Eurasia Press & News
Avoiding a Civil-Military Crisis in the Age of Trump
Why were U.S. military officers fretting about having to show up, on short notice, to a base in Quantico, Virginia, to hear a speech from the two civilians in the chain of command? “All hands” meetings like the one held this week, at which subordinates gather to hear from top leadership, are one of the oldest customs in the U.S. military—think “George Washington addressing the troops.” What made this meeting so notable is that today’s military is buffeted by an atmosphere of extreme partisan polarization, and neither political party is doing much to protect the military from its baleful effects. In such a moment, the long-term health of the American republic depends on the military safely walking an extremely narrow tightrope to uphold civilian control without becoming a partisan institution itself.
High-profile meetings such as the one in Quantico force the military to walk that tightrope in the full glare of the media and without the safety net of strong trust across the civil-military divide. The military audience managed to pull off that feat, but they can be forgiven for fretting about it in advance. The last military audience in that situation—the lower-ranking troops who heard a similarly partisan speech from President Donald Trump at Fort Bragg in June—failed the test, whooping and hollering as if they were the party faithful at a political rally. In that case, many of the “applause lines” were scathing critiques of the lawful orders their military oath had required them to implement barely a year ago.
In the United States, the civil-military balance depends on commanders in chief of either party trusting the military to obey lawful orders regardless of which party is in power. The risk represented by the gathering orchestrated by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the speech delivered by Donald Trump is that it threatens to leave military leaders with no choice but to become partisan actors or to violate norms of civilian control of the military. So far, senior U.S. officers have managed that dilemma reasonably effectively. But the more that civilian leaders treat the military as a partisan institution, the more the military will start behaving like a partisan institution—and the less it can be relied on to fight and win wars.
WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW
George Washington and the other great military heroes in American history excelled at delivering informative and inspiring remarks to the assembled troops. Civilian leaders have done this, too, although rarely quite so memorably. There have been many thousands of tedious all-hands meetings for every significant one, so the convening of one usually prompts more eye rolls than alarms.
Why, then, was there such a big fuss that Hegseth called in hundreds of senior military leaders (and the media) for an all-hands? Partly it was because this particular type of all-hands was unprecedented, especially when Trump joined and turned it into a presidential level gig. All-hands are typically held at lower levels or when the secretary of defense visits an installation, but it is unusual to hold one on a global scale. There is little precedent or rationale for bringing senior leaders together in person when virtual alternatives are available. Pulling off an unplanned meeting of this kind was a staffing nightmare. Moving one senior military officer around the world involves a lot of staff work. Moving hundreds boggles the mind. In the military, this is known as a “whiskey tango foxtrot moment,” and it left thousands of lower-level personnel asking, “What is the emergency that is prompting this event-planning crisis?”
But the more ominous reason the gathering kicked up such a fuss is that the Department of Defense increasingly operates in a low-information environment. Since Trump began his second term, leaders have been taking significant actions—consider the unprecedented pace of firing senior officers or the sharp escalation of military strikes in the Western Hemisphere—without providing much explanation to affected individuals, the junior ranks, or the general public. All sorts of worst-case theories flood into the vacuum of a low-information environment.
One such theory that proved wildly off was that Hegseth intended to use this as a moment to institute a new loyalty oath. A retired general raised that possibility on social media, and rather than knocking it back, Hegseth coyly seemed to suggest that there might be something to this notion. Hegseth may have just been trolling the alarmists, because instituting a new oath would have provoked a genuine crisis in civil-military relations and threatened public confidence in both the military and American democracy. The existing military oath, which has served the country well since the days of George Washington (with an important change after the Civil War), obligates the military to support and defend the Constitution, and the Constitution establishes the president as commander in chief. In practice, members of the military honor the oath when they obey the lawful orders of the commander in chief. (By contrast, the Constitution obligates the other branches of government, the legislature and the judiciary, to determine what is lawful and to serve as a check against lawful but awful orders.) Because the people in the audience at Quantico have been honoring this oath, the Trump administration has faced no resistance from the military even as the administration has made abrupt and dramatic changes. Any change to the oath in this polarized and partisan moment would have marked a true crisis.
Instead, what happened was what was most likely to happen from the get-go: a mother of all all-hands, at which military leaders heard, not for the first time, Trump and Hegseth’s vision and were challenged to redouble their efforts to implement it. Convening such a meeting is within the prerogatives of civilian control, and civilians have the right to deem whether it is worth the effort to convene it.
A FINE BALANCE
Yet avoiding the worst-case scenario did not mean that there was nothing to worry about. On the contrary, because of the country’s partisan, polarized environment, the meeting was an unusually fraught episode in American civil-military relations. When political leaders such as the president or secretary of defense give remarks to the troops, the speechwriters always include lines designed to generate applause. Praising the heroics of this or that unit, invoking sports rivalries, or including self-deprecating humor designed to show that the senior leaders understand what those serving under them are going through are all effective rhetorical devices that can help leaders build trust with their subordinates.
But strident partisan statements cut the other way, especially with an audience of senior military officers. Those officers understand that professional ethics require that they avoid even giving the appearance of partisanship—which means refraining from applauding the partisan statements of others, since cheering the policies of one party is tantamount to booing the policies of the other. Over the course of their professional lives, these military officers are likely to serve a large chunk of their time under both parties. If they become identified as partisans of one, they may be viewed as enemies of the other—starting a cycle of partisan purges that leaves the military disoriented, demoralized, and ineffective, as has happened in other purge-prone militaries. A rip-roaring partisan stem-winder that works on the campaign trail should fall flat with a military audience if that audience is honoring its professional duty.
Hegseth’s speech had a lot of boilerplate of the sort that would show up in any speech. But it had at least as much partisan red meat suited to a MAGA audience and very little to say about the exceptionally complex geopolitical environment the U.S. military is confronting. Trump’s speech, meanwhile, included the standard humorous asides, generating some natural laughter from the audience. But other than that, the military representatives resisted Trump’s encouragement to “loosen up” and stayed professional, barely reacting to the partisan commentary—including when Trump went on at some length about the “enemy within,” apparently referring to political opponents rather than genuine adversaries trying to hurt the United States. If there is a movement to translate some of the rhetorical bombast into actual policies, that will be the moment when key military advisers may need to speak up, very quietly, within the chain of command to warn civilian leaders about the second- and third-order effects of such policies. But a made-for-TV speech is not the time for that, so the military audience rightly kept quiet.
In short, U.S. military leaders met the moment. They knew that the world was watching, particularly their own troops, and were especially keen to show proper decorum reflecting a professional military ethic. Accordingly, they stood and applauded for the ceremonial arrival and departure of the civilians in their chain of command. Otherwise, they listened respectfully, taking pains not to resemble a campaign rally audience, lest they compromise the nonpartisan ethos of the military.
Ultimately, Hegseth’s all-hands turned out to be both an opportunity and a challenge. The mystery preceding it guaranteed that media attention exceeded that for almost anything else the secretary has presided over. There was a risk the event could have turned the military into a political prop, and all the partisan commentary from the stage provided ample opportunity for that. Fortunately, the military itself averted that outcome—preserving, at least for now, the trust and balance on which healthy civil-military relations depend.
