By Kori Schake
Sunday, March 22, 2026
Last May, I gave a lecture at the Air War College, the
Air Force’s senior service school for officers. I have taught at West Point and
spoken at several other senior service schools. At the Air War College, I
presented my work on the history of U.S. civil-military relations—research that
later led to a book
that was favorably reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and the
military’s Joint
Force Quarterly. The college was complimentary of my presentation and
invited me to reprise my talk this school year. But last week, I was
asked not to come after all.
The professor who gave me the news was polite and
professional, apologetic even. In a statement to The Atlantic, a
spokesperson for Air University, the college’s parent institution, said, “Air
University adjusted its academic schedule following the recent government
shutdown, including the Air War College program, to prioritize core curriculum
and program requirements. As a result, the scheduled guest lecture by Dr. Kori
Schake was unable to be accommodated within the revised schedule. This was a
command decision.”
Although I have no evidence that the decision was
political, I nonetheless found myself wondering if something else was going on.
The Defense Department under Secretary Pete Hegseth has made clear that people
and institutions may be excluded from involvement in professional military
education for ideological reasons. The Pentagon has cut academic ties with
numerous elite
colleges that Hegseth called “factories of anti-American resentment and
military disdain,” and rescinded
a former Biden-administration official’s professorial appointment at West
Point. The department has also sought to control the ideas taught at military
institutions, instructing
the service academies to remove
library books that promote “divisive concepts and gender ideology” and
requiring them to cancel
some classes because of their content.
Hegseth has created a command climate in which
subordinates might fear defending their educational programs. The dynamic
reminds me of the tightening of the rules of engagement in Afghanistan during
the Obama administration: When the military command sets a new standard that
subordinates are worried about violating, they sometimes comply preemptively
and even more stringently than the formal directive might require.
At any rate, the history of civil-military relations, the
subject I was to lecture on, is extremely relevant today. Far more than their
predecessors, Hegseth and President Trump have traduced the once-firm line
between politics and the military. Here is what I would have said in my
lecture.
It was not inevitable that a military strong enough to
defend U.S. interests could avoid state capture or resist a military coup—it
wasn’t even likely. In fact, no subject worried America’s Founding Fathers more
than the risk of a standing army threatening civilian governance. Complaints
about the potential danger posed by military forces are prominent in the
Declaration of Independence. Thirteen of the 85 Federalist Papers directly
address the issue. The Constitution would not have been ratified without the
Second and Third Amendments’ protections against the federal government’s use
of military force. Beginning with the 1795 Calling Forth Act and in subsequent
legislation, Congress restrained the chief executive’s ability to mobilize
militia. The Founders would be astonished to see how massive the country’s
defense establishment has become today, and even more surprised by its
tradition of deference to civilian authority.
How a country founded in fear of a standing army came to
think of its military as a bulwark of American democracy is the subject of my
work. As with so many other good things in American governance, George
Washington’s example was crucial. While commander in chief of the Continental
Army, Washington didn’t make demands of Congress; he pleaded and entreated,
consistently reinforcing the war powers of the civilian authorities. Although
he preferred a strategy of decisive battle, he adopted a “war of posts” because
it was the best his army could carry out with the resources that Congress had
provided. When Alexander Hamilton argued that the army should intimidate
Congress into giving itself revenue-raising powers, Washington cautioned that
an army “is a dangerous instrument to play with.” At the end of the war,
Washington publicly surrendered
his commission to Congress, “bidding an affectionate farewell to this
august body, under whose orders I have so long acted.” Washington’s adroit
handling of the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion as president established that a
democratic government could legitimately compel compliance with the law,
including by using the military. His unfailing commitment to civilian authority
gave time for government institutions to sink roots, and established norms that
gelled into the professional ethos of our military today.
Those norms weren’t uniformly respected by either
civilian or military leaders during the 18th and 19th centuries. The first
American president to vet military officers by their political affiliation was
Thomas Jefferson. Andrew Jackson, Zachary Taylor, John Fremont (twice!),
William Tecumseh Sherman, Ulysses Grant, George Armstrong Custer, and other
military officers exceeded their orders in ways that created severe political
problems for the presidents they served. But they are all examples of singular
leaders taking initiative in the conduct of their military duties, not of the
gathering of armies to threaten the government.
