Threatening ‘The Enemy Within’ with Force: Military Ethicists Explain the Danger to Important American Traditions

second term, Trump says he wants to hire Cabinet and other government officials who will follow his orders without question, rather than people who might try to prevent his worst inclinations from being enacted.

Questions about dissent and disobedience will therefore likely fall on those at more junior levels of military service in a second Trump administration than they did in the first.

The U.S. military has long been dedicated to the principle of civilian control. To minimize the chance of the kind of military occupation they suffered during the Revolutionary War, the country’s founders wrote the Constitution requiring that the president, an elected civilian, would be the commander in chief of the military. In the wake of World War II, Congress went even further, restructuring the military and requiring that the secretary of defense be a civilian as well.

For that reason, in a time of increasing political polarization, military educational institutions are focusing even more explicitly on the oath military members take to the Constitution, rather than to a person or an office.

As the Joint Chiefs of Staff reminded the military after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, and just before the inauguration of Joe Biden as president, military personnel serve the nation’s interests, not those of a politician or a political party.

Nonpartisanship Could Become Partisan
When faced with a potential order to deploy the U.S. military within the nation’s borders, however, service members may find themselves in a situation where upholding the military’s tradition of staying out of politics could itself appear partisan.

Military members have a duty to obey orders from superior officers. But as military ethicists, we recognize that the content of an order is not the only factor that determines whether it is a moral one.

The political motivation for an order may be equally important. That’s because the military’s obligation to stay out of politics is deeply intertwined with the mutual obligation of civilian officials not to use the military for partisan reasons.

If an elected official were to attempt to use the military for obviously partisan ends, the decisions of military personnel to either follow the order or resist it would open them up to accusations of partisanship – even if their actions were attempts to protect the military’s strict partisan neutrality.

At the nation’s founding, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson worried about a military that would be loyal to a particular leader rather than to a form of government. James Madison was concerned that soldiers