Civil-Military Relations Under Trump, With Kori Schake

ANNOUNCER:
This is the United States Army's 250th Anniversary Parade.

LINDSAY:
2025 marks the 250th anniversary of the founding of the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy, and the U.S. Marine Corps. Throughout their histories, they and the other U.S. military services have prided themselves on their professionalism, their loyalty to the Constitution, their submission to civilian control, and their commitment to staying out of politics.

DONALD TRUMP:
And that I will obey the orders...

MILITARY MEMBERS:
I'll obey the orders.

DONALD TRUMP:
... of the President of the United States.

MILITARY MEMBERS:
... of the President of the United States.

LINDSAY:
Since January, President Trump has moved aggressively to put his stamp on the U.S. military. He has far at least fifteen high-ranking military officers, including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Chief of Naval Operations, and the Commandant of the Coast Guard. No other administration has moved so quickly to remove so many senior officers with so little clarity about the reason for the changes.

PETE HEGSETH:
Every day, we have to be prepared for war, not for defense. We're training warriors, not defenders. We fight wars to win, not to defend.

LINDSAY:
Two weeks ago, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth convened an unprecedented, in-person meeting of senior military leaders from around the globe in Quantico, Virginia to promote a new warrior ethos. President Trump used the meeting to raise the prospect of using the U.S. military to fight a war from within.

DONALD TRUMP:
San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles. They're very unsafe places and we're going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That's a war too. It's a war from within.

LINDSAY:
These decisions have sparked debate over whether the tradition of an apolitical professional military is under attack.
From the Council on Foreign Relations, welcome to the President's Inbox. I'm Jim Lindsay. Today, I'm joined by Kori Schake, senior fellow and Director of Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Kori, thank you for joining me and congratulations on your latest book, The State and the Soldier: A History of Civil-Military Relations in the United States, which will be published later this month.

SCHAKE:
Thank you, my friend.

LINDSAY:
It is good to see you, Kori. I want to get into current events. But if I may, let's start with some history. You know probably better than most that the framers worried that a standing military would be a threat to democracy. Let me quote Sam Adams, a gentleman whose name now is for a beer company, but he was a radical back in the day in Colonial Massachusetts. And he wrote, "That a standing army, however necessary it may be at some times is always dangerous to the liberties of the people."
Yet, the past 250 years suggest that that fear was misplaced. Unlike in many other countries, the United States has not seen the military seek to come to power. So, I have to ask you, Kori, why has that been the case?

SCHAKE:
So, I wish there were a simple sole source answer to this, but there isn't. It partly is the result of the founders' great fear. I mean, these are students of the Enlightenment who genuinely worried about Cromwell's army rising in the New Republic. It partly has to do with the distribution of power in the American political system. The fact that president doesn't have sole civilian authority over the military, Congress has in many ways the supreme authority over the American military, especially in peacetime.
Partly, the nature of the expanding frontier and fighting wars against Native American tribes almost unceasingly across the first 150 years of the Republic where militia were more important than a standing army, partly because we are cheap and we didn't want to pay for a military. It's multivariate, I guess I would say, Jim.

LINDSAY:
Okay. I want to talk about people and I want to talk about my favorite American president, George Washington, because I would argue, and I think this is the point you make in the state, in the soldier, that George Washington was critical in creating this notion of a military that saw itself as subordinate to civilian control. And that was in great part of function of the fact of the uniqueness of George Washington and the way he viewed the proper role between the military and a democratic government.

SCHAKE:
I think that's absolutely right. You would have a very different American military, a very different relationship between that military and the political leadership and a very different relationship between that military and the American public. If you don't have George Washington, and let me give you two specific reasons. One is that Washington sets the example that it is the civilian leadership that gets to decide the strategy, not the military. The determination about the resourcing and the major objectives lies in civilian hands.
George Washington, he wasn't a very good general to be honest. He kept writing military plans that would have taken a much better army than he had to carry out successfully. But what George Washington was, was a brilliant leader and he surrounded himself with all these young sparklers like Alexander Hamilton and the Marquis de Lafayette and Daniel Morgan and Nathaniel Green and practiced what we in modernity call mission command like, "You know what I'm trying to do? Go find a way to do it."
And before he came to that realization, he nearly lost his army on three separate occasions because he was trying to fight a British-style decisive battle. And the young sparklers eventually persuade him, as long as you have an army in the field, you have a revolution. Washington considered that kind of fighting a lesser form of cowardice, but he adopts it because Congress isn't going to give him the resources to fight the way he wants to. And so, it's the foundational example that the civilians, by determining the objectives and the resources get to set strategy in America.