The most
difficult civil-military case to assess is that of Grant. During the
constitutional crisis of 1867–68, President Andrew Johnson fired the secretary
of war and attempted to appoint Grant in his place while Grant was also serving
as commander of the U.S. Army. When Congress threatened Grant with five years
in prison and a $10,000 fine if he accepted the dual appointment, Johnson
offered to do the time and pay the fine should Grant uphold the president’s
authority. Grant was thrust into the most consequential civil-military test
that any American officer has had to navigate, namely deciding which of the two
constitutionally authorized sources of civilian control to obey—Congress or the
executive. Grant chose to obey the law, not the commander in chief,
establishing that in peacetime, congressional authority takes precedence.
In the 1870s, political jockeying led to what would
become the nation’s most important restriction on the use of military forces
domestically, the Posse Comitatus Act. For more than a decade after the Civil
War ended, formerly seceded states remained under military occupation. Violence
was so prevalent that, in 1871, Grant invoked martial law in South Carolina. He
sent federal troops to protect legislatures and polling places, and even to
supervise the counting of ballots in Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida
during the 1876 presidential election. By that time, however, support for
Reconstruction had waned. Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican presidential
nominee, made a pledge to end it in exchange for the southern states’ votes,
and won. Congress enacted the bargain in 1878 by prohibiting, via Posse
Comitatus, the use of U.S. military forces for law enforcement unless Congress
authorizes such action, it is requested by a governor, or the president invokes
the Insurrection Act. (Just last year, in Trump vs. Illinois, the
Supreme Court reinforced
this restriction.) Presidents can also override Posse Comitatus to ensure
that states respect constitutional rights. Dwight Eisenhower did this in 1957
by federalizing the Arkansas National Guard and sending active-duty troops to
the state—over the governor’s objection—to enforce the Court’s Brown v.
Board of Education ruling.
In the 20th century, even as the size of the U.S.
military ballooned, fewer military leaders challenged civilian authority than
had in the prior century. There are only two examples of consequence: During
World War I, Admiral William Sims expressly violated President Woodrow Wilson’s
order that U.S. forces would be associated but not integrated with those of
allies, and during the Korean War, General Douglas MacArthur publicly
campaigned against President Harry Truman’s strategy for the war. In both cases,
the civilian leaders easily prevailed. In the 1930s, the Marine Corps, the most
independent of the military services, wrote a doctrine explicitly subordinating
its expeditionary forces to the direction of diplomats. There were no
significant civil-military disputes during World War II despite the military’s
preference, contra the civilian leadership, for an Asia-first strategy. A 1949
dispute over government funding for the military was branded as the “revolt of
the admirals” but was in fact a legitimate public debate about postwar budgets
and strategy, not a refusal by the military to enact them.
In more recent times, civil-military frictions have
consisted almost entirely of civilian leaders pushing the military up to or
over the bounds of traditional decorum or even the law. Most dangerously, Trump
has deployed military forces into cities and states over the objections of
their mayors and governors, or has attempted to. The abrupt retirement last
year of the head of the U.S. Southern Command amid a series of controversial
U.S. boat strikes in the Caribbean, along with the fact that a classified Justice
Department memo reportedly
indemnified the military against prosecution for the strikes, suggests at least
some level of concern inside the government that the administration is
operating very close to the legal line in those operations.
More commonly, politicians today attempt to legitimate
their policies and themselves by using the military as a prop: Think of
candidates flaunting endorsements from veterans, and political conventions
showcasing them as speakers. President Biden had uniformed Marines standing
behind him when he gave a 2022 speech about democracy. Trump has given campaign
speeches to military audiences and encouraged their participation in partisan
activities. In a recent video, several Democratic members of Congress reminded
the military not to obey illegal orders, making compliance with the law seem
like a political act. Veteran endorsements appear
to have a small-to-negligible effect on voters, but may also negatively
affect their attitudes about the military as an institution.
The military’s ability to resist politicization rests
almost wholly on the professionalism of the force itself. When Hegseth called
hundreds of military leaders to Quantico, Virginia, last fall to watch what
turned out to be political-rally-style speeches by him and Trump, the military
leaders showed up, as they had been directed to do by their civilian leaders.
But they all sat in stoic silence during the political program. This kind of
professionalism runs deep in the U.S. military. Yet the armed forces will not
long remain immune to our febrile politics if we keep dragging them into it.
Avoiding that will be even harder if service members are denied opportunities
to learn the history of the military’s relationship with its civilian leaders.
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