Don’t Count on the Military to Save Democracy
The military is one of the few forces in society capable of countering tyranny. But not only is it the pointy end of the tyrant’s machine; it is experiencing far-right radicalization within its ranks, making it part of the problem, not the solution.
A prominent left-of-center friend posted a now-deleted thread on BlueSky about the likelihood of the military defecting if given orders to siege or attack American cities.1
He seemed to think America was experiencing revolutionary conditions—which might be right—but also that at least portions of the US military would mutiny or refuse unlawful orders if made to do something insane like fire on Americans or invade a friendly country. That internal rupture, in turn, would yield either an overthrow of the Trump regime or a civil war.
But he has no experience with the US military. Neither do most of the well-meaning people who think the military will intervene on the side of the people in the event of martial law. Americans are among the most propagandized people on earth, and nowhere is this more obvious than when it comes to the average American’s view of the military, which is cartoonishly heroic (I’m a veteran).
The United States has been at war for its entire history. It has lost most of its wars the past century. And it has undertaken new wars at a terrifyingly rapid rate as its share of global power increased the past 50 years. Despite all of that, I grew up being told in school that “America’s never lost a war,” and that our boys in uniform can do no wrong. In America, veterans are the most protected class in society.
The best short summary of all this reality-distorting veneration is simply “American exceptionalism.” That exceptionalism is a pathology that blinds Americans who know nothing of what the military really does, just as it blinds those who serve to the crimes in which they’re complicit.
Over the past six weeks or so, I’ve been in a number of conversations with friends who are either still active duty or recently retired. The picture they paint is nightmarish, of military officers who:
Mostly support illegal bombings of fishermen in the Caribbean;
Are impressed by the illegal bombings of Venezuela and the kidnapping of its president;
Think Pete Hegseth is right (!) for trying to prosecute Senator Mark Kelly for participating in a video that urged US troops to refuse unlawful orders (which is what their oath to the Constitution requires);
Are convinced that America’s illegal war on Iran is strategic AND that the US is winning; and
Have no opinion about the deployment of US forces in American cities, the plundering of the welfare state to fund a $1.5 trillion military budget, US military support for Israel, or a national security strategy that unapologetically embraces both imperialism and foreign interference in European democracies.
The only thing the past year that made the officer class bray, albeit for a mere moment, was Trump’s active threats to take Greenland by force, which would make NATO an enemy overnight. But it was more of a quiet grumbling than a determined opposition.
Even more recently, like just in the past few days, a prominent national security publisher I’ve known for a long time has received death threats from MAGA chuds and had his address and mother’s name doxxed. For what, you ask? For publishing a critique of a far-right op-ed calling for a revolution in professional military education (eg, firing all civilian faculty, focusing on “lethality,” de-wokifying the war colleges, whatever that means). The mass, moronic, violence-laced reaction of people who are part of the national security state to something as bland as “Actually, it’s good to have some qualified civilians teaching at the war colleges” is a sign of how much has changed over the past decade.
When Trump originally came to power, it was the enlisted ranks that were most red-pilled; the officer class thought he was a buffoon. They may have followed Trump’s orders, but they thought his every decision was clownish and ill-informed. But as we enter another illegal war, it’s the enlisted folks who are already disproportionately dying, as they do in every war. And it’s the officer class who increasingly believes the crap I noted above. Enlisted soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines are unlikely to overthrow anything on their own; the prospect of a military coup or resistance movement always depended on the officer corps. A revolt from below, by contrast, would look more like the GI resistance movement to Vietnam—fragging, desertions, lower morale and combat effectiveness…but nothing ruptural.
The military is too massive to be a monolith. But it also has a conformity culture unlike anything else I’ve ever experienced. What would be the red line, the “Rubicon,” for an officer class that holds the aforementioned beliefs in predatory power irrespective of the law? If you can be on the wrong side of an illegal war, or a genocide, and keep following orders and sleeping at night, then you have no red line. You would only revolt if someone withheld your pay check, and perhaps not even then.
It’s important to understand that if you’ve reached the point that you’re counting on an undemocratic institution of violence to somehow displace or disempower your democratically elected leader, you’re already lost. Anti-democratic means rarely suits democratic ends. But no, I don’t expect the military to save or defend democracy. It’ll do what it’s told, even if that’s illegal, strategically inept, and immoral—because that’s what it’s been doing.
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He argued that any “revolutionary situation” in the US would have to involve substantial military defections. That’s true given how US society is structured, but he was bullish on that happening, and that doesn’t reflect the military I know.