By Shay Khatiri
In March 1783 Gen. George Washington put down a conspiracy among some of his officers who wanted to mutiny against Congress. During the War of Independence, he agreed with his officers' discontent with Congress but equated rebellion against Congress with treason: "This dreadful alternative of either deserting our country . . . or turning our arms against it, which is the apparent object, unless Congress can be compelled into instant compliance, has something so shocking in it that humanity revolts at the idea."
The professionalism of the American military remains essential for the survival of a democratic republic. Most Americans don't fear a military coup d'état, because they are confident that the armed forces' loyalties lie with the Constitution. Abstaining from partisan politics -- many officers even decline to vote -- also helps explain the military's high approval rating among the American people.
In "The State and the Soldier," Kori Schake, who directs foreign and defense policy at the American Enterprise Institute, traces these tendencies to the Founders' worries about an army so powerful that it could subvert republican government. Thirteen of the 85 Federalist Papers wrangle with how best to handle this threat, she notes in her history of American civil-military relations. The Constitution mandates that Congress "maintain a Navy" and allows -- but doesn't require -- it to "raise and support Armies."
Throughout history, standing armies had undermined liberty. Unlike in ancient Rome, where the norms dividing civil and military deteriorated, in America they became stronger. Thomas Jefferson selected officers based on partisan loyalty, but today, Ms. Schake observes, senior officers are mostly unaffiliated with a party.
In the 19th century, Americans frequently elected victorious generals -- Andrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant, Zachary Taylor -- as president. They only elected one, Dwight Eisenhower, during the next century. John McCain, a long-serving senator, lost the 2008 presidential race despite his status as a military hero. In 1964 Americans handed Sen. Barry Goldwater, a major general in the Air Force Reserve, one of the greatest electoral defeats in history, largely because they distrusted his strategic judgment.
Politics and warfighting are crafts, and there is little overlap between their required skills. The professionalization of the military that began in the 20th century has increasingly isolated officers from politics, as a few of Ms. Schake's stories demonstrate. After World War I, Adm. William Sims "publicly critiqued administration policy, and launched a public relations campaign to discredit the secretary of the navy." In the late 1940s, a group of admirals "revolted" against the attempt to create a civilian-led Department of Defense. During the Korean War, President Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur for violating his orders. In each of these cases, civilian authority triumphed.
Ms. Schake's title, "The State and the Soldier," reverses that of "The Soldier and the State" (1957), the political scientist Samuel Huntington's canonical work on American civil-military relations. Huntington argued, as Ms. Schake puts it, "that the liberality of American society is incompatible with an effective military," which should instead be professionalized and arranged with "objective civilian control (separate spheres of civilian and military decision)." Ms. Schake unequivocally rejects that thesis: Civilian control need not undermine strategy. The Allies' civilian-directed military won World War II against Japan's militarized politics, and, as Ms. Schake reminds us, President Kennedy was at odds with his senior military advisers during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and history has vindicated his judgment.
Yet "civil-military relations" is a misleading term. The pioneering military theorist Carl von Clausewitz categorized relations in a country as military, societal and political, each having its distinct relationships with the other two. The phrase "civil-military relations" lumps the last two into one category.
Americans tend to approve of their military but not their elected officials, and Ms. Schake warns that politicians increasingly seek policy legitimacy through the military. George W. Bush appointed a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, as secretary of state, perhaps to mask his foreign policy inexperience. Barack Obama and Donald Trump appointed retired and active-duty general officers as national security advisers over the same worry. Mr. Trump and Joe Biden both appointed retired generals, Jim Mattis and Lloyd Austin, as secretaries of defense -- a civilian-held position by law.
The unhealthy practice of retired officers making political endorsements also has become ever more common. In 2016 both the Democratic and the Republican party conventions featured retired general officers making heavily partisan arguments. The reputation of the military doesn't seem to benefit from this association with politics. Its approval rating is at the lowest in decades, the author notes.
Ms. Schake sets two criteria for a good relationship between the political class and the military: the ability of the commander in chief to fire officers with impunity and whether members of the military obey orders they don't agree with. In both cases, today's civil-military relations in the U.S. pass Ms. Schake's health check.
There remains a somber takeaway: Over time, politicians have become too weak to defend their own prerogatives against military advice because Americans, against the wisdom of their forefathers, view a standing military not as a potential threat but "as a bulwark of democracy," as Ms. Schake says. This speaks highly of the military but poorly of both society and its political leaders. Both elected branches seem to have grown uninterested in making political and prudential arguments to the American people, and rely on both active-duty and retired officers to do it for them. Ms. Schake rightly warns that this practice undermines their long-term interest in political supremacy over the military.
--Mr. Khatiri is a vice president and senior fellow at Yorktown Institute.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
February 01, 2026 10:24 ET (15:24 GMT)
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