The prospect of a second Trump administration has rekindled a debate from four years ago about the proper role of the military in our democracy.
During the tumultuous period before and after the 2020 presidential election, several extraordinary conflicts took place between Donald Trump and senior leaders of the military. In June 2020, for example, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said publicly that active-duty military should not be used to control protests in American cities — despite a threat from Mr. Trump to do precisely that.
Likewise, Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, took a series of unusual steps during the final months of the Trump administration to protect the country from a president who he believed was looking for ways to remain in power. General Milley even went as far as to solicit assurances from the military chain of command that it would not launch a nuclear strike on Mr. Trump’s order without his involvement.
Recent reporting has raised concerns that a second Trump administration would once again strain relations between the military and civilian authorities. Mr. Trump and his potential appointees are apparently considering deploying the military for a variety of purposes that might invite scrutiny from military leaders: to patrol the border, arrest undocumented immigrants, combat urban crime and quell protests.
Now, as then, a question arises: When is the military permitted (and perhaps obligated) to criticize or even refuse an order from a commander in chief — and when must it defer?
Of course, if an order is clearly illegal, service members are legally bound to disobey it. But the law in this space can be ambiguous. For example, the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 generally prohibits using the U.S. military for domestic policing purposes, but that prohibition has exceptions — and the Insurrection Act of 1807 grants the president the authority to unilaterally deploy the military to restore domestic law and order. A president’s advisers have plenty of wiggle room to make reasonable-sounding legal defenses of domestic policing operations.
This sort of legal uncertainty might seem to dictate a very strict policy of military deference. Indeed, people on both the right and the left have criticized General Milley and Mr. Esper for their actions in 2020, arguing that they overstepped, undermining the authority of the commander in chief and compromising the military’s political neutrality. The assumption here is that political neutrality means the military must obey all presidential orders, as long as those orders are not clearly illegal.
But this assumption is mistaken. It is true that political neutrality means having the military generally defer to civilian authority. But neutrality also means not letting the military become a partisan political tool, which is why service members are prohibited from, among other things, taking part in political events in uniform. If the president orders the military to take actions that jeopardize its neutrality, the military is ethically justified in criticizing and even resisting the order, even if it is not clearly illegal. In a political system like ours, unlike in an autocracy, the people are the ultimate sovereign.
Critics of General Milley and Mr. Esper fail to appreciate that political neutrality exists to solve two problems. The first is to ensure that the military does not usurp power and turn on the society it is designed to defend. Insofar as the military remains obedient to civilian authorities, there is no risk of a military coup.
If avoiding military coups were the only problem that political neutrality was meant to solve, equating neutrality with obedience would suffice, and actions like General Milley’s probably would violate it. But political neutrality exists to solve a second problem, as well: to ensure that the military is subordinate only to legitimate democratic authority — not to, say, a tyrant.
In a political system like ours, unlike in an autocracy, the people are the ultimate sovereign. This is why, when members of the military take their oath of office, they pledge to defend the Constitution, not the president. Political neutrality is a democratic ideal. As such, it is not a promise of absolute military subordination to the executive. On the contrary, it is a commitment to uphold the political order that ensures the sovereignty of the people. This requires a clear separation of the military from the president’s partisan political agenda.
For this reason, the military has an obligation to object to or resist certain commands that blur this line. If the president orders the military to disperse protesters who are upset that the president will not leave office after losing an election, military leaders could be obligated to refuse on the ground that the operation threatens the democratic order.
If the president orders the military to police urban areas, military leaders could be obligated to refuse on the ground that the operation threatens the due process rights of civilians (because the military is designed to confront combatants, not enforce laws in a civil society). Mere passive obedience to orders like these would be inconsistent with the demands of political neutrality.
Regardless of who ends up in the White House in 2025, it is crucial to a just and stable society that we understand how the relationship between the military and civilian leaders ought to function. Contrary to a dangerously naïve conception of military obligation, resisting a legal order is not necessarily a violation of political neutrality. Military resistance does not always undermine the rightful authority of civilian leaders, nor is it always tantamount to putting one’s personal political or moral convictions above one’s loyalty.
