The Trump Presidency and Civil-Military Relations - Mackubin Owens

The Trump Presidency and Civil-Military Relations - Mackubin Owens

Civil-military tensions are nothing new in American history. Indeed, they date from the very Founding of the Republic. Although there are many examples of unhealthy civil-military relations during the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations, civil-military relations were particularly fraught during the Trump presidency. Indeed, by the end of his time in the White House, they were at a truly toxic level.   

The reason for this toxicity is that healthy civil-military relations depend upon the mutual trust, respect, and understanding between civilian and military leaders. Unfortunately, mutual trust was not often in evidence during much of the Trump presidency, especially toward the end of his term in office. Both Trump and military bore responsibility for this state of affairs.

Donald Trump entered the White House as an outsider who did not hesitate to express skepticism about the direction of the foreign and defense policies of his predecessors, arguing against the alleged verities of the post-9/11 consensus as articulated by the “security community.”  Indeed, Trump’s very presidency was an affront to this foreign policy/national security consensus and to the people who articulated it. 

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According to his critics, Trump upended the “norms” of civil-military relations. Among other things, they claim that he “politicized” the military and “militarized” foreign policy by surrounding himself with retired generals and that he demanded personal loyalty rather than loyalty to the Constitution. He publicly criticized unnamed active duty officers who opposed his decision to pull U.S. forces from Syria as “failed generals;” he excoriated both active and retired military leaders who had criticized him, impugning their character and competence purely for political reasons; and he lavished praise on the active-duty military voters whom he believed supported him. These were in addition to the long-since discredited claim that he “colluded” with Russia, acting as a willing handmaiden to Vladimir Putin.

But it is also clear that many members of the national security “community” took it upon themselves to actively thwart Trump’s policies. Over the course of the Trump presidency, it was common for the president’s critics to claim that he was a threat to national security, whether because of “collusion” with Russia or controversy over the Ukraine affair, which led to his impeachment. But the same people who had once dismissed the idea of a “deep state” blocking the president’s policies as a dangerous conspiracy theory later came to support public opposition by unelected bureaucrats as a way to curb Trump’s actions.

Unfortunately, the idea that it was necessary to protect the country from a duly elected president had its advocates from the beginning of Trump’s presidency. For example, right after his inauguration, Georgetown law Professor Rosa Brooks, the author of How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything, wrote in Foreign Policy, that Trump’s “first week as president has made it all too clear [that] he is as crazy as everyone feared. [One] possibility is one that until recently I would have said was unthinkable in the United States of America: a military coup, or at least a refusal by military leaders to obey certain orders.”

A senior Pentagon appointee from 2009 to 2011, she continued that, for the first time, she could “imagine plausible scenarios in which senior military officials might simply tell the president: ‘No, sir. We’re not doing that.’” One can only imagine the reaction of the press had someone made a similar argument about President Obama.

Trump accepted military advice on most occasions but he also didn’t hesitate to reject it on others. Of course, a president is not obligated to accept military advice. And although officers, swear an oath to the Constitution, not to an individual, a president should be able to expect the loyalty of the officer corps in support an administration’s policy once a decision has been made, remembering that it is the president, not an imaginary “security community,” that has the constitutional authority to make national policy.

Trump bears a great deal of responsibility for the poor state of civil-military relations during his tenure in office, but he was far from alone. The officer corps, both active and retired, aided and abetted by a press eager to paint Trump in the most negative light, bear much of the blame. During the Trump presidency, too many in the military seemed to have forgotten that the president bears the responsibility for establishing U.S. policy. The military provides advice but do not have the right to “insist” that the president accept it. U.S. history also illustrates that the military is not always right, even when it comes to military affairs, as Vietnam makes clear.

In short, both Trump and the military, active and retired, bear responsibility for the toxic state of civil-military relations during the Trump presidency. The missing element was trust, the mutual respect and understanding between civilian and military leaders that enables the exchange of candid views and perspectives between the two parties as part of the decision-making process. If we are to reestablish healthy civil-military relations in the country, civilians and the military need to reexamine their mutual relationship. Mutual trust ultimately lies at the heart of healthy civil-military relations.