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The American political system today is indeed in crisis. Government function is in doubt, the administration has politicized and weaponized a previously independent justice system, judicial rulings are regularly subverted or outright ignored, and political leaders are openly using their office to enrich themselves. Regular attacks — both rhetorical and legal — on the news media, education system, political opposition leaders, civil servants, and law firms have created a chilling effect across the country, compromising the quality of American democracy in ways not seen since at least the Nixon administration. As a result, public trust in institutions is at or near all-time lows, and some Americans are beginning to question whether democracy is in fact the right form of government for the future.

The military has not been immune from this crisis. Norms once thought essential to healthy civil-military relations in the United States are being shattered at record speeds: In just the last eight months we have witnessed open efforts to politicize the military, high-profile purges of the senior officer corps, proposals to use American cities as “training grounds” for the U.S. military, severe restrictions on transparency (including undermining Congress’s role as a legitimate oversight body), and attacks on judge advocates general, the rule of law, and the laws of armed conflict.

Peter Mitchell’s October 31 essay here in War on the Rocks is the latest example of profound civil-military norm-breaking that is a symptom of a larger political crisis — and one that holds potentially dangerous consequences for the American officer corps. In the piece, Mitchell engages in a sweeping critique of the military profession and asserts that this is the direct result of a failing rights-based liberal order as enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. To that end, he performs a thought experiment: what would military officership look like if service members were to suddenly wake up in an illiberal America?

However, while Mitchell’s exercise may be an interesting thought experiment for West Point cadets, where he taught until recently, the reality is that military and political leaders in the United States will not simply wake up one day, a la Rip van Winkle, to find themselves in a world where there is suddenly a new political order. Rather, they will be active participants with choices to make about the degree to which they continue to serve civilians intent on undermining the liberal values enshrined in the Constitution. Rather than asking, “What does being a soldier look like in an illiberal state?” senior leaders should instead be asking, “To what degree does continuing to serve as an officer in the U.S. military do more harm than good to the democratic values I swore an oath to bear true faith and allegiance to?”

A Post-Liberal America is an Authoritarian One

Mitchell argues that the time has come for American officers to consider what service to the United States may look in a “post-liberal” system. He first grounds the imperative in an indictment of the current military profession, which he argues has failed to achieve victory because of a “postmodern” ethos that has privileged bureaucracy, expertise, and cultural priorities, and de-emphasized the meaning of victory. To do so, he invokes and misinterprets swaths of the civil-military relations literature, most importantly the intent of Samuel Huntington in The Soldier and the State and Risa Brooks’ thoughtful critiques of how its influence on the senior officer corps has led to less, not more, liberalism.

What’s more, the problem that Mitchell identifies and lays at the feet of a “postmodern military” where “victory is a social construct” — otherwise known as the challenge of executing military strategy to achieve lasting political ends — is neither new nor unique to a liberal political system. Strategists from Jomini to Clausewitz to Mao have identified this central challenge of warfare, and did not need a rights-based order to grapple with the difficulty and complexity of matching political ends with military ways and means.

Mitchell’s hypothetical solutions stem from the proposals of a series of thinkers over the last decade who have openly challenged the current rights-based political order in the United States, and who currently have sway with many in power. The rise and influence of these thinkers, who largely identify with recent populist movements, has coincided with one of the most deliberate attempts to undermine pluralistic democracy in America since segregationists opposed the civil rights movement. The proposals of the post-liberal intellectual movement should therefore be understood as an active political project rather than a state of being that may suddenly appear in front of the modern officer.

Mitchell attempts to reassure his readers that post-liberal America “is not a synonym for authoritarianism or a politician in Budapest,” (a reference to Hungary’s illiberal leader Victor Orban). Yet these assurances stand in stark contrast with both the preferred outcomes of the thinkers Mitchell cites as well as his own typology. Indeed, the five outcomes he describes are not, in fact, compatible with anything we would recognize as democracy and thus by definition are authoritarian in nature. A patrimonial state cannot allow serious political competition. A mercenary one cannot be held accountable by citizens. Heinleian (aka praetorian) states are effectively oligarchies. Neo-Prussian models are personalist by design. Chivalric models are a synonym for theocracy where rulers lead by claiming divine right. As Mitchell’s own thought experiment shows, the options for a post-liberal order require that leaders operate free from meaningful constraint and outside of the bounds of public accountability. They are, in both theory and practice, authoritarian regimes.

