Posted by Bret Devereaux

https://acoup.blog/2025/07/04/collections-the-american-civil-military-relationship/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=collections-the-american-civil-military-relationship

https://acoup.blog/?p=30280

As is traditional here, I am taking advantage of the Fourth of July this week to write something about the United States, this time a brief discussion of the nature of civil-military relations in the United States.

Civil-military relations (typically shortened to ‘civ-mil’ or sometimes CMR) is, simply put, the relationship between the broader civil society and its military. As you might well imagine, the nature of civil-military relations vary substantially based on institutions but are even more sensitive to norms, because institutional and legal structures can only restrain folks with arms to the degree that they collectively agree to be restrained.

In practice, as we’re going to briefly outline, American civ-mil is, in a sense, fundamentally based on a bargain, the foundations of which date to the American Revolution but which has evolved and solidified since then. That bargain has been remarkably successful: the United States has avoided the sort of major civ-mil disjunctures (like military coups) that are often distressingly common in many states and has done so for two and a half centuries.¹ That isn’t to say the American civ-mil has been forever untroubled, as we’ll see: it is an evolving bargain, based on norms and thus fundamentally both precious and fragile.

Newburgh Foundations

The institutions, cultures and customs of the American civil-military relationship, of course, were not born out of nothing, but rather drew from two clear sources: the young country’s British inheritance and the long-running colonial militias, which now became state militias. Nevertheless, when I’ve taught American military history, I’ve often stressed to my students how contingent, how reliant upon personalities and choices, the founding of the country was. Somewhat famously, Benjamin West, friend and court painter to King George III, claimed the king “asked West what would Washington do were America to be declared Independent. West said He believed He would retire to a private situation.–The King said if He did He would be the greatest man in the world.” Unclear if the exchange took place, but it speaks to the degree that the foundation of the United States could have gone a great many different ways.

The first really firm step in the establishment of the American civil-military tradition comes in March of 1783. You will permit me to relate the story in full, because I think this is one of those events that often gets alluded to as if everyone knows it, but is in fact relatively rarely taught and so many folks do not know it or do not know the particulars.

The Revolutionary War was, at this point, effectively over, but the peace hadn’t been signed and so the Continental Army remained drawn up at Newburgh, New York. The issue was that the officers and soldiers of the Continental Army had been promised to be, you know, paid, something that had happened only irregularly because the Continental Congress was reliant on the states for funds (as would the Confederation Congress be under the Articles of Confederation; this gets fixed with the Constitution in 1789), In particular, the Congress had promised officers a pension of half-pay for life, which was a tradition in European armies, but it had taken no action to make that promise a reality.

This simmering discontent came in the context of debates about the nature of the new government and political disputes over the powers central government (under the Articles of Confederation). In that context, a group of officers drew up a petition to have their pensions converted into a single lump-sum payment and the faction (‘nationalists’) that favored maximum central government power in turn used that pressure and the implication that there might be a mutiny if Congress were not given the powers they wanted. When the Congress as a whole didn’t budge, the ‘nationalists,’ led in particular by Robert Morris encouraged the disaffected officers to raise tensions in order to put pressure on the Congress.

It’s not clear if any of the officers actually contemplated a real coup d’état, but this was transparently an effort to introduce the military, particularly the officer corps, as a political faction, an active ‘player’ in the politics of the nation rather than simply a servant of its civil authorities. Two anonymous letters were circulated in camp, one calling for a meeting (against regulations) and another putting the Congress on blast and threatening that the army would refuse to disband if Congress didn’t meet its demands. It’s important to recognize in this moment that it isn’t the Continental Army vs. the Continental Congress, so much as one faction of the Congress (that wasn’t winning) inviting the army to tip the scales in their favor.

Washington, who had been away due to illness, arrives back at the army shortly before this and moves quickly. The letters circulated on March 10th, calling for a meeting on March 11th; that morning (the 11th), Washington issued general orders objecting to the anonymous meeting, but instead called a regular meeting on the 15th. He also, in a bit of glorious misdirection, requested a report of the meeting, implying he would not be there. It feels necessary to stress that, “convene a group of your disaffected officers in a meeting where you aren’t present so when they vote you supreme power you can say you didn’t ask for it” was a fairly obvious trick even in 1783 and one wonders if some of the disaffected officers read the general orders that way. A second anonymous letter appeared the next day presenting Washington’s meeting as an endorsement of conspiracy of disaffected officers.

The meeting was opened by Major General Horatio Gates, who had been in command of the camp and was in sympathy with the conspiracy.

And it is at this point that George Washington turns in one of the virtuoso moments of his career. He enters the meeting – surprising all present, who assumed he would not be present – and asks to address the gathered officers. He then gave a short speech, the Newburgh Address urging his officers, “as you value your own sacred honor, as you respect the rights of humanity, and as you regard the military and national character of America, to express your utmost horror and detestation of the man, who wishes, under any specious pretences, to overturn the liberties of our country; and who wickedly attempts to open the flood-gates of civil discord, and deluge our rising empire in blood.”

Washington then drew a letter from Congress and, with a bit of theatrics, paused and fumbled with it, before taking our a pair of reading glasses – another surprise, they were new – and asked the officers’ indulgence, “Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country.”

The conspiracy collapsed basically instantly. After reading the letter from the Continental Congress, Washington left and the meeting approved a resolution drafted by General Henry Knox affirming their “unshaken confidence” in Congress and deploring the anonymous letters.

The Bargain

The event may have been the most dramatic one in the creation of the American civil-military relationship, but it was hardly the only one in those earliy years, which featured repeated debates over the size of the central standing army as compared to state militias, the establishment of fraternal societies for former officers (the ‘Society of the Cincinnati,’ which some feared might become a plot), a riotous mutiny of the Continental Army in Pennsylvania in April and so on. Many of these problems led to the stronger Constitution replacing the weak Articles of Confederation in 1789.

But I think the Newbough Conspiracy is a good place to start because it represents the essential bargain that forms the backbone of the American civil-military tradition. The classic work on this topic, of course, is Samuel P. Huntington’s The Soldier and the State (1957), which rather unlike some of Huntington’s other works is worth reading. Huntington presents the civil-military relationship of countries as fundamentally a product of three factors: civilian ideology (pro- or anti-military), the political power wielded by the officer corps and finally the professionalism of the officer corps. It is the last of these factors he views as decisive. The goal is achieving ‘objective’ civilian control as compared to ‘subjective’ civilian control where the military is subordinate not to civilian authority as a whole but to civilian sub-groups, such as if a political party or ideology had the loyalty of the military, rather than the whole government. Huntington’s solution is professionalism, bluntly put, “Civilian control in the objective sense is the maximizing of military professionalism.”²

I find I agree and disagree with Huntington – or more correctly, I think he has some load-bearing definitions here which conceal as much as they illuminate. In particular while he details the emergence of professional officer corps as a specific historical process in the 19th century that plays out in the establishment of standards, institutions of training and the waning role of old aristocracies, he also uses ‘professionalism’ to mean an ideology, which – following Clausewitz (drink!) – subordinates military affairs to political considerations. In short, professionalism in Huntington’s reading by definition guarantees military subordination to civilian control, because while it is the product of a process it is also an ideology. The problem here is he has created a definitional identity: professionalism is both a process and an ideology, because he believes the process reliably produces the ideology. But that is begging the question – in the correct use of the phrase – demanding the reader concede by nature of definition the entire argument. It results in a situation where Huntington’s definition bears the load of his argument rather than his evidence.

This is a book that basically anyone doing military history has to grapple with, but I’ll be frank: I think Huntington is quite wrong or at least substantially incomplete. He recognizes almost immediately that Germany is an enormous problem for his thesis, because of its reputation as the most professionally military and yet at the same time…well, we’re talking about Germany from 1914 to 1945. Things went wrong. Huntington’s analysis of this problem, to my mind, doesn’t work; his claims that Germany had objective civilian control until 1914 (and thus that German civ-mil worked) is hard to sustain against something like Isabel Hull’s Absolute Destruction (2006) which successfully traces the roots of the Wehrmacht’s butchery in WWII to the military culture of the Imperial Germany and its near total insulation from meaningful civilian oversight well before the First World War (and often successfully bucking weak Imperial German democratic institutions to do so). German military culture was already sick in the 1870s and 1880s when Huntington imagines it the picture of health.