LINDSAY:
It's also remarkable to me, Kori, when you look back at Washington and you look at his correspondence to the Continental Congress that even while he was under-resourced, as you point out, he was always making requests of his civilian superiors. He wasn't making demands. And I'm hard-pressed, particularly at that era of world history, to think of any other military leader who wouldn't have made demands or perhaps seized power to accomplish what they were trying to do on the battlefield.

SCHAKE:
I think that's exactly right and a really important contribution that Washington makes. And I think he's in that frame of mind because he's a politician before he's a general, right? Seven years in the Virginia House of Burgesses. He's listening to Patrick Henry fulminate against soldiery. And so, he understands that the political pressures that the founders are under and that it's pointless to make demands. He entreats. He pleads, instead.

LINDSAY:
So, as we look at American military history, we look at this issue of civilian control of the military, civil-military relations, and the rest. I don't want to paint the picture just somehow everything was rosy after Washington. We can find throughout the course of American history, American military officers, particularly generals who acted in untoward fashion. But I want to ask about another president who's one of my favorites. He's a bearded president. Since I have a beard, I've kind of partial to bearded presidents, and that's Ulysses S. Grant, who not only won the Civil War for the United States but became a president. But when he was leader of the U.S. armies, he faced a particularly daunting political question and challenge. Tell me about it.

SCHAKE:
Yeah, I think no American military officer has ever been thrust into the political crisis that Grant was and have to adjudicate between the two constitutionally authorized civilian sources of control over the American military. It comes during the constitutional crisis of 1866 to 1868.
So, after Lincoln's assassination, the Congress was passing the 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments passing the three reconciliation bills. Johnson vetoes all of them. Congress overrides the legislative veto, the executive veto of the legislation, and he is trying to diminish the influence of the advocates of Lincoln's policy of reconstruction. Primarily, that is Secretary of War Stanton and General Grant. He tries to send Grant to Mexico as part of a negotiating team. Grant rightly understands that this is to get him out of the policymaking process, refuses to go.
The president tries to elevate General Sherman to be Grant's successor. Sherman refuses saying, "Grant hasn't vacated the post." Grant is at this point the most popular person in America because of the Civil War. It comes to ahead and a cabinet meeting in 1866 when President Johnson accuses Grant of insubordination. Grant's rebuttal is that, "You have no right to give me non-military orders and sending me to Mexico for a negotiating team is a non-military order."
Johnson appeals to the Attorney General who sides with Grant, that the president has no right to issue non-military orders. And that collapses the remains of a relationship between Johnson and Grant. And then, the most fraught moment comes in late 1867, 1868 when... Let's see. So, Congress had impeached President Johnson. Johnson was threatening to disband Congress. Congress is threatening to have the president arrested.
Congress passes a law that the president cannot fire Grant or Stanton. Johnson fires Stanton anyway, and appoints Grant simultaneously the civilian Secretary of War and the Commanding General. Congress threatens Grant with five years in prison and a $10,000 fine if he doesn't refuse the appointment to the civilian role. And so, Grant has to make a judgment about which constitutionally authorized source of civilian control is supreme over the military. And he makes I think, a very important judgment that in peacetime, Congress's authority is supreme. And I keep thinking about that as we think about our modern challenges.

LINDSAY:
We're going to get to modern challenges in a second, but I want to do one more historical example, and that is General Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War because the instances of outright insubordination during wartime are few and far between in American history. This is clearly the most significant. So, maybe you should help us understand that moment back in the early 1950s.

SCHAKE:
So, if Grant's civil military challenges are the hardest ones to adjudicate, MacArthur's infractions are the easiest. And by the late 1870s, mostly there have stopped being charismatic upstart generals that nobody requires to play by the rules viewing themselves as more worthy political leaders than those we elect. MacArthur's really a man out of time. I mean, his behavior is fifty years, sixty, seventy years out of sync with the behavior of everyone else in the military.
And it should have been clear early on that the signs of charismatic military leaders behaving badly. MacArthur's got all of them. He leads the assault on the peaceful Bonus March in 1932, I think, bringing cannons and cavalry with drawn swords to bear on civilian men and women protesting for the promised pensions of World War I veterans.
And when the president, President Hoover tries to persuade him to call this off, MacArthur says, "I don't have time for anyone interfering in what I'm doing." It's outrageous. He should have been relieved then. When candidate Franklin Roosevelt heard about MacArthur's behavior during the Bonus March, he said, "This is just elected me, president."
So, MacArthur retires after that. He goes to the Philippines. He's a civilian envoy there. He's appointed a commander in the Philippines when World War II begins. At no point after 1932, does he return to the United States to consult with his superiors, military or civilian, right? So, there are so many ways in which you could see this coming. What actually happens during the Korean War is that MacArthur wants to push across the Yalu River.
The fundamental political guidance he has given is do nothing that will draw China into the war. MacArthur pushes straight through that because he had the genius of the Incheon landings which were successful and not just the strategy, the fighting spirit of the army and the marines who make the landing. So, MacArthur starts writing to John Foster Dulles and other prominent Republicans criticizing the president's strategy and encouraging political pressure against the president.
He starts giving press conferences. The president with the support of the Joint Chiefs of Staff order MacArthur to give no public statements that aren't cleared by the State Department and not to start bombing into the North. And he does both of those things, anyway. Truman, I think handles it interestingly because MacArthur is much more popular than Truman is at this point in time.
So, Truman releases all of these supporting documents for MacArthur's relief. He has the unified support of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and of newly confirmed Secretary of Defense, George Marshall. So, MacArthur was clearly way over the line, and Truman was right to relieve him. But it mattered that he had Marshall in his corner. And actually, Marshall's kind of to blame because he's the guy who should have been bringing MacArthur to heel, but he left it to the president to do and he had the Joint Chiefs behind him. MacArthur, the trigger moment is when MacArthur sends a letter to the Republican minority leader criticizing the president's strategy and arguing that Congress should overturn it.

LINDSAY:
Right. And that goes against sort of the fundamental principle of civil military...

SCHAKE:
George Washington's example...

LINDSAY:
Right.

SCHAKE:
... politicians get to set the strategy.

LINDSAY:
Yeah, civilians have the right to be wrong, I believe is sort of a colloquial way of putting it. But I will note that MacArthur had a lot of support in Congress because they bring him back. He gives an address to a joint session to Congress, delivers what would be one of the greatest speeches in American history just as a piece of political rhetoric. We remember, he said, "In war, there is no substitute for victory."
And, of course, the famous line he ends on, "Old soldiers never died, they just fade away," which fortunately MacArthur actually did. But I think it's striking that William Manchester, when he wrote a biography, a terrific biography of MacArthur, he titled it American Caesar, which I think was designed to signal the very threat that MacArthur posed. But let's jump to sort of current events because I think there's been a lot of discussion over the last nine months about the state of civil military relations and the question of, to what extent what the Trump administration is doing is both new and consequential. So, help me understand against the backdrop of what we think the rules should be where we are right now.

SCHAKE:
So, there are two fundamental tests of whether civil-military relations in the United States are healthy. And the first is, can the president fire anybody he wants to? And we've seen that, what, fourteen times, fifteen times already?

LINDSAY:
I'd say the answer in that question is, yes.

SCHAKE:
Yeah, I don't count the Coast Guard chief since that's external to DoD, but fourteen or fifteen.

LINDSAY:
Except when called up in the cause of a war. So, I'll note that to my Coasty friends.

SCHAKE:
So, the first is, can the president fire anyone? And second is, will the military carry out policies they don't agree with? And I think the American military passes that test with flying colors. And so, I don't actually think civil-military relations, I don't think the American military is restive in a way that would result in coup or capture. I think actually the people behaving badly are the civilians and the military is doing exactly what they should.

LINDSAY:
Why do you think the civilians are acting badly?

SCHAKE:
I think Senator Tuberville holding up how many hundreds of military promotions in order to pressure the Biden White House to change policy is terrible. I think Senator Tuberville holding up appointments of military leaders who carried out legal orders in the prior administration like vaccinating troops, those people are being singled out for retribution by the Congress, not just by the White House.
And, of course, the president's litany of bad behavior, pardoning soldiers who had been convicted at courts-martial including of war crimes, appointing to senior civilian positions, people who had been drummed out of military service for insubordination and other violations of good order and discipline, giving political speeches in front of military audiences.

LINDSAY:
Can I just hold you on that one? Can you just sort of lay out for people why from the vantage point of the U.S. professional military that is significant? I say that because there was a lot of commentary from the president himself when he spoke at the meeting at Quantico, and all of the generals and admirals sat there stone-faced not applauding. Whereas, when he went both to, I call it a rally with U.S. Army soldiers at Fort Bragg, but also then down, I think to Norfolk to talk to the Navy. There were cheering crowds there. Help me understand why this is seen by a lot of people as being a bad sign.

SCHAKE:
Yeah. It's seen by a lot of people, including me as a very bad sign. And the reason is because the American public begins to think of our military, the way they think about the Supreme Court, which is, if they agree with your political position, then they are patriots. If they disagree with your politics, they are practicing partisan politics. And what you want, what you need for a military that is as influential as ours, as powerful in the policymaking process, what you want is your military to be politically inert.
And that's what we saw from the leadership in Quantico, right? They had a duty to be present because the secretary ordered them and they had a duty not to participate in partisan politics, and they did both of those things. The example I think is the way the Joint Chiefs of Staff behave at the State of the Union address. They show up to support the office and they sit there in stony silence because they're not political actors.

LINDSAY:
They're not jumping up and clapping.

SCHAKE:
Right. And what you saw, I think both at Fort Bragg and at Norfolk was junior and enlisted military behaving with less discipline than the senior military has.

LINDSAY:
Do you think those junior officers and enlisted people were told that they shouldn't behave like that?

SCHAKE:
Probably, but there are a thousand of you there. What are you going to do, start busting soldiers for clapping for the commander in chief?

LINDSAY:
It's probably not a great look, but if you are concerned about not being seen as being a participant in politics while we are in the uniform, that would seem to be something that you should worry about.

SCHAKE:
Yeah, it is something you should worry about, but I don't doubt that the professional instincts of the military are to do that. But remember, if Pete Hegseth hears about that happening, he's likely to relieve that commander. And so, the incentive structure is towards passive compliance with orders and hoping that this will pass, I think is where most folks in the military, certainly the military leadership, are.

LINDSAY:
I think it's important probably to note this, maybe I should have done so earlier, that when we talk about the U.S. military as being apolitical, we're talking about military people while wearing the uniform, being engaged in or supporting partisan political activities. It doesn't mean that uniform members of the military can't after the military run for political office. We have a number of examples of that happening, most notably our first president and obviously President Jackson, President Grant and...

SCHAKE:
There are also presidents who run for office while on active duty. I mean, Grant didn't resign as military commission until the morning he was sworn in as President. Zachary Taylor, Winfield Scott, a whole bunch of them. But in the modern era in the 20th century, that becomes a norm. That Washington's example of not running for political office until you are once again a citizen and not a soldier.

LINDSAY:
Kori, I want to get back to the basic idea of civil-military relations because most of the conversations I have been used to having over the years was always about the fear of the general on the white horse who comes in and presents a threat to civilian governance. But what I detect in many of the recent conversations prompted by the way President Trump has gone to put his mark on the U.S. military is that the concern is really the other way now, that decisions being made by political leaders are going to fundamentally undermine our change the professionalism of the U.S. military. That we could end up with, let's call it a political military in which people seeking to rise up the ranks are chosen not on the basis of their merits, but on the basis of whether they're willing to follow the political cues of their leader or that in essence they'll game the system by trying to find ways to suck up, if I can use that phrase, to political leadership. Is it a real concern?

SCHAKE:
Absolutely. It's the paramount concern right now. The amount of pressure that this civilian leadership is putting on the military. The only thing that is preventing us having Latin American style militaries is the professionalism of the American military itself. What you saw on display routinely by General Caine and the Service Chiefs, what you saw at Quantico in the leadership, that's the discipline and professionalism. But it's under enormous pressure and not just from President Trump. I mean, President Obama asked Admiral Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whether generals on a promotion list were our generals. I mean, President Biden gave a speech about the collapse of American democracy with uniformed marines standing behind him, pointedly standing behind him.
So, everybody should knock this off because you are not going to like the military we have if their professionalism crumbles and they begin to be partisan political actors in America.

LINDSAY:
What do you make of the argument, Kori, that what President Trump and by indirection Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth are engaged in is an attempt to ready set, or level set the U.S. military that the U.S. military went down the DEI road and it's now time for necessary corrective to get back to the borrow of the Secretary of Defense's favorite phrase, "a warrior ethos."

SCHAKE:
So, I think there's a modicum of truth to that, right? But as with most things in the Trump administration, they take an argument that's 5% true and make it the totality and the identity politics that Pete Hegseth is forcing into the military with his, "Do push-ups, don't be fat."

LINDSAY:
"Don't wear a beard." I was horrified by that, I think of General Grant, but...

SCHAKE:
Well, General Grant lived before the chemical and nuclear age. And so, he didn't have to think about a gas mask in quite the same way. So, again, there's a teeny element of truth in what they're talking about, but they have turned it into a culture war. And I really like and admire Georgetown professor, Heidi Urben. And she said it best, which is, "The longest running war the American military does not want to fight is the American culture war."
And so, if there was pressure in the Biden administration for more progressive policies in the military, and there are some folks in service and some folks of prior service who really resented that. There is going to be resentment of what Secretary Hegseth is doing too because he's basically saying, "Unless you fit what I think it should look like, I don't care whether you're a brilliant computer scientist or a logistician or a leader. I only care that you look like what I think that should look like."