Indeed, many if not most of the most currently influential thinkers he cites openly acknowledge as much: Adrian Vermeule fantasizes about an undemocratic takeover of the liberal state. Gladden Pappin accepts that the anti-liberal project requires wielding state power regardless of societal consent. John Gray himself critiques the post-liberal movement as being not just unworkable in its conception but undemocratic and unpopular. Historically speaking, what Mitchell casually ignores is that there are effectively no instances of societies coming together and agreeing to be ruled in authoritarian fashion when a rights-based system is an option. It is only when leaders subvert those popular rights-based institutions through deceit, patronage and elite bargains, or outright coercion that liberal democracy dies.

And so whether he intends it or not, Mitchell’s demand that officers consider service in a post-liberal regime is in fact a call to explore the nature of American officership under authoritarian rule. And to be sure, if U.S. military officers were indeed to suddenly awake from a deep sleep and find themselves subject to an authoritarian government, that would present a true puzzle. But modern democratic backsliding is rarely so simple and never so clean. Rather, in the American system, officers repeatedly swear to support and defend the very liberal principles in the Constitution that Mitchell argues they ought to contemplate abandoning. That makes them not innocent bystanders in the process, but rather active participants in the process of either defending democratic ideals or enabling their demise.

Yet Mitchell deals with this critical problem too flippantly, raising the dilemma but then essentially dismissing the prospect that officers may, in fact, have to make the unthinkably difficult decision to actually defend that oath (“The military will, and ought to, follow [a new system]”). While the essay may be interpreted by some as “just asking questions,” the argument advanced in fact effectively undermines the normative values of duty and fidelity to U.S. democracy that emerged after the Civil War — and were explicitly codified in the revised oath that was implemented in its wake. As a result, the essay becomes less of an idle thought experiment and instead enables the kind of anti-democratic norm erosion that the post-liberal political project requires to succeed.

The Post-Liberal Profession is a Myth

The stakes are high not just for American democracy but the profession of arms itself. It is tempting, as Mitchell does, to view the military profession as simply an organized group of armed people with “a code of conduct, discipline, and justice.” And indeed, this is as deep as many officers get in their treatment of the profession of arms — particularly at more junior levels — because that is what largely matters for operational and tactical effectiveness. Too often, the profession of arms is conflated (even by some senior leaders) with simply engaging in professional (read: appropriate and disciplined) behavior.

Yet the majority of senior leaders understand that true professions require much more than simple rule following. When we think about the classic professions — medicine, law, and clergy — we see that they occupy a privileged place in society. Each provides a critical service to the public that, if applied inappropriately, could have catastrophic consequences for a person’s freedom, health, or spiritual well-being. As a result, members of a profession ought to be vigilant about maintaining legitimacy with the public through continued study, rigorous certification processes, and self-policing according to a higher code of ethics. To achieve this end, they obligate their members to refuse to apply their expertise in a situation they know to be unethical, and professional organizations actively sanction those who behave in unethical ways even at the request of a client, patient, or congregant.

The profession of arms holds many of the same responsibilities as the classic professions. The military is responsible for the common defense through what Huntington calls the “management of violence,” yet that violence misapplied can cause catastrophic harm to the lives of citizens and residents. As a result, professional militaries must maintain legitimacy with the public to function appropriately. There is a reason why so many of the country’s most senior military leaders have spent so much time over the last decades emphasizing the importance of public trust. But as other senior military leaders have explored, the profession of arms is especially precarious, because subordination to civilian control requires that the military obey lawful orders regardless of whether they violate professional ethics (there is now some debate about this in legal circles, but it remains the dominant understanding within the profession itself). This means that the legitimacy of the profession of arms is tied much more closely than other professions to the legitimacy of the political regime.

It is therefore far from certain, and in fact unlikely, that there can be a legitimate profession of arms without a similarly legitimate form of civilian government. Mitchell is right in part that “the [American] military has always drawn its legitimacy from its regime,” but errs in assuming that it could maintain that legitimacy in the absence of a similarly legitimate government. Certainly, each of the five regime types that Mitchell explores lack legitimacy because they are not regularly responsive to changes in public preferences and therefore cannot reliably govern by popular consent. Mitchell’s thought experiment, therefore, deals not with the future of a recognizable military profession but rather the experience of leading troops under an illegitimate authoritarian regime. Those who are invested in maintaining a profession of arms, steeped in ethics, should be extraordinarily wary of serving at all under such conditions.

