Former military service members, particularly retired officers, have become more active and visible in politics over the past thirty years. It is not a practice without precedent, after all George Washington, the nation’s first president was also its first army commander, and to this day enshrined as its highest ranking military officer. Nonetheless, it has been a cherished piece of American military tradition that its professional military should be detached from politics.
That tradition has been steadily eroding over the past three decades. The recent identity of numerous retired military officers being among those who attacked the nation’s Capitol on January 6, 2021, was very disturbing. Equally disturbing was the direct involvement of several retired senior officers in efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election — in words and regrettably in deeds. Is this something the nation should be worried about? Overall, I believe the answer is no, it should not be. But in a few specific cases there is cause for alarm, and the military itself should address those cases where the concern is real.
Many years ago, I attended an Army ROTC event held at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia. The event was to welcome the nation’s top ROTC graduates into the ranks of the Army just before their actual commissioning as officers. The VMI campus is also the home of the Marshall Foundation, an institution established to store the papers and sustain the legacy of a man many believe to be the nation’s greatest soldier / citizen of the Twentieth Century, if not all time: General of the Army George C. Marshall.
Attending this event was former Army historian Forrest C. Pogue, who had written a massive four volume biography of Marshall. With both of us being natives of southwestern Kentucky, and me in the final years of my own military career, Pogue and I struck up an easy conversation.
In working on Marshall’s biography, Pogue had interviewed the General many times and he shared a few of what he believed to be the more interesting exchanges. The one I found most fascinating had nothing to do with Marshall’s time as Army Chief of Staff in World War II, or his time as President Harry Truman’s Secretary of State and later Defense Secretary. It was a comment Marshall made about the 1956 presidential election.
Pogue conducted several interviews with Marshall at his Leesburg, Virginia home in late 1956, within a couple of weeks of the November 6th presidential election between President Dwight D. Eisenhower and former Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson. Since Eisenhower had been picked by Marshall from relative obscurity within the Army, and because of Marshall’s advocacy had moved from a newly minted Brigadier General to Five-Stars between September 1941 and December 1944, Pogue was relatively certain who Marshall would be supporting. While leaving the General’s home after one interview he had somewhat mischievously asked Marshall if he knew for whom he would vote — confident he knew the answer. What surprised him was the one he received.
“I won’t be voting in the election,” Marshall firmly announced with his characteristic seriousness. He then continued, “I have never voted in an election. I believe the military should be completely apolitical, and firmly believe the Chief of Staff should not be involved in politics even by voting.”
The reply surprised Pogue, and surprised me even more for two reasons. First, in October 1956 Marshall had been retired from the military and his Army Chief of Staff position for more than a decade. He had served in several senior civilian positions, including Secretary of State for which he had received a Nobel Peace Prize. Yet, ten years into retirement from the military, Marshall still saw himself as a military man and in some ways still the Chief of Staff.
But second, we had at that moment just finished the 1992 presidential election, one in which a group of recently retired military officers, led by a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral William J. Crowe, had surprisingly endorsed Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton over incumbent President George H. W. Bush, who as Commander-in-Chief had directed the most successful military operation since World War II, Operation Desert Storm. Crowe’s announcement was all the more surprising as he had been the JCS Chairman when Bush first assumed office. After his election, Clinton would name Crowe to the prestigious post of Ambassador to the United Kingdom in London.
I had worked on Crowe’s staff a few years earlier and held him in very high esteem, but was puzzled by his endorsement of Clinton. A couple of years after my own retirement from the Army, I had the good fortune to develop a personal relationship with the Admiral and once related to him the story Pogue had offered, contrasting Marshall’s view with Crowe’s action.
“It’s a quaint perspective,” Crowe replied. “Marshall lived in an era where there was a broader understanding of the military and the needs of national security. That’s becoming rather rare since we went to the all-volunteer armed force. Somebody’s got to teach and inform the new political leaders.”
Did Crowe have a point? So it seems. Clinton and the four presidents who followed him certainly had no military experience, with the exception of George W. Bush’s brief, incomplete, and somewhat controversial tour in the Texas Air National Guard. But President Bush 41 was a genuine World War II hero, shot down in the Pacific while Crowe was a Midshipman at the Naval Academy. Bush thought highly of Crowe and even offered him a third tour as the JCS Chairman. Bush even attended and officiated at Crowe’s Annapolis retirement ceremony. So why would Crowe have turned on him?
