Alice Friend, Daniel E. White
The past two weeks may have marked a turning point in American civil-military relations. President Donald Trump threatened to deploy active-duty troops to subdue domestic political protests; the secretary of defense suggested governors should “dominate the battlespace” of major U.S. cities, only to later walk back his remarks; and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, the country’s highest-ranking military officer, appeared alongside Trump at a photo-op near the White House after National Guard troops had helped forcibly clear the area of protesters. Milley later apologized, saying he “should not have been there.”
Although these events may seem sui generis, they are consistent with two ongoing trends. First is the increasing involvement of the military in partisan politics over the past four decades. Second is the legacy of racism in the military itself. These trends openly collided recently, raising questions about whether and how the military will be involved in domestic political contests and debates in the years to come.
By tradition and by law, the U.S. military is a nonpartisan institution. The reason for its nonpartisanship, as the Congressional Research Service explains, is so the military can be counted on to “defend all Americans regardless of their affiliation.” This professional standard is also spelled out in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and further articulated in Department of Defense regulations.
But the military’s nonpartisan ethic became harder to realize beginning in the 1980s, as the officer corps began to increasingly identify with the Republican Party. In 1988, retired Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Paul X. Kelley endorsed George H.W. Bush for president, beginning a trend of retired generals and flag officers publicly supporting presidential candidates from both parties. Since then, presidential candidates have sought endorsements from retired officers as a way to boost their own credibility, in turn chipping away at the country’s perception of a nonpartisan military.
At around the same time, public trust in the military rose to unprecedented levels, far exceeding other institutions. That further whet political candidates’ appetites for military endorsements. Today, this public trust—combined with partisan polarization and the attendant desire by the public for objective political referees—gives the military’s voice added political salience.
That political salience was magnified further after George Floyd, a black man, was killed in Minneapolis on May 25 by a white police officer who pinned him to the ground by his neck. As mass protests against racism and police brutality swept the country, a wave of retired and active-duty military leaders spoke out publicly about both racism and calls by Trump and other prominent Republicans to use the military in response to protests. Meanwhile, the military’s own legacy with racism came into focus.
A 2019 survey found that 36 percent of active-duty personnel have witnessed signs of white supremacy or racist ideologies by other members of the military.
One of the first responses by a member of the active-duty military to Floyd’s murder came from the most senior enlisted member of the U.S. Air Force, Chief Master Sgt. Kaleth O. Wright. In a Twitter thread, he wrote in searingly personal terms that, “What happens all too often in this country to Black men who are subjected to police brutality that ends in death…could happen to me.” Wright and the outgoing chief of staff of the Air Force, Gen. David L. Goldfein, have both pledged to do more to counter racist attitudes in the ranks. In subsequent statements, the Marines, Army and Navy acknowledged that they need to do the same. Gen. David Berger, the current commandant of the Marine Corps, reiterated his ban on Marines displaying the Confederate battle flag, which he first ordered earlier this year; Adm. Mike Gilday, the chief of naval operations, joined him by prohibiting the flag’s display across the Navy.
“The military is no more than a reflection of the American society that we serve—it’s no better or worse as far as racism,” retired Army Maj. Gen. Dana Pittard, one of the few black officers to reach such a senior rank, recently told Foreign Policy. One of the most troubling illustrations of this idea is that the armed services struggle with the presence of white supremacists in their own ranks. According to a 2019 survey, 36 percent of active-duty personnel have witnessed signs of white supremacy or racist ideologies by other members of the military—a 12-point increase over the last time the poll was conducted in 2018.
In the wake of the violent white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, all of the military service chiefs vocally condemned white supremacy. Nonetheless, some analysts have argued that racism is “baked in” to the military’s history, as Mike Pietrucha recently put it. Today, a campaign is mounting to rename Army bases that memorialize Civil War-era Confederate officers, and given the president’s negative response, that issue could become a political controversy in its own right.
Few studies have considered the racial components of the military’s politicization, despite several important implications. First, racial and political identities in the military have patterns of overlap. The same officer corps that began to identify with the Republican Party in the 1980s and 1990s is also overwhelmingly white, a fact underscored last week when Gen. Charles Q. Brown, Jr. became the first black man to be confirmed as a service chief in the 245-year history of the American military.
This disparity often extends into veterans’ political activities. Currently, there are 96 members of Congress who are veterans, yet only 11 of those lawmakers are non-white; of them, five are black—and all of those five are Democrats. Meanwhile, the experiences of black veterans often have lasting effects on their own political views. Many black soldiers who fought in World War II, for instance, came back to America willing to fight to claim the rights at home that they had risked their lives defending overseas. Part of their mobilization in the civil rights movement can be traced to the denial of entitled service benefits and unequal treatment under the law. Today, studies have found that black veterans continue to face greater difficulties than their white counterparts finding employment and also have lower earning potential. Although there is growing scholarship on how veteran status shapes politicians’ governing behavior and partisanship, more attention needs to focus on how racial experiences and attitudes in the force might condition veterans’ political identities and activities.
Concerns about racism in the ranks may also be having an impact on the representativeness of the military. The few black officers who have attained the rank of general or admiral often lament their own lack of black mentors as they advanced upwards. Despite the military’s best efforts to change that, the sight of federal security forces using smoke bombs, pepper balls and other chemical agents on anti-racist protesters outside the White House could give pause to young black and brown Americans considering a career in the military. This could especially affect the Army’s goal of recruiting 68,000 new soldiers for the year.
Finally, as Americans’ tendency toward partisan polarization affects the current debate over structural racism in the United States, the military may also be called upon to take sides on questions of racial equality and anti-racism. Yet while polls have found that a majority of the U.S. public supports the protesters’ goals, the National Guard has been visibly involved in dispersing them, while the commander-in-chief nearly deployed active-duty units to American cities. As a result, the military appears to be torn between loyalties. U.S. officials, both inside and outside the military, must heed the delicacy of these dynamics to help the military tackle its own struggle with racism while insulating the force against further partisan politicization.
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