Meanwhile, Huntington’s limited exoneration of the Wehrmacht’s officer class, “they were trying to behave like professional soldiers, and it is by the standards of soldiers that they should be judged. By these criteria they come off well. The evil was not in them. It was in the environment which would not permit them to live by the soldier’s creed” is simply an ‘clean-Wehrmacht’ apologia that has not remotely survived the last 70-odd years of scholarship on the behavior of the German officer corps in the Second World War.

But I would offer that a military order that acquiesces and comes to actively aid in allowing a single political faction to seize power, overturn the democratic system of government and then proceed to butcher substantial portions of the citizenry does not “come off well” in maintaining good civil-military relations. To be fair to Huntington, a lot of that scholarship wasn’t available in 1957, of course. But this book is supposed to be a general theory of military professionalism, rather than a specific study of its American version and so if the general theory falls apart in the face of modern scholarship, then it isn’t very much of a general theory. The trappings of professionalism – the war colleges, training programs, career paths and corporate professional identity – do not guarantee Huntington’s ideology of professionalism, the subordination of the soldier to the state and its civilian authorities.

The idea that simply because a group is professionalized that they might not come to see themselves as a distinct class with interests to drive politically strikes me as shockingly naive. As Adam Smith famously quipped, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices”³ It is not at all clear to me why military professionals should be made immune by their professionalism to this trend in human nature when no other profession is.

Instead, I think that the American civil-military relationship – which to be clear, I view as very successful – is predicated on a bargain, that we can see at work already at Newburgh, of which Huntington’s ideology of professionalism is only one part. The bargain is one between civilian authorities (mainly the President and Congress), the military (mainly the officer corps) and the citizenry. And I would frame it like this: the military agrees not to insert itself into (internal) politics broadly construed and in exchange the civilian authorities agree not to use the military in internal politics and finally in turn the military occupies an elevated place of trust in the citizenry.

(Attentive readers may note the three constituents of the bargain – political leadership, the officer corps and the public – correspond neatly to the entities which ‘manage’ each element of Clausewitz’ trinity (drink!): the political object calculated by political leadership, friction managed by the officers and will derived from the public.)

In that context, what Huntington terms ‘professionalism’ as an ideology is the military’s part of the bargain, a collective ideology and set of norms made by the military (occasionally reinforced by presidents, as we’ll see) to keeps its members within the terms of the bargain. It is in turn matched by a set of civilian norms where politicians actively avoid actions that might politicize the military or military figures while at the same time politicians and civilians go out of their way to praise the military as an institution and its members, according it a special, privileged place in the American social order. That bargain has not always held, but it has mostly held and I think those are its contours.

The Best Features of Our Government

Of course this set of norms did not emerge instantly at the founding of the republic either, but rather they were solidified over time, often through testing. The story of the development of the United States’ military institutions is generally one of substantial skepticism: for most of American history, policy-makers (particularly in Congress) have openly worried about the danger a standing military of any sort poses to a free country and yet at the same time aware of the necessity of at least some standing military force. Teaching the development of the United States military as an institution, one gets almost tired of the repeated episodes of this sort: a security challenge or military innovation (usually in Europe) prompts an effort to reform the US military, which sparks congressional skepticism about the impact to the civil-military relationship and civilian control of the military. Usually the end result is that the reform happens, but in a watered down form.

So after the Revolution, Hamilton argued for a standing army and state militias patterned off of the Continental Army; the Congress disbanded the army and eventually raised a single hybrid regiment of 700 soldiers (the 1st American Regiment) to replace it. When that proved insufficient, the Constitutional Convention provided for a federal army, but Congress kept it small for a long time and it existed alongside state militias, which were only weakly regulated through the Uniform Militia Act (1792). A push for a larger standing army after the War of 1812 went pretty much nowhere. I am in love with the quip of Charles Fischer (Rep. for NC, 1819-1821, 1839-1841) that he “always thought that one of the best features of our government is its unfitness for war.”

