https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/trump-civil-military-relations-tensions/Tensions between the two sectors are woven into the fabric of the American republic.
As Tom Nichols, my friend and former colleague at the Naval War College, noted recently in The Atlantic, Americans don’t often think about civil-military relations, and that’s a good thing. It means that paratroopers are not normally seizing communications centers, and tanks aren’t rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol.
But since U.S. civil–military relations are generally healthy, when Americans do talk about them, they often do so in apocalyptic terms. Each example of civil–military tensions, it seems, portends a crisis. Nichols’s essay is a case in point: President Trump, he writes,
has taken a dangerous path, excoriating retired military leaders who criticize him and lavishing praise and make-believe pay raises on the active-duty military voters who he believes support him. A precious heritage built on the dual pillars of military obedience to civilians and civilian respect for military professionals is now at severe risk.
Someone reading that essay would have to conclude that, under Trump, U.S. civil–military relations have entered a unique period of crisis.
But that is not the case. To understand why, it is useful to understand that U.S. civil–military relations can best be described as a bargain among three parties: the uniformed military, civilian policymakers, and the American people. Periodically, in response to social, political, technological, and geopolitical changes, this bargain must be renegotiated. In this case, as in many previous ones, what seems to be a crisis is more likely a transition as the civil–military bargain is in the process of being renegotiated.
There is no question that many of Trump’s actions, including his excoriation of some retired generals and flag officers critical of him, as well as his dismissive remarks about Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis after effusively praising him when the latter resigned, have inflamed civil–military tensions. But the 2016 presidential campaign should have made it clear that Trump’s approach to the military would be unconventional.
During that campaign, Donald Trump slammed the leadership of the U.S. military, claiming that “the generals under Barack Obama have not been successful. Under the leadership of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the generals have been reduced to rubble, reduced to a point where it is embarrassing for our country.” He implied that, as president, he would replace Obama’s military leadership with generals and admirals who would not subordinate military effectiveness to “political correctness.”