Opinion: Politicizing the Military Chain of Command Is a Dangerous Trend America Cannot Afford
(STL.News) Politicizing the Military – America is living through a period of political noise so loud that it sometimes drowns out the basics of how our own government works. The military, an institution built on discipline, clarity, and unity, is now being pulled into that noise. When political figures publish videos or statements that imply service members should personally question or interpret orders from the Commander in Chief, the conversation stops being ordinary politics. It becomes a direct threat to national stability.
This is not about defending or attacking any one president. It is not about choosing a party. It is about protecting the system itself: the chain of command, the office of the presidency, and the military’s essential role as an apolitical instrument of the American people. A military invited to view its own Commander in Chief through a partisan lens is pushed toward confusion, division, and hesitation. Those are not minor side effects. They are precisely what serious countries work hardest to avoid.
At the center of this problem is a simple but dangerous idea: that individual soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and Guardians should personally decide whether a presidential order is legitimate based on political messaging instead of the law. That idea is not only wrong — it completely ignores how the U.S. government actually works, and how many legal filters stand between a president’s intention and a troop on the ground.
The more this kind of rhetoric spreads, the more it weakens the one thing every strong military must have: unquestioned clarity about who is in charge and how decisions are made.
The Chain of Command Is a Survival Mechanism, Not a Talking Point
The American chain of command is not a slogan. It is a survival mechanism. It is the structure that allows hundreds of thousands of people, operating across land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace, to move in coordination rather than chaos.
From day one, every service member learns the same basic rules:
- Lawful orders must be followed.
- Unlawful orders must be refused.
- Confusion is escalated up the chain, not handled through personal politics.
- Authority flows downward clearly, and accountability flows upward.
That is how the military avoids paralysis. That is how lives are protected. That is how missions are completed.
When political leaders suggest — directly or indirectly — that a president is likely to issue illegal orders, and that troops should “be ready” to resist, they are doing something extremely reckless. They are inserting themselves into the relationship between the Commander-in-Chief and the people sworn to carry out lawful commands. They are treating the chain of command as a debating topic rather than the backbone of national defense.
Mixed Messages Break Families, Workplaces, and Armies
The damage caused by mixed messages is not hard to understand. In a family, if one parent says, “Do your homework,” and the other quietly tells the kids, “You don’t always have to listen to your mother,” the result is predictable. The children become confused. They do not know who is really in charge. They learn to play one parent against the other. Respect erodes. Structure falls apart.
In a business, if a CEO issues a clear direction and middle managers tell employees, “You might want to ignore that if you disagree,” the company will not function for long; projects stall. People stop taking responsibility. Nobody is quite sure which priorities matter.
Now translate that same kind of confusion into the military environment, where decisions are made in seconds and lives truly hang in the balance. A soldier who stops to wonder whether an order is “really” legitimate, based on political arguments on a screen, is a soldier put in a terrible position. A unit in which some members are influenced by one political narrative and others by another becomes divided before it ever steps into the field.
A confused army is not an empowered army. It is a vulnerable army.
This is why, historically, serious leaders in both parties understood that you never, ever play games with the chain of command. You can argue about policy. You can talk about budgets. You can argue about speeches. But the relationship between the Commander in Chief and the troops is supposed to be off-limits to partisan theater.
How Decisions Really Move Through Government Long Before Troops See Them
The loudest political rhetoric often paints a picture of a president acting alone — waking up, making a snap decision, and issuing a military order. That image is dramatic. It is also false.
In reality, there is a long, dense, and very intentional process that happens before anything resembling an order reaches the troops:
First, the intelligence community provides assessments.
Before a policy option even becomes concrete, agencies like the CIA, NSA, DIA, and others offer data on threats, capabilities, risks, and likely consequences. They do not deal in campaign talking points. They deal in classified facts, risk assessments, and professional judgment.
Second, there is interagency work.
Departments such as State, Defense, Justice, Homeland Security, and Treasury review the situation from their own lanes. They examine legal frameworks, diplomatic implications, homeland impact, economic exposure, and more. By the time an issue reaches the Oval Office as a real decision, it has already passed through a maze of specialists.
Third, White House Counsel and other lawyers step in.
Before a president signs off on serious action, attorneys examine the boundaries of constitutional authority, statutory limits, existing authorizations for the use of military force, and treaty obligations. Their job is not to cheerlead. Their job is to say, “You can do this,” “You cannot do that,” or “You can do this only under specific conditions.”
Fourth, the National Security Council weighs in.
Senior advisers review options, risk, timing, and alignment with broader strategy. They consider second- and third-order effects. They stress-test the plan.
Fifth, the Department of Defense conducts its own legal and operational review.
JAG officers and DoD civilian lawyers confirm that any contemplated use of force complies with U.S. law and the law of armed conflict. Combatant commands determine whether the mission is feasible, what resources are needed, and what rules of engagement will apply.
Sixth, the Joint Chiefs of Staff provide military advice.
They do not simply salute and say “yes.” They explain what is possible, what is wise, and what is dangerous. They help translate political intent into a plan that does not break the force.
Only after all of those steps does anything reach a battalion commander, a ship’s captain, or an aircrew.
By the time an order reaches a private or a petty officer, the question of legality has already been examined by armies of lawyers and layers of leadership whose entire job is to protect both the Constitution and the people wearing the uniform.
Service members are not supposed to bear that legal burden alone. The system is designed specifically so they do not have to.
Oversight Belongs in Congress, Not in Viral Clips
If lawmakers sincerely believe a president has overstepped the law, the Constitution gives them powerful tools to respond. They can hold hearings. They can subpoena documents and witnesses. They can request classified briefings. They can pass binding legislation. They can ask courts to review executive actions. In the most serious cases, they can consider impeachment.
Those are the tools of serious oversight. They are formal, documented, and accountable.
Creating emotionally charged content aimed at the general public and, indirectly, at troops is not oversight. It is performance. It does not resolve legal questions. It does not improve discipline. It does not make the country safer. What it does do is inject suspicion into a relationship — between the Commander in Chief and the armed forces — that absolutely depends on trust.
If leaders want to be taken seriously when they say they are “defending democracy,” they should be willing to use the mechanisms the Constitution actually gives them, instead of playing to the cameras and social feeds.
Historically, American Leaