicization of the military require some unpacking. High-ranking military positions are inherently “political.” Military officers are expected to offer their advice on matters of strategy and policy. That advice may be accepted or rejected. But the military has no right to “demand” that its advice be accepted. Accordingly, it is inevitable that military leaders will be linked to the policies that they advocated and/or executed, whether they agreed with them or not. General William Westmoreland will be forever linked to Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam policy. General David Petraeus will always be inextricably bound to George Bush’s Iraq policy.
The act of resignation by a senior military officer, furthermore, is itself a political act. The idea that officers should resign when their advice is not accepted is based on a misreading of H. R. McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam, a misreading that is common in the military, reinforcing the belief that officers should advocate particular policies rather than simply serve in their traditional advisory roles.
According to this misreading, the Joint Chiefs of Staff should have more openly voiced their opposition to the Johnson administration’s strategy of gradualism in Vietnam and then resigned rather than carry out the policy. But the book argues no such thing. Instead, it contends that the Joint Chiefs should have: (1) spoken up forcefully in private to their superiors and candidly in testimony to Congress when asked specifically for their personal views; and (2) they should have corrected misrepresentations of those views in private meetings with members of Congress. He neither says nor implies that the chiefs should have obstructed President Johnson’s orders and policies by leaks, public statements, or by resignation.
There is no tradition of public resignation in American history. At best, resignation under such circumstances undermines the mutual trust that lies at the heart of healthy civil-military relations. At worst, such a step constitutes a form of mutiny.
Healthy civil-military relations — and by extension, effective policy, good decisions, and positive outcomes — require mutual respect, candor, collaboration, cooperation, and ultimately subordination. Nothing would undermine that relationship more than a resignation by a senior military officer. The role of the military is to advise and then carry out lawful policies and orders, not to make them. In the end, the threat to resign, thereby taking disagreement public, directly undermines civilian control of the military.
There is a final aspect to consider. As citizens, retired officers such as General Brooks are entitled to voice their opinions. However, they should be circumspect in how they go about it. Even though retired officers claim to speak only for themselves and not for the military, they are, as Richard Kohn once observed, akin to the cardinals of the Catholic Church. Thus their statements carry weight.
Accordingly, they should take into account the public impact of their statements. They need to realize how such public statements undermine trust between the military and civilian authorities. And finally, they must answer this question: Is it proper for unelected military officers to undermine duly elected officials, especially when they use the sort of contemptuous language that would be impermissible were they still active-duty?
The key to healthy civil-military relations is trust, which is necessarily based on mutual respect and understanding between civilian and military leaders. Trust requires the exchange of candid views and perspectives between the two parties as part of the decision-making process.
As citizens, we should insist that military officers present their views frankly and forcefully throughout the decision-making and implementation process, something the Joint Chiefs of Staff failed to do during the Vietnam War. The give-and-take between civilians and soldiers can be contentious. Indeed, it should be.
In the case of General Milley, he should have made his objections known to the president in private. But public attacks on an elected president by retired officers and the threat of resignation by high-ranking officers undermine trust and poison civil-military relations. Toxic civil-military relations are something no citizen should desire.