Indeed, those who value the profession of arms and serve democracy should and do have little interest in risking their lives and the lives of their subordinates to protect a political project lacking in such legitimacy. And so the question is not how American officers today, who have presumably taken and/or administered the oath to the Constitution dozens if not hundreds of times in their careers, adjust to serving in an illiberal world — but at what point do they decide that continuing in uniform is doing more harm than good to the form of self-determining government they chose to serve upon commissioning.

After all, it is worth remembering that military leaders’ obligation to respect civilian control of the military is derived from the Constitution, not the other way around. It is the Constitution — and specifically the democratic processes, checks, and balances that ensure the ultimate power lays with a country’s citizens — that gives certain political leaders the legitimate authority to make policy and exercise authority over the military.

Mitchell excuses officers from having to contemplate this legitimacy by claiming that it is too hard for the average servicemember to parse, arguing “if district judges cannot agree on the Constitution’s meaning, why pretend soldiers can?”  Yet judges have disagreed with each other since the founding of the republic and the profession has nevertheless survived. The true challenge emerges if and when senior political leaders choose to undermine the legitimacy of the court system itself, and contemplate openly defying rulings they dislike. Yet this is again not unprecedented. Indeed, for 250 years, officers been able to understand and respect the sometimes messy and confusing democratic processes that divide and determine power in the United States. A lack of civics education is not an excuse to abandon the civic project entirely.

The Right Question

The central challenge therefore facing today’s senior military leaders is not how to serve in an illiberal America, but rather one that quite literally involves the fate of the republic and grapples with the descent into illiberalism itself: What does one do if and when the obligation to obey all lawful orders conflicts with the oath to support and defend the Constitution?

It is a novel question in the U.S. context, and one with few easy answers. Since ratification in 1789, all military officers have, upon commissioning, sworn an oath to bear true faith and allegiance to the United States. Since the Civil War, that oath has demanded fealty to the Constitution above all else. The idea that a military leader would be given orders at all that could undermine the very democracy they joined to protect is a deeply uncomfortable proposition, let alone the possibility that they may be ruled to be lawful. Yet it is this very phenomenon — the lawful dismantling of democracy from the inside out — that is the defining feature of democratic backsliding today around the world. Military leaders who have lived through the politicization and attempted weaponization of every other democratic and professional institution in the United States should be deeply concerned, but perhaps not surprised, that it has finally come home to the military profession.

Those who specialize in civil-military relations — in both theory and practice — have, for understandable reasons, placed a particular focus on the importance of civilian control of the military. The vast literature on the centrality of civilian control and what it looks like in practice — beginning with the Huntington–Janowitz military professionalism debate and most recently taken up by an exciting growing literature on civilians and civilian deference —  focuses disproportionately on what Risa Brooks describes as “relations between political elites and the senior military leadership at the state’s apex,” with a particular emphasis on presidential-military relations in the American subfield. This has allowed many practitioners to assume (incorrectly, as senior practitioners would remind the force) that obeying the president’s orders is enough to satisfy their commitment to the oath. To the degree that discussions of civilian control are more nuanced, they highlight the importance of Congress as a civilian actor in the relationship; all but a scant few bother to mention the importance of the judiciary as the official arbiter of disputes. In sum, the focus on principles of civilian control has largely come at the expense of a deeper education about the Constitution, the form of government it represents, the liberal values embodied in the document, and their importance for the profession of arms.

That discrepancy is beginning to reverse, however. While the topic of military dissent, resistance, and resignation has been a regular and at times contentious point of debate in civil-military relations — and indeed, is taught in most war college leadership courses as an important topic at senior leader level — experts first really began wrestling with the problem of outright disobedience during the first Trump administration. That concern took on a new level of urgency during the lead-up to the 2020 election and 2021 inauguration as President Donald Trump looked increasingly less likely to peacefully relinquish power. Scholars and practitioners alike questioned the role that the military had to play in ensuring healthy democratic processes in cases where the president is untethered to democratic and civil-military norms: some adopted the extreme position that they should enforce domestic law and help remove the president from power, while others insisted they had no place in the dispute.

Subsequent work has dealt more directly with the issue of what it means to have a military steeped in modern liberal, democratic political values, asking questions like: under what conditions is it okay to disobey orders? What are the role of norms in upholding democratic civil-military relations? What role can, should, and does the military profession play in facilitating or preventing democratic backsliding? The answers are not simply academic. In a political moment where the president of the United States calls for the arrest of sitting members of Congress for reminding officers of their well-established obligation to disobey unlawful orders, military leaders across the profession will be forced to grapple with ethical challenges not seen in the modern era.

Liberal Democracy is Not a Spectator Sport

And so the central, critical question of the era remains. How should military officers respond when elected leaders issue apparently lawful orders that nevertheless undermine their oath by advancing an undemocratic (read: illiberal) political project? The options are not just a binary decision to comply or disobey. Indeed, outright disobedience is the most extreme and democracy-damaging form of resistance when other measures exist, and should be saved for the orders that are, in fact, outright unlawful.

Rather, senior leaders should be taking serious stock of the civil-military norms that have historically protected the military’s democratic ethos, its legitimacy, and the profession. They should be reevaluating and reassessing how those norms may or may not serve them in the current moment. They should remember that civil-military norms are not manna given from heaven. Rather, they are simply expectations of behavior developed over time by a community as a way to protect bigger principles like the democratic ethos. It is the norms that change with social and political winds, not the principles themselves. And so rather than wait for junior officers less steeped in the obligations and responsibilities of the profession of arms to engage in norm-breaking that threatens the very principles we care about, senior leaders should be actively assessing and articulating which norms need to be broken, which ones should be reinforced, and whether new ones should be established to survive the current moment.

Most critically and immediately, this may look like changes in the civil-military norms around resignation. Historically, we have seen public resignation and resignation in protest as threatening to civilian control because it inserts the military (which is itself not a democratically legitimate institution) into the political process as a powerful actor with policy preferences. Research further suggests that the impact of public resignations on public opinion writ large are minimal at best, making such a move both normatively undesirable and empirically ineffective — as Peter Feaver called it in 2015, “a cure worse than the disease.”

Yet the current moment involves far greater dilemmas than simple policy disagreements that would unnecessarily politicize the military. In a moment when Pentagon transparency is at an almost all-time low while the administration has clearly stated its lack of respect for the laws of armed conflict, public resignations may serve more as whistle-blowing activities than subversive actions. Resignations in protest over professional ethics may also send powerful positive signals to the rest of the force. By contrast, silence might otherwise indicate complicity or agreement, and in fact accelerate democratic norm erosion. Just as officers are now encouraged to risk being fired for giving honest military advice, when just a few years ago being fired was a source of great shame, public resignation in the service of professional ethics may be a norm worth similarly revising.

Yet how does one know when to break norms, when to stay silent, and when to disobey? The recommendation here is similar to what one would find in any preliminary ethics course: Identify in advance one’s ethical, moral, and legal red lines, discuss them with people who can hold you accountable, and visualize your actions in situations that could, in the moment, be extraordinarily complex. Without preparation, humans are subject to slippery slopes, ethical fading, and post hoc rationalization. By thinking about the scenarios that one may be placed in — whether it is using lethal force against protestors or migrants, interfering in elections, violating U.S. domestic law or court orders, or executing legally questionable strikes on vessels in the Caribbean — senior military leaders must be able and willing to make perhaps the hardest choice of their long and distinguished careers.

Kori Schake’s excellent new volume, The State and the Soldier, asks how an American public that began as skeptical of the standing army came to see it as a guardian of democracy. The answer, I would argue, is quite simple: By asking military officers to swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution and bear true faith and allegiance to the form of government it enshrines, the American people made our military leaders responsible in part for its health and survival. Liberalism may indeed be failing — it is certainly under assault and we increasingly hear from those who would like to see it relegated to the dustbin of history. But we are not simple spectators in the process. Military leaders will not wake up suddenly one day to find themselves surrounded by and serving in a post-liberal political regime. The decisions that they make along the way will have an enduring impact on whether liberalism adapts to survive, and how effective the illiberal political project is in subverting American democracy.

Carrie A. Lee is a senior fellow with the German Marshall Fund of the United States, where she leads the Democracy and Security Network. From 2021 to 2025, she served as the chair of the Department of National Security and Strategy at the U.S. Army War College.

Image: Gemini