LINDSAY:
But that's actually a difficult question because I would go back and think about President Harry Truman's orders to desegregate the military, and that would clearly was the civilians telling the military that they had to rethink how they do it. I think history looks back in that and acknowledges what Harry Truman did was right, he was brave and that the services were wrong at least three of them, it really dragged their heels in enacting the orders. So, how do we know when that intervention to tell the military, "You've got to rethink how you approach things is wise," is right, is justified as opposed to being some partisan political whim?

SCHAKE:
Yeah, it's a really interesting question and one difficult to adjudicate, to take the desegregation executive order. Truman issued it because he couldn't get Congress to pass legislation doing it, and he also did it because he was going into the Democratic nominating convention and he really, really wanted the support of Black labor unions.
And so, there was a political motive in addition to the noble motives. Also, on the other side of it, I mean, Omar Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff opposed it on the not unreasonable ground that, "You are forcing the military to do something American society is unwilling to do." And you're completely right that the Air Force was the only service that embraced desegregation. The Army, the Marine Corps, and the Navy opposed it until the commanders fighting in Korea saw the performance of black soldiers and Marines. It was upward pressure to change the attitudes. Upward pressure from within the military that we need the manpower and these guys are good soldiers and Marines. That changes the attitude of the leadership.

LINDSAY:
Kori, I want to ask you another question about where things may be going, and there's been a lot of talk about the Posse Comitatus Act, which I think is 1878, which bars the U.S. military from doing law enforcement activities, but there's also something called the Insurrection Act, and there has been speculation or talk that the president might invoke it. And, of course, the president at Quantico talked about potentially using the National Guard to go into cities and treating them as training grounds. What do you think the invocation of the Insurrection Act in a situation which it is not widely agreed upon, that there is an insurrection would do to the military?

SCHAKE:
I think it would be a category of error called lawful but awful because as you suggest, Jim, the 1807 Insurrection Act gives the president very wide authority to declare that an insurrection, rebellion, or invasion is occurring. And thereby, to use the American military in domestic circumstances. I think of both the Insurrection Act and Posse Comitatus as limiting legislation because the Insurrection Act says, "Only in these three instances can the American military be used domestically.
And before the Insurrection Act, there was a precursor when George Washington had to put down the Whiskey Rebellion in, what was it, 1793, I think. He had to get a Supreme Court justice to agree that an insurrection was occurring, and with the 1807 legislation, that and other restraints were removed. So, if the president's willing to engage the political fight about whether an insurrection is occurring, he has very wide latitude for domestic use of the military.
The only two other instances in which a president can legally use the American military for domestic law enforcement are the exceptions to the Posse Comitatus Act. One is if a governor asks for that assistance or if the president federalizes the National Guard for the protection of Americans constitutional rights.

LINDSAY:
Kori, I want to close on a question, not about active-duty military, whether officers or enlisted personnel, but people who are retired. One of the things I have noticed over the last decade or two with the proliferation of cable news channels of differing political orientations is that you see a lot of formers on TV assessing the work of their successors, assessing the decisions of presidents, often quite critical of what they're doing. And again, this also taking place among what seems to, at least to me, to be a broader trend toward formers going out and endorsing political candidates. Maybe I'm imagining this. How do you assess that? And what are the long-term consequences when all of a sudden people can think, "Hey, the U.S. Army or the U.S. Navy or the U.S. Air Force is for the other party, not my party?"

SCHAKE:
Yeah. So, Peter Feaver, his research is definitive on this, which is that retired military folks making prominent political statements actually doesn't affect the political argument. What it does is diminish support for the military as an institution. The other word for veterans is citizens. And the restrictions we put on military, engaged in political activities that's to prevent the people with guns from becoming a threat to civilian leadership. Once they are veterans, they're just American citizens and so they can do as they please. But when they do it, they're not changing anybody's attitudes. What they are doing is diminishing public support for the military.

LINDSAY:
On that note, I'll close up this episode of the President's Inbox. My guest has been Kori Schake, senior fellow and Director of Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. She is the author of the new book, The State and the Soldier: A History of Civil-Military Relations in the United States. Kori, thank you for joining me.

SCHAKE:
It was a great pleasure.

LINDSAY:
Today's episode was produced by Justin Schuster with recording engineer, Jorge Flores and Director of Podcasting, Gabrielle Sierra. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.