Bolding mine
The U.S. armed services have long sought to preserve the tradition of a nonpartisan military.
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News analysis
‘Dangerous Cities,’ the Military, Trump and the Founding Fathers
The U.S. armed services have long sought to preserve the tradition of a nonpartisan military.
In the middle of Tuesday’s rambling speech at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, President Trump told hundreds of the country’s military commanders his latest thinking on where they should next set their sights.
Not Poland, or Romania, or Estonia or Denmark, all NATO allies where Russian drones have in the past month violated airspace in a challenge to the alliance’s borders.
The president chose San Francisco. Chicago. New York. Los Angeles.
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“It’s a war from within,” he said.
In that moment, the president again pitted himself against the wishes of the country’s founding fathers, historians and former military leaders say.
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‘A Fraught Moment’
Mr. Trump has tried this before.
During Mr. Trump’s first term, Defense Secretaries Jim Mattis and Mark T. Esper and the chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley and Gen. Joseph Dunford, tried to prevent the president from using the military domestically to further his political agenda.
When Mr. Trump demanded a deployment of 10,000 to 15,000 military troops to fend off what he called a migrant “invasion” at the southwest border, Mr. Mattis responded by sending 6,000 National Guardsmen, and told them to make sure to stick to support roles and to steer clear of migrants.
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When Mr. Trump wanted to send the 82nd Airborne onto the country’s streets during social justice protests, Mr. Esper called a news conference to announce his opposition, for which he was eventually fired.
Those men are now gone, and the men Mr. Trump has installed in their place in his second term have either amplified his wishes or bowed to them.
Gone too is the congressional opposition that blocked Mr. Trump during his first term. Republicans control both the House and the Senate, and have acquiesced to all of Mr. Trump’s directives and appointments that relate to the American military.
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Deploying troops inside the country as an arm of law enforcement is not what the founding fathers wanted, military historians say. They feared that the government could use a standing army to suppress dissent and establish tyranny.
Over 250 years, American political and military leaders built what is widely viewed as the world’s most competent fighting force. Its 1.3 million active-duty troops and 765,000 reserve and National Guard troops have answered to civilian leaders, whether Democrat of Republican, saluting whomever the American people elected as president.
But now the military, which has long prized its nonpartisan role in society, has a commander in chief who is not only breaking that tradition, but also targeting domestic, instead of foreign, threats.
“If I was the leader of the Polish military, and we’re getting Russian incursions into NATO territory, and I saw 800 American generals and admirals sitting in an auditorium listening to that speech, well, that would grate,” said Maj. Gen. Paul D. Eaton, an Iraq war veteran who is retired. “Is the American military serious?”
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Cleareyed Realists
The framers of the American Constitution were students of history, heavily shaped by the English Civil War, in which King Charles I asserted the divine right of kings, tried to rule without Parliament, and used his army against his own people.
The framers also were heavily influenced by the British military’s occupation of the colonies.
They were cleareyed about what they considered the biggest potential danger: that a standing army could be turned against the people it was supposed to protect.
But they were also realists and acknowledged the need for a military to defend the country.
“The continual necessity for his services enhances the importance of the soldier, and proportionably degrades the condition of the citizen,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers. “The military state becomes elevated above the civil.”