I suspect the Admiral, a most decent man, intensely disliked the nasty tone of the 1988 Bush campaign against Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, a campaign run by Bush’s bare-knuckles political brawler Lee Atwater. Atwater died of brain cancer in 1991, but before passing apologized to Dukakis for some of the more vicious campaign ads he had run. Some reported that Crowe was upset seeing similar attacks thrown at Governor Clinton, especially about his avoidance of the draft while a Rhodes Scholar. Being something of an intellectual himself, and having charted a Navy career that was by some measures rather contrarian, Crowe likely held some sympathy for Clinton and was offended yet again.
But there has been a definite change. Since 1992 presidential campaigns have gone out of their way to solicit military endorsements. They release competing lists of retired Generals and Admirals who support their candidate. Retired General Norman Schwartzkopf was a featured speaker at the 2000 Republican Convention, as was retired JCS Chairman John Shalikasvili at the 2004 Democratic Convention. Over a dozen retired officers appeared on stage in 2008 to endorse Senator Barack Obama.
But if this had slowly become the new norm in presidential politics, 2016 saw a significant escalation. Retired Marine General John Allen gave a forceful speech at the Democratic Convention endorsing Hillary Clinton, a speech somewhat more edged than those from the past. However, Allen’s speech was exactly as advertised: an endorsement of Clinton. Trump’s name was never mentioned by Allen, and any allusions to him were strictly metaphorical or implicit. General John Shalikashvili’s speech before the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston was also restricted to endorsing Senator John Kerry, with references to Kerry’s commendable service in Vietnam, service that was being grossly misrepresented in the Bush campaign’s “Swift Boat” attacks.
But the 2016 Republican Convention speech endorsing Donald Trump given by retired Army Lieutenant General Michael Flynn was a significant departure from Schwarzkopf, Allen and Shalihashvili. Not only was Flynn’s speech markedly more political, but he broke with the usual practice of restricting comments to extolling the virtues of his preferred candidate — Donald Trump, and launched into a very harsh personal characterization of Clinton.
Flynn called Clinton by the name Trump had concocted for her — “Crooked Hillary,” he said she had put the nation at risk, called on her to leave the race, and led the crowd in calls to “lock her up.” This was a significant escalation of military involvement in presidential politics, and it was only the beginning.
The rest of the story is well known. After Trump’s election Flynn established a backchannel to the Kremlin through the Russian Ambassador, Sergei Kislyak. When asked about it by the FBI, that was aware of Flynn’s efforts, he lied about it. After three weeks as Trump’s National Security Advisor, Flynn was fired and later pled guilty to felony charges before being pardoned by Trump three years later, and then re-emerging as an informal advisor after the 2020 election.
Other retired military officers joined the Trump administration, most notably retired Marine General John Kelly who served first as Secretary of Homeland Security then as White House Chief of Staff. But Kelly ultimately left as Trump’s policies became more erratic and bumped against — perhaps crossing — what was legally permissible. Army Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster, who succeeded Flynn as National Security Advisor, had a similar experience.
The difficult role of Trump military advisors came to a head in June 2020 when Trump cleared protestors from Lafayette Square across from the White House so that he could stage a strange photo op in front of St. John’s Church.
Trump crossed the square accompanied by his Defense Secretary, Mark Esper, and his JCS Chairman, General Mark Milley — the latter dressed in a tactical camouflage uniform. Milley quickly sensed he was being used as a prop and left the area. A few days later he released a video in his service uniform apologizing for having been in Lafayette Square. Later, after the November election, when Trump was declaring that the results were fraudulent, and suggesting (or being advised) that he might bring in the military to supervise re-doing the election, Milley was even more forceful, releasing a statement that the military had no role in the electoral process.
After the US Capitol was stormed by enraged Trump supporters on January 6, 2021, Milley went a step further by releasing, on his own authority and without clearance from Trump-installed Pentagon civilians, a letter signed by him and the other members of the Joint Chiefs stating that the election was certified, that former Vice President Joe Biden had won, and that on January 20th Biden would be the new Commander-in-Chief.
And who was reportedly telling Trump that he could declare martial law, and redo the election using federal troops to monitor polling locations and count the votes? Retired Lieutenant Generals Michael Flynn and Tom McInerney. In even making such a suggestion to a desperate Trump, Flynn and McInerney were demonstrating an astonishing lack of rationality coupled with a disturbing degree of constitutional and legal illiteracy.
But what we also see in these actions of Milley and Flynn is a somewhat exaggerated expression of the differing positions established long ago. If Milley was demonstrating a more vocal and visible reflection of the views of General Marshall, Flynn and his misguided fellow travelers were practicing a dangerous distortion of the views of Admiral Crowe.
There can be no doubt that both Marshall and Crowe would be equally horrified. Marshall would be enormously bothered by the very fact that General Milley felt the need to articulate such a position, personally at first and later in writing with other JCS members; and Admiral Crowe (with his Princeton Ph.D. in government and international relations) would have been disgusted that the advice being offered by former military officers was not on strategic or operational issues but on political ones — and worse, that this advice was not only inappropriate but totally wrong! Technically, there is no presidential power to declare martial law, and under existing legislation active duty military troops cannot be anywhere near polling stations.
So, where does that leave us? Back in 2016, on the eve of the election, I was at West Point and lectured a group of cadets on these two differing perspectives regarding the intersection of military advice and political preference. I did not suggest that one perspective or the other was correct — indeed both have merit. As Admiral Crowe had predicted, neither of the two candidates vying for the presidency in 2016 had ever served in the military, nor had the two competing candidates in 2020. I merely told the cadets to think about it, as there would come a time in the future where some of them, having achieved senior rank, might have to grapple with the issue.
I think that was a correct way to leave it; however, I had no idea that four years later the issue would become so immediate, and the consequences of how to address it so serious. The issue had moved from one of individual preference to one of domestic tranquility.
The military does have one caution by which it reminds service members that any participation by active-duty personnel or veterans needs to be measured. As elections approach, the Defense Department’s legal authorities remind military members of the restrictions embedded in the Hatch Act, a piece of legislation that limits political participation by the military and government civilians. Although numerous Trump officials have blatantly disregarded the Hatch Act, the military still stakes it seriously.
But for those who do not, whether active duty or retired, there is the possibility of court martial. In the cases of Generals Flynn and McInerney, and that of retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Larry Brock, who was seen walking the Senate floor on January 6th wearing body armor and carrying zip ties, courts martial would send a clear statement of where the military stands.
Although not widely known, retired military personnel maintaining a “voluntary” relationship with the Defense Department remain subject to the congressionally crafted Uniformed Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), which describes the military judicial code and prescribes how it is administered. A voluntary relationship has been defined for officers as not resigning a commission and accepting retirement pay. Flynn, McInenery, and Brock have (so far as is known) maintained such a relationship.
In calling for martial law, the dismissal of the 2020 election, and conducting a new election supervised by the military, Flynn and McInerney were advocating sedition. By attacking the US Capitol, unlawfully entering it, and strolling around the Senate floor, Brock was actually practicing sedition. These actions are violations of section 894, article 94 of the UCMJ, which states that anyone advocating “the overthrow or destruction of lawful civil authority, creates, in concert with any other person, revolt, violence, or other disturbance against that authority is guilty of sedition.” Those found guilty of violating Article 94 are potentially subject to the death penalty. In other words, the UCMJ takes sedition very seriously, and for good reason.
Brock has been arrested and will seemingly be prosecuted by a U.S. Attorney in a Federal Court on lesser charges. If so, he’s lucky. But Flynn and McInerney also deserve a day in court. General Marshall and Admiral Crowe would expect no less. As General Milley has rightfully reminded President Trump, the military role in elections is quite simple — it has no role. But for those retired personnel, especially senior officers, they can exercise a supporting role like that of any other citizen. They can advise a candidate on national security policy and military matters and doing so is likely quite useful. But rabid political partisanship, especially in an era of hyper-partisanship is best avoided. Those crossing that line step on a slippery slope and they should be reminded just how slippery it can be.