Congress also notably resisted the creation of a European-style General Staff – that is, one modeled off of the Prussian Great General Staff (Großer Generalstab). This is a story we’ll need to come back to another day, but after the Napoleonic Wars, Prussia – embarrassed and smarting from defeat – set about a dramatic reform of both senior officer training and organization which created a single central planning organ (the General Staff) headed by a single chief planner (the Chief of the General Staff), and ‘feed’ officers by a single advanced officer training institution (the Kriegsakademie or ‘War College’). Especially after Prussian victories in the Second Schleswig War (1864), the Austro-Prussian War (1866) and the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1), there was a lot of pressure to imitate this system and most of the major European militaries did so.

But in the United States, Congress took one hard look at that system and balked at the potential threat to civilian control. After the American Civil War, William T. Sherman, Commanding General of the U.S. Army after 1869 promoted Emory Upton, who proposed something like a German system in 1875, backed up by a congressional commission headed by then-senator Ambrose Burnside (yes, that one) , but Congress calmly but soundly voted down basically all of the proposals. Secretary of War Elihu Root (1899-1904) made another attempt, backed by senior army leadership and he got the ‘General Staff Act of 1903’ which despite the name, didn’t establish a German-style general staff either. Instead the General Staff created was merely supervisory and coordinating, subordinate to the Secretary of War and did not exercise direct authority over army logistics or movements. Whereas the Großer Generalstab became the heart of the Imperial German military, by 1914 the weakened American equivalent had just twenty-two officers assigned to it.

When it came time, after WWII to reorganize the American defense establishment, the War Department suggested the armed forces be reorganized, again thinking in terms of something like a European model, with a single staff headed by a single chief reporting to the civilian secretary. Congress…did not do that. Instead Congress passed the National Security Act of 1947 (amended in 1949), creating the ‘National Military Establishment.’ Instead of a single chief of a general staff, this system split up the organizational, planning, advisory and actual command roles, which really only consolidate at the Secretary of Defense. There is no ‘general staff’ as such, but a Joint Staff headed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff headed by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs who is the highest ranking (living) officer in the US military, but who is forbidden by statute from actually commanding any troops, while a civilian council advises the president (this is the National Security Council (NSC)). Instead, actual combat forces are attached to the theater-based combatant commands, which report to the SecDef. That centralizes planning in the office of a much stronger Secretary of Defense, rather than an empowered general staff.

What I have always found odd, teaching the subject, is that the standard textbooks for American military history – notably For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States (1984, 1994, 2012), which is as far as I know, the most common general American military history textbook – treat these moments of skepticism as disappointing half-measures or failures of vision. And to be sure, some of them turn out to have been strategically foolish; Congress’ early reticence to fund a navy combined with whipsawing presidential policy under the first three presidents left the United States less prepared for the Quasi War, First Barbary War and the War of 1812 than it might have been, for instance.

But overall, that tradition of skepticism strikes me as not a tradition of failure, but of success.

The thing is, Congress’ fear that a European-style general-staff might subvert civilian governance in the event of a war, that it might resist civilian control was clearly correct. Of course the most glaring example in the First World War (commented on, inter alia, by Huntington, op cit.) was Erich Ludendorff, who by 1918 might as well have been the king of Germany given the degree to which he effectively ran not just the German war effort but Germany from his position as Quatermaster General (with Paul von Hindenburg as the figurehead Chief of the General Staff). But the problem occured even among the allies in WWI: Sir William Robertson, Chief of the [British] Imperial General Staff from 1916 to 1918 had terrible relations with David Lloyd George, but was politically impossible to remove and in turn made it impossible for Lloyd George to sack Sir Douglas Haig, who he also thought little of. The French equivalent too, the Grand Quartier Général both steadily expanded its effective authority, while it was almost impossible to actually fire any of its members, save the Chief of Army Staff himself (and even then they had to generally be ‘promoted’ out of command for political reasons).

Of course Congress wasn’t alone in making and keeping the bargain. Thomas Jefferson had overseen the establishment of a permanent military academy out of the training post at West Point in 1802, which of course is now the United States Military Academy. Jefferson’s goal had been in part political, to break up the federalist dominated officer corps by creating an avenue for (Democratic-)Republicans to enter it, but over time West Point (and its naval equivalent at Annapolis and the rest of the apparatus of military education as it emerged) adopted an ethos of professionalism along the ideological lines Huntington advanced above: a responsibility to the country which demands non-partisan, ‘a-political’ execution of one’s duties. That ethos remains deeply embedded in how American officers are trained and how they understand themselves.⁴ Indeed, many officers today are sufficiently committed to the idea that the role of an officer in the United States military is non-partisan that many famously do not vote (voter participation among service members is somewhat lower than among the general population).

Dumb Son of a…

Of course the civ-mil bargain was never perfect. Officers in the age before instantaneous communication often had substantial local authority and through the 1800s frequently pushed that authority beyond their orders – Commodore David Porter raided Fajardo on then-Spanish Puerto Rico without orders in 1822 (he was cashiered); Captain John Downes burned Kuala Batu in Sumatra in 1832, killing hundreds, well beyond the remit of his orders (he was critiqued by then-president Jackson only in private); while Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s aggressive ‘opening’ of Japan in 1852-5 also clearly exceeded his orders, but it succeeded, so he was rewarded.⁵ This was curbed not by a crackdown on such officers – who often got off with little, if any, punishment – but by the steady expansion of communication technology enabling presidents and their cabinets to employ far more direct authority over overseas affairs.

More famously, of course, was the defenestration of Douglas MacArthur. The generation is now mostly passed, but it used to be that you could start a pretty firece argument in a room of older folks simply by offering an opinion as to if president Harry Truman was right to fire Douglas MacArthur. Truman was right to fire MacArthur, because MacArthur had violated the bargain in a serious and significant way. Always a self-promoter, MacArthur had a strong public image and after WWII was essentially the American proconsul in East Asia, a dangerous thing in and of itself. MacArthur favored expanding the Korean War into a general war with China, which Truman (and many others) feared would draw in the Soviet Union and trigger a third World War. Rather than carrying out Truman’s strategy of seeking a negotiated peace, MacArthur effectively acted out his own foreign policy, among other things by communicating to other countries (Spain and Portugal) his intention to widen the war against the president’s wishes.

For Truman, the problem was that the evidence he had that MacArthur was doing these things was mostly classified. But in April of 1951, MacArthur sends a letter to representative Joseph Martin, deeply critical of Truman, which Martin read out on the floor of Congress. MacArthur was, essentially, directly challenging the bargain. Huntington (op. cit.) is right to note this behavior was a sharp deviation from American military ideology (what he terms “the military mind,” but again, I reject the generalization) and Truman responded, on April 10th, by removing MacArthur from command. Truman quipped later, “I fired him because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the President. I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.”

The move was deeply unpopular at the time but it was correct and a necessary reassertion of the traditional civil-military bargain in the context of a United States military establishment that was, after World War II, never going to go back to the small armies of earlier American history.

The Vietnam War represented a different challenge to the civil-military bargain, one in which the military and political establishment’s relationship with the public was the point to fray. Public opinion, which had been supportive of the war early on, turned decisively against it in 1968 (notably somewhat before the Tet offensive, though Tet intensified the movement). Americans objected not merely to the political decision – the decision to wage the war – but how it was being waged. While the My Lai massacre is the most famous, the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group – kept secret until 1994 – documented at least 320 substantiated war crimes. It did not help that the public saw – with some accuracy – senior military officers like William Westmoreland as complicit in Johnson administration political dishonesty. With declining public support, morale plummeted; towards the end of the war Creighton Abrams (Westmoreland’s successor as US Army Chief of Staff) concluded that the collapse in discipline and moral was so severe that he needed “to get this Army home to save it.”⁶

The All-Volunteer Force

This of course forms the context for the creation of the All-Volunteer Force (AVF), the effective conversion of the United States military into a professional, fully standing military, which I’d argue is the single most dramatic shift in the civil-military relationship in American history, the full impact of which is not yet clear. For almost 200 years, the United States military had been an essentially civilian force which relied on conscription. For the decades prior to the creation of the AVF in 1973, conscription had been a fact of life. While the United States had demobilized substantially after WWII, there had been at least some conscription in every year from 1940 to 1972 except for 1947. In every year between 1950 and 1972, conscription had never been lower than at least 80,000 new conscriptions a year.

This was a huge change. For such a major change, I find that it draws surprisingly little attention. The 50th anniversary of the AVF passed with relatively little fanfare in 2023. I’ve mentioned For the Common Defense (1984, 1994, 2012) as the dominant textbook for introductory American military history: the shift to the All-Volunteer Force is dealt with in a single page (page 568, for the curious). The textbook I’ve seen most recently used for US Naval history (and which I used), J.C. Bradford and J. F. Bradford, America, Sea Power and the World (2016, 2023), doesn’t even give it that much: the shift is discussed in a single paragraph on page 351 (308 in the 2016 edition).⁷

The likely impacts of the shift to an AVF were studied prior to implementation in the Gates Commission, a report that had a preordained conclusion – it was convened to provide Nixon the cover to do the thing (end the draft) he had promised to do already in his campaign – and which honestly I find disappointing in its approach, which is mostly ‘happy talk’ designed to justify what Nixon had already decided to do. It is striking to me, for instance, that the Gates Commission did not include a single historian to perhaps discuss how the shift towards fully professional militaries had gone for republics in the past. Instead, the focus is on the economics of the shift, with fairly blithe assertions that the civil-military relationship would remain unchanged despite the fairly obvious implausibility of that given the shift from “everyone serves” to “only a small portion of society serves.”⁸

As I’ve noted elsewhere, the Romans also seem to have thought that they could professionalize their army without reducing its ability to scale up in an emergency or altering the civil-military relationship and for quite a decades that more or less worked, while the old norms held. But as those old norms decayed, the institution increasingly became what you’d expect from its institutional structure: a permanent political faction, advocating for its own interests, often with violence, to the point that the emperor Septimius Severus’ advice to his sons as he lay dying in 211 was, “Be harmonious, enrich the soldiers, and scorn all other men,”⁹ a fairly open admission that the soldiery was not just a political constituency, but the most important one. It took time for those norms to shift, but when one is building or rebuilding institutions, the long-term is the term that matters.

I do not think necessarily that this is the direction the All-Volunteer Force must go. It has two and a half centuries of strong norms pushing it away from this direction. But careful maintenance of the civ-mil bargain is made all the more necessary when the military is effectively fully professional. For my own part, all cards on the table, while I greatly value the service of the United States’ military personnel (there’s that third part of the bargain!) and think they serve honorably, I am quite skeptical of the long-term implications of the All-Volunteer Force. Its creators assumed that fully professionalizing the military would not impact the civil-military relationship and that it would always be possible to shift back to a mass-conscript army in the event of a major war, but historical examples suggest it is not so easy.

But the All-Volunteer Force is not the direction from which I see now the principal threat to the civ-mil bargain.

The Fraying Bargain

It is instead, to my mind, an overweening executive that now most endangers the bargain, threatening to break the American civil-military bargain by dragging the military into politics. Remember, the civil-military bargain is not merely a pact of submission by the military to civilian authority, but also a determination by civilian authorities not to pull the military into politics, not to use the military in internal, partisan political ways, because repeatedly doing so will, inevitably, eventually wear down the a-political nature of the military, sandpapering away the professional ethos that keeps the military from using bullets instead of ballots.

Notably, the problem here really has come primarily from the executive. Reading all this way, it may be somewhat striking that there is so much Congress and so few Presidents so far. However, since 1933 (when Franklin D. Roosevelt became president) the powers of the presidency, as exercised in practice, have grown substantially; the usual term for this is the ‘Imperial presidency,’ and it seems apt to the increasing dominance of the executive over the legislative branch. Meanwhile, the United States military has never been truly demobilized at any point since 1941. Instead, it has remained almost always on a operational, if not war, footing somewhere more or less continuously. At the same time, Congress has seemed to effectively shrink as a political institution. So while for most of American history, the civil-military bargain existed primarily between a military and congress that were often opposed, increasingly it operates between the military and a president who views the military as an agent of their own authority.

