"The prospective return of Donald Trump to office as president and commander in chief may — and in fact should — prompt a fundamental rethinking of civil-military relations in this country. Rather than a call to action, I offer here an appeal for preventive reflection by the military establishment on a matter of utmost domestic and international, strategic and ethical consequence.
Think of civil-military relations as a tacit but binding social contract of mutual rights, obligations and expectations among the three parties to this ideally harmonious but inevitably sometimes discordant relationship: the uniformed military, the military’s civilian overseers in Congress and the executive branch, and the general public. In the ideal version of this tripartite relationship, all parties have recognized institutional roles they are expected to fulfill for the common good. But if and when any of the parties fails to perform their roles correctly, the contract is broken and democracy is jeopardized, at least in some measure.
When we consider Trump’s past dealings with the military; his disdain for particular generals (and others of lesser rank, dead and alive), even as he embraces unprofessional malefactors in uniform accused of war crimes and other serious misconduct; his selection of bottom-feeding loyalists to run the Pentagon in the waning days of his administration; his self-indulgent obsession with personal loyalty at the expense of all else; and his openly stated plans for autocratic rule, score-settling and the undermining of democratic institutions if he returns to office, we must conclude that traditional precepts of civil-military relations seem demonstrably outmoded and ill-equipped to counter any such enemy from within."(our emphasis)
Foster's article is an excellent read and should be at the forefront of the military's thinking as the possibility of a mentally unstable, vengeful, anti-democratic and lawless Malignant Loser winding up back in the Oval Office is real. He tried to use the military to maintain himself in power, and the military refused. If there's a next time, he'll try again.
(photo: The Malignant Loser meeting at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., Jan. 18, 2018. DoD photo by U.S. Army Sgt. Amber I. Smith)
