The Military and the Republic

CHARLES Q. BROWN, JR., a retired U.S. Air Force General and the 21st Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is an Executive in Residence at Duke University. PETER D. FEAVER, a former naval reservist and National Security Council staff member, is Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Duke University, where he leads the Program in American Grand Strategy. ANDREW KRAGIE, an alumnus of the American Grand Strategy program at Duke University, is a lawyer in North Carolina. What America’s Armed Forces Can—and Cannot—Do for Democracy Charles Q. Brown, Jr., Peter D. Feaver, and Andrew Kragie Celebrations of America’s founding and reflections on its ideals often overlook the central role of civil-military relations. This is a mistake. In the Declaration of Independence, a chief complaint was that King George III “affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.” George Washington himself worried about this abuse of power and went to great pains to avoid it in his own career. Throughout the Revolutionary War, he constantly deferred to the Continental Congress despite its calamitous delays and erratic instructions, because he recognized that his authority over the Continental Army flowed from the people’s representatives. Given his immense personal popularity, he was often encouraged to redress this or that political dysfunction, but he knew that the republic would suffer in the long run if the military were to become an instrument of the commander’s will rather than of the people’s elected leaders. The United States has not recently had leaders of Washington’s popularity, but in other ways the present moment recalls the era that followed the country’s founding. Today, as it was then, there is gridlock in the civilian political system. Similarly, Americans today hold the military in high regard compared with civilian branches of government. When the public is confronted with a problem that seems too big for the civilian branches to solve, the reflex is to ask the military to handle it. Both Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden, for instance, looked to the military to play a leading role in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. The temptation for mission creep is understandable: the U.S. military is the most advanced in the world, with a budget two to three times that of its nearest competitor. As the recent capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolàs Maduro demonstrated, U.S. service members can do things no other military in the world can do. And in the face of a genuine national disaster, the public will readily embrace the military’s help; during the Great Depression, for instance, President Herbert Hoover directed the military to set up relief camps and President Franklin Roosevelt ordered it to establish the Civilian Conservation Corps, which put unemployed men to work to develop public land. But when presidents use the armed forces for more politically contentious missions, such as addressing domestic crime in cities, the work of the military becomes more fraught. Resorting to a military solution rather than fixing the underlying incapacity or dysfunction in civilian institutions diverts the military from focusing on its primary combat mission. And, as Washington knew, it is not the military’s job to save the republic from political impasses. Indeed, if you ask too much of the military, you risk the entire enterprise. A quarter millennium after the first Americans rejected monarchy, representative democracy remains an “experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people,” as Washington said in his first inaugural address. It has been tenderly handed down from generation to generation, and it has been bitterly contested. The Civil War was only the greatest test of whether this experiment could survive its divisions, as the United States has faced disagreements throughout its history, including in the agrarian discontent of the 1890s, the depression and isolationism of the 1930s, the progress and tumult of the 1960s, and the political polarization of recent years. In each chapter, the best political leaders found inspiration to overcome political divisions in the ideals that prompted the first patriots. These leaders held dear the self-evident truths “that all men are created equal [and] endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” Of course, those ideals, so well articulated by the founders, were not so well practiced by them. Thomas Jefferson held the pen for the stirringly universal Declaration of Independence, yet he also held people in bondage. Washington, the indispensable man, considered the institution of slavery to be indispensable to the nation’s prosperity (at least initially). All the founders left women out of the equation entirely. But the American experiment strengthens each time its leaders recognize that the founders’ project to create a more perfect union is an enduring one—one to be passed down to every generation. The ideal wa

The Military and the Republic

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