An Army Is a Dangerous Instrument to Play With
5 min read
In 1783, George Washington faced a potential mutiny of the Army. Two years after Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, Congress still hadn’t paid American servicemen and was repudiating promised pensions. Alexander Hamilton, then in Congress, encouraged soldiers to rebel, because he thought the pressure would lead Congress to approve the taxing authority he sought. Washington reproached Hamilton in a letter: An army is “a dangerous instrument to play with,” he wrote. In this, as in so much else, President-Elect Donald Trump does not share Washington’s sensibilities.
Trump has spoken repeatedly of his plans to use the American military domestically: for policing the border, deporting millions of undocumented immigrants, repressing protests. He would not be the first president to use the military for some domestic purpose. Others have done so to break strikes, tamp down election or race riots, and enforce court orders or tax collection. But overreach in this area can do real damage to the relationship between the American military and the public. In his first term, Trump showed that he was willing to push that boundary.
The Constitution prohibits domestic use of the U.S. military unless the country is invaded or the president declares that an insurrection is occurring. The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act further restricts the American military from getting involved in law enforcement, unless Congress legislates it or the president invokes the Insurrection Act.
The Insurrection Act does give the president wide latitude to call up National Guard troops and deploy active-duty military, including to enforce domestic law. As the scholars Lindsay Cohn and Steve Vladeck emphasized in 2020, “The authorities governing the domestic uses of military force are notoriously open-ended.” And yet presidents very rarely invoke the act. It was last used more than 30 years ago, in 1992, when California’s governor requested federal reinforcement to restore order during the Los Angeles riots.
During his first term as president, Trump stopped short of invoking the Insurrection Act, but he did set about corroding the professionalism of the armed forces by making its use as a partisan political force acceptable and attempting to create military loyalty that was personal to him. As commander in chief, he used meetings with service members as campaign stops, encouraging them to agree with him that “we had a wonderful election, didn’t we? And I saw those numbers—and you like me, and I like you.” He asked military audiences to lobby their members of Congress in support of his policies, and he pardoned a serviceman who had been convicted of serious crimes—including war crimes—by court-martial and then included him in campaign events.
Trump also attempted to reach past the senior leaders who discipline the rank and file by ridiculing “the generals” and accusing them of stupidity, cowardice, and betraying the fighting forces. He has since said that, once back in office, he will fire all the “woke” generals and that he’s considering creating an external board of preferred veterans to determine which active-duty military leaders to remove. He insinuated that retired General Mark Milley in particular should be executed for treason. The scholar Risa Brooks has written that these are efforts to create a military coalition committed to keeping him in office.
Is Trump disciplined enough to devise and enact a plan to use the military against constitutional authority? To believe that he’s not is tempting. Unfortunately, it also underestimates the protean instincts that have made him successful and the authoritarian ambitions that animate him and many around him.
In the final months of Trump’s first term, the “adults in the room” left the building, and the president appointed such reckless partisans as Christopher Miller, Kash Patel, and Douglas MacGregor into senior defense roles. Some of Trump’s current Cabinet picks, such as defense-secretary nominee Pete Hegseth, resemble these appointees in their attitudes and positions. If confirmed, they will likely inject partisan politics into the military, creating dissension within the ranks, driving out experienced commanders, and alienating a large segment of the public.
Americans have not had to worry about military threats to democracy in the past. The armed forces have never aspired or organized to overthrow the government, and their professional ethos of subordination to civilian control is deeply ingrained. But a determined president and his civilian officials could change this relationship, even radically, through entirely legal means, such as by using the Insurrection Act.
The American military has an obligation to refuse illegal orders, but it cannot simply decline to obey those it deems immoral or unethical if they are allowed under the law. That is as it should be. A military that placed its judgment above that of the civilian government, which was elected to make policy decisions, would be operationally ineffective and a danger to democracy.
But making the military a political tool of civilian leaders is also a threat, not only to democracy, but to the integrity of the military itself. A politicized military—dragged into confrontations on behalf of party or president, rather than country—will have a hard time recruiting and retaining personnel, and its legitimacy will suffer both at home and overseas.
An important line of defense against this possibility still exists, and that is Congress. Much of U.S. defense policy is actually controlled by Congress under the law, and the Armed Services Committees in both chambers can and should rein in excesses. The Senate also has the authority to confirm or deny Trump’s Cabinet picks, and it should establish clear qualifications for running the Defense Department—which is, after all, an $841 billion business with nearly 3 million employees. Senators should confirm only appointees who pledge to respect the legislature’s prerogative to set military policy (Congress should be the body to decide whether servicewomen can be assigned to combat duty, for example), and they should not accept appointees who would allow a politically selected group of veterans to decide which military leaders to fire.
Legislators and governors can also press the president not to invoke the Insurrection Act. There is objectively no insurrection occurring in our country, and manipulating executive privilege to declare one would be an abuse of power. It would also cause the public to view the military as a tool of domestic repression. In a volunteer army, such a perception will affect not just recruitment but also the types of people who choose to serve, and this will further erode public trust in the military, which has already been on the wane since Trump and Republican opinion leaders began attacking senior military officials.
Both the professional ethos that keeps the American military out of politics and the restrictions on its domestic use exist for a reason. Americans probably won’t like the military or the democracy that results from destroying them. Donald Trump may not understand these stakes the way that George Washington did, but Congress has reason to, and the latitude to act.