Now you may be expecting this to be the start of a jeremiad against the Trump administrations and, to be fair, there is going to be some of that. But the fraying of the civil-military bargain goes back well before 2016. The First Gulf War (1990-1) was a clear ‘reset’ of public perceptions of the military: the victory, shocking at the time¹⁰ caused American confidence in the military to surge; even when the surge of confidence ended, it settled at a much higher new normal. I should also note that the current assumption that the United States military enjoys a large qualitative superiority over any potential rival is itself really a product of the surprise of lopsidedness of the Gulf War.

The result was that going into the aughts, particularly following the shock of the September 11th attacks, the United States military was one of the few institutions that retained broad credibility in the United States, while also being more completely under the sole control of the president (rather than the shared control of Congress). After all, with the shift to an All-Volunteer Force, the President didn’t need to go to Congress to request annual draft authorizations to simply maintain the force – instead there was an expectation of a ‘steady state’ military large enough to manage whatever the president deemed it ought. Likewise, extremely broad executive interpretations of the War Powers Resolution (1973) combined by equally extremely broadly worded post-9/11 authorizations for the use of military force (AUMFs), meant that presidents could and did wage what in any other context we’d call wars largely at their own discretion.

In short, American presidents have gotten use to initiating military strikes and combat operations almost entirely without consulting Congress, turning the military into a tool of the executive alone. That covers the Trump administration’s recent adventures in Yemen and Iran, but equally the Biden administration’s adventures in Yemen and Somalia, that latter risibly justified under the 2001 9/11 AUMF and the Obama administration’s adventures in Libya and Syria.¹¹

That has collided with a culture that trusts almost nothing, but still trusts the military. One of the striking recent examples of this has been selections for the Secretary of Defense. The Secretary of Defense is, by statute to be a civilian position, with former officers being barred by law for selection within seven years (ten for general officers) after the end of their service, with special Congressional dispensation required to avoid this. Nevertheless, most Secretaries of Defense had fairly limited military service – just one of the first ten, George C. Marshall, was a career officer (and required the first congressional waiver). It was far more common to have Secretaries of Defense with no military experience than career officers, although by far the most common were men who had served for short periods as relatively junior officers during the periods of large-scale conscription before distinguishing themselves in business and law.

However, we can see a shift: of the last four confirmed (not acting) Secretaries of Defense, three required Congressional waivers to serve because of recent military service (Mattis, Austin, Hegseth). To put that in perspective, from 1947 to 2017, only once did a president select and congress confirm a career officer who would require a waiver to be the Secretary of Defense. But from 2017 to 2025, it has happened three times with just one exception. It speaks to a public that has lost faith in Clemenceau’s famous dictum that “War! It is too serious a matter to trust to military men.”¹² It seems well worth noting that, contrary to expectations, entrusting the top job at the Pentagon to military men has not resulted in substantially better outcomes, either in the institution or on the battlefield. Indeed, a survey of the Secretaries of Defense and their forebears, the Secretaries of War, does seem to suggest that careers in business and politics may have been rather better preparation for the Secretary of Defenses’ job than purely military careers (though George Marshal is an obvious exception).

Instead, we increasingly only trust military men and our presidents are all too willing to seek to wrap themselves in that trust.

So George W. Bush landed a jet on the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) and gave a speech with a giant ‘Mission Accomplished‘ banner behind him, an effort to use the military to amplify his own political position. The Democrats responded with a candidate, John Kerry, who foregrounded his military experience, leading his nomination convention speech with, “I’m John Kerry, and I’m reporting for duty,” with a salute. Biden’s parting speech to the military was carefully calibrated to avoid stepping over the “no political speeches in military contexts” norm by the letter of the law, but hardly the spirit of it, as his call for soldiers to “remember your oath” had fairly clear political implications given the context. The Trump administration does not represent, to my mind, a break with this trend, but a dangerous acceleration of it.

In the first Trump administration, there were fairly clear efforts to politicize the military, which were resisted by an officer corps that remained ideologically attached to Huntington’s professionalism and its ideal of an a-political military. The president in 2017 wanted a large military parade, but was forced to cancel it. The president asked Gen. Mark Milley to use the military to break up protests, which was refused. Instead, Milley, aware of the need to present an a-political military, publicly apologized for being present in uniform at a presidential photo-op (which had required violently clearing a peaceful protest from a public space). At the same time, departing officers, like James Mattis, felt that their oath required at least a period of silence about their disagreements with the president, precisely because of those norms of a non-partisan, non-political military.

