JAMES MATTIS, a revered former general, had largely kept his views to himself since resigning as President Donald Trump’s first secretary of defence in December 2018. On June 3rd he ended his silence with a blistering attack on his former boss. General Mattis recalled the oath he had taken to defend the constitution. “Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens,” he said. “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try.” He was hardly alone among generals—serving and retired—to distance themselves from Mr Trump’s demand for an iron-fisted security response to days of protests and riots in American cities.
America is in the midst of its worst civil-military crisis for a generation, one that threatens to do enduring harm to democratic norms and the standing and cohesion of its armed forces. Mr Trump’s call to use military force to quell the most widespread unrest in half a century—sparked by the killing by a white police officer of George Floyd, an unarmed black man—has caused unease and alarm up and down the chain of command. Two events, in particular, seem to have prompted the generals to speak out. On June 1st Mr Trump threatened to deploy active-duty troops under the Insurrection Act of 1807. He also decided to walk to a church near the White House to stage a photo-op, flanked by Mark Esper, the secretary of defence, and General Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, America’s top military officer. Peaceful protesters had been forcibly cleared away with tear gas from the site moments earlier, even before the city’s curfew had taken effect.
On June 3rd a chastened Mr Esper broke with the White House, saying that he did not support invoking the Insurrection Act over the heads of American governors, none of whom have asked for troops. General Milley, for his part, wrote a letter to service chiefs promising that the armed forces would “operate consistent with national laws”, implying a worry that he might be given illegal orders. Army leaders sent a joint letter to soldiers clarifying that their oath to the constitution “includes the right of the people peaceably to assemble”.
Such anxious dissent from within, and open fury from the ranks of former leaders—General Mattis was just one of several retired generals and admirals to express his alarm—is extraordinary. “We are at an inflection point, and the events of the past few weeks have made it impossible to remain silent,” said Admiral Mike Mullen, one of General Milley’s predecessors as chairman of the joint chiefs. The problem was a larger one that cut to the heart of America’s civil-military relations, he said. “Too many foreign and domestic policy choices have become militarised; too many military missions have become politicised.”
Scholars of civil-military relations are troubled. “This is absolutely the only time I can think of that this many current and former high-ranking military officers have made a very clear pushback against the domestic use of the military,” says Lindsay Cohn of the Naval War College (who stressed that she was speaking in her personal capacity). That pushback is rooted not only in moral qualms over troops’ possible involvement in the suppression of First Amendment rights they are sworn to protect, but also practical concerns over the implications for the reputation of the armed forces and their long-term cohesion.
For one thing, most active-duty troops are trained and equipped to deliver lethal force under the laws of war, not crowd control under domestic law. “Trying to figure out what would constitute a lawful versus an unlawful order would be very difficult,” says Dr Cohn. Many of the soldiers and marines that deployed to Los Angeles in 1992, when President George H.W. Bush dispatched forces on the request of California’s governor, say that they were ill-suited to such duties. The legacy of the Kent State shooting in 1970, when Ohio National Guard troops shot 13 unarmed students protesting against the Vietnam war, killing four, is a searing reminder of the breach that can open up between the public and the army when things go wrong.
That the protests have been about mostly white police forces killing mostly black men is a particularly sensitive issue for the armed forces. Black Americans are no longer vastly over-represented in the services as they were in the years after the Vietnam war. They make up around 13% of America’s population and 16% of its active-duty force. But 72 years after Harry Truman abolished segregation in the ranks, African-Americans comprise only 9% of commissioned officers, and almost none of its senior echelons. Only two of the 41 most senior commanders in the armed forces are black, according to the New York Times.
Here, too, the legacy of Vietnam casts a long shadow. During the war, anger among black and other minority soldiers about racial injustice at home prompted widespread unrest, desertion and even hints of mutiny aboard American warships. Many of the 551 “fragging” incidents in Vietnam, in which soldiers turned their grenades on officers, were rooted in racial grievances. Tapes of Malcolm X, a radical black activist, spread through barracks. A study in 1970-71 found that 47% of soldiers, many of them conscripts, had engaged in some form of dissent or disobedience, and rebellions at American bases were common.
Military leaders are acutely conscious of how today’s racial tensions might ripple through the force again. General C.Q. Brown, nominated to be the first black head of America’s air force, released a poignant statement reflecting on his experience of “living in two worlds”, often as “the only African-American in the room”. On June 1st Kaleth Wright, the most senior enlisted member of the US Air Force, admitted that his “greatest fear” was “that I will wake up to a report that one of our black airmen has died at the hands of a white police officer.”
Finally, there are the wider political consequences. Any decision to use active-duty forces to control American cities (some governors have brought in the National Guard, the state-level reserve force, to help police) would compound a politicisation of the armed forces that was long under way, but accelerated under the Trump administration. The president stacked his cabinet with retired officers (“my generals”, he called them), mused about military parades in Washington and gave charged political speeches to troops abroad. That militarism appeared to seep into those around him last week. In a controversial op-ed published online by the New York Times on June 3rd, Tom Cotton, a Republican senator from Arkansas, called for the use of active-duty forces and “an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers.”
Mr Esper’s exhortation to governors on June 1st to “dominate the battlespace” and General Milley’s decision to roam the streets of Washington later that night in combat uniform went down badly among many Americans, Republican and Democrat, who thought both men had allowed themselves to be co-opted by Mr Trump as political props. On June 5th, 89 former defence officials, including four former secretaries of defence—among them Chuck Hagel, a former Republican senator—sharply criticised both Mr Esper and General Milley in an open letter, warning that Mr Trump’s actions risked “diminishing Americans’ trust in our military […] for years to come.”
Americans hold the armed forces in greater esteem than any other institution—ahead of small business, the police and the presidency. But research by Jim Golby, an army officer, and Peter Feaver, a professor at Duke University, shows that support among Republicans and Democrats falls markedly if the forces are seen to back the rival party.
The use of troops by a Republican president to quell protests supported by a majority of Democratic leaders might well be viewed as such a partisan military intervention. “This may be the moment when civilian politicisation of the military is at a tipping point,” notes Risa Brooks, a professor at Marquette University. “No country recovers easily after that point has been reached.” It is all too easy to imagine Mr Trump using the armed forces as electoral props ahead of November’s presidential election—or, in the nightmare scenario discussed by some worried officers in Washington, calling on military support in the aftermath of a disputed result.
In many respects, Mr Trump has placed military leaders in an invidious position. Last week’s revolt of the generals was intended as an effort to keep the armed forces out of the political fray. Yet the act of rebuking the president—implicitly, like General Milley, or explicitly, like General Mattis—is inevitably and intensely political. That this task fell to military leaders in the first place is a symptom of a broader malaise.
A cardinal principle of American democracy is that civilians are in charge. It ought to have been Mr Esper, as well as other civilian Pentagon officials and lawmakers, who sounded the alarm about Mr Trump exceeding the limits. But they were unable or unwilling to shoulder this responsibility. In part as a result of the weakness of civilian leadership under Mr Trump, and in part because of his own love of military brass, military officials at the Pentagon have grown steadily more powerful than civilian ones over the last few years. In April Mr Trump nominated yet another retired general to take over as the Pentagon’s policy chief, replacing a civilian who resigned in February.
That the generals are willing to defend civic norms against a wayward president is reassuring. That it falls to them to do so is an indictment of the state of American politics. “Civil-military relations scholars would absolutely say that it is not a good idea to look to the military to save democracy,” says Dr Cohn. “No matter how bad the situation is.”
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