A politicized military would be the Founders' nightmare come true

The decisive Republican victory in Election 2024 has given Donald Trump a strong mandate for change.

Overhauling the federal government tops his list of priorities.

He has long railed against “rogue bureaucrats” of the deep state, federal employees with civil protection whom he accuses of at best incompetence or at worst corruption.

Trump plans to reissue his 2020 executive order, converting government with civil service protection workers to “Schedule F” employees easier to fire. Trump is also drafting an executive order to create a review board allowing him to remove senior military officers and replace them with generals and admirals loyal to himself.

He is even considering court martialing or charging with treason military leaders involved in the Afghanistan withdrawal

Making civilian bureaucrats more compliant would hamper agencies' ability to exercise their regulatory function and provide services. But making the military completely subservient to the president would be downright dangerous.

Such a move would overturn a principle established at the beginning of the republic: Military personnel must be politically neutral.

The Founders saw how European despots used their armed forces to oppress their own people. That’s why they did not want a large peacetime military, relying instead on state militias that a cadre of professional soldiers could lead during times of war.

When President George Washington suppressed the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, he relied on troops from the Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland and New Jersey militias.

The army expanded dramatically to fight the Civil War, reaching a peak strength of more than 2.6 million, but it was rapidly demobilized following Reconstruction.

By 1890, it had fewer than 30,000 officers and men.

The military expanded again to fight World War I, growing to approximately 2.9 million in 1918 but shrank to 247,000 in 1923.

The World War II military reached a peak strength of more than 12 million.

Post-war strength declined but has never fallen below 1.3 million.

Today, the armed forces number approximately 2.1 million. Although Americans accept the need for a large professional military, they have never lost their unease over how it might be used against them.

In 1878, Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibited the use of the army for domestic policing.

As a safeguard to political neutrality, in 1789 the first Congress required soldiers to swear an oath to “support the Constitution of the United States.” During the Civil War, Congress changed the wording to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic,” and in 1959, dropped “support.”

The current oath also requires personnel to “obey the orders of the President of the United States.” Therein lies the rub. What if the duty to obey orders conflicts with the obligation to defend the Constitution?

During Trump’s first administration, the Pentagon opposed using troops against protestors or to support the president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Would a Pentagon staffed with loyalists show the same restraint?

“I need the kind of generals that Hitler had,” Trump allegedly remarked in a private White House meeting. “People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.”

His campaign denied he said that, but either way, Trump has made clear his desire for a more compliant officer corps. He has vowed to purge the military of what he calls “woke” generals. Critics fear this criteria will be used to get rid of those he considers insufficiently loyal.

As commander in chief, the president has the authority to appoint senior officers with the “advice and consent of the senate,” the same caveat that applies to cabinet secretaries.

It remains to be seen how willing the Republican-controlled Senate will be to confirm nominees, no matter how controversial.

The president-elect has wasted no time in testing the waters, nominating Pete Hegseth to be Secretary of Defense.

The Fox News talk show host is a National Guard veteran who rose no higher than the rank of major and has no experience running a small company, let alone a massive federal agency.

According to one retired military official, loyalty to Trump seemed to be Hegseth’s main qualification. If the Senate approves his nomination, that will signal a willingness to comply with the president-elect’s other military appointments.

If Trump gets the military he wants, how might he use it? He will surely deploy troops to the southern border as he did in 2018. He might also use the army to round up and deport illegal immigrants.

The legal justification for this lies in a modification of the very act designed to keep the armed forces out of domestic affairs. In 1981, Congress amended the Posse Comitatus Act, authorizing the military to assist with drug trafficking interdiction. Some experts fear that it allows for wider use of the military for civilian law enforcement.

The president-elect’s threat to go after those he considers domestic bad actors is particularly worrying. In an October interview on Fox News, asked how the government should handle post-election violence if he were to win the election, Trump spoke of the “enemy from within.”

“We have some sick people, radical left lunatics,” he declared. “And I think they’re the big — and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”

According to some legal experts, the Insurrection Act (passed in 1807 and last modified in 1871) might allow him to use the army within the country.

Article 253 of the act empowers the president to deploy the armed forces “to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy, if it ... opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.”

The Supreme Court would be the final arbiter of whether using troops domestically is legal, but it has shown a willingness to allow presidents wide discretion when it comes to executive authority.

Under these circumstances, we can only hope that the president will choose senior officers wisely, and senators from both parties will fulfill their obligation to preserve the apolitical military that has served us so well for more than two centuries.

Tom Mockaitis is a professor of history at DePaul University and the author of “Violent Extremists: Understanding the Domestic and International Terrorist Threat ."   