It is hard not to view the second Trump administration as at least attempting to directly attack those norms in response. The president by habit refers to ‘his military’ and ‘his generals,’¹³ while his Secretary of Defense began his term as SecDef with an unprecedented string of political firings – Gen. CQ Brown Jr. (Chair of the Joint Chiefs), Gen. Timothy Haugh (CYBERCOM), Adm. Lisa Franchetti (Navy CNO), Adm. Linda Fagan (Coast Guard commandant); Gen. Charles Hamilton (Army Materiel Command) and Gen. Jim Slife (Vice Chief of Staff). That is not the sort of thing incoming administrations generally do, but it also seems worth noting, particularly in the context of Hegseth’s open rejection of gender and racial inclusivity in the military, that of those high profile firings removed every woman and person of color from the Joint Chiefs. That military parade happened this time, on Trump’s birthday no less. As President, Trump went to the renamed-in-defiance-of-Congress Fort Bragg to give a transparently political, partisan speech, with directions for a crowd of soldiers behind him to be selected for political affiliation, in a flagrant violation of the norms of that civil-military bargain that the military is not to be used for partisan political purposes.

Of course on the flipside of that, one doesn’t have to spent much time in left-leaning spaces to encounter folks who dream that perhaps a military rising would deliver the government to them from a man they detest. There are countries where it is a military tradition that the military launches a coup if the civilian government strays from certain ideological lines. The Turkish military famously worked this way, with coups in 1960, 1971, 1980 and 1997 before such an effort failed in 2016. This is, to say the least, not the habit of successful countries; you cannot make a democracy strong by developing a habit of launching a military coup every time someone doesn’t like the results. But this certainly seems to reflect an increasing politicization of the military, which has in turn coincided with diminishing trust (albeit still quite a ways to fall to reach the low ebbs of the 1970s). It would be the height of foolishness to try to defend the republic by attempting to call in the military to overthrow the government.

This is, clearly, quite a dangerous trend. The American civil-military bargain has been extraordinarily successful, but it relies on restraint and forbearance by both military and civilian authorities.

And, quite simply part of the reason this trend continues to get worse is that we do not generally talk about it or think about it in these terms. Journalists do not write about the civil-military relationship the way they write about congressional norms (which are also fraying) or perennial political issues like the budget. Where the civil-military relationship isn’t simply ignored, it is taken for granted, assumed that because the system has always worked this way that it always will. But the strong norms of the civil-military bargain are not typical or normal, they are unusual, the product of more than two centuries of careful construction and maintenance dating back to that day in Newburgh. It is one of the great American achievements, and we should not let it slip away out of indifference.

Mending the tradition likely requires shifting authority over the military back towards Congress and away from an imperial executive. But equally it requires attention and value placed on the bargain: it requires Americans to impose costs for politicians that violate those norms and for that to happen it requires Americans to recognize the norms upon which their democracy is predicated in the first place.

The American history of civil-military relations is certainly not without its blemishes and complexities (you may note I have left the complexities of Reconstruction entirely out here; that’s a topic for another time), but it is a tradition we ought to value and be proud of, one we ought to seek to protect and foster. It does not consist only in military submission to elected civilian authority – though it does include that – but also consists of a civilian determination not to make the military the arbitrator of our civil disputes. It is not to be taken for granted, but rather is something fragile, carefully built up over decades and now placed into our care. Our memory should never outlive the shame of it if we were to let fall something so carefully built up over two and a half centuries.

Instead, even in difficult times – especially in difficult times – we are called to rise to George Washington’s closing exhortation at Newburgh, that “you will, by the dignity of your conduct, afford occasion for posterity to say, when speaking of the glorious example you have exhibited to mankind—”had this day been wanting, the world had never seen the last stage of perfection to which human nature is capable of attaining.””

https://acoup.blog/2025/07/04/collections-the-american-civil-military-relationship/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=collections-the-american-civil-military-relationship

https://acoup.blog/?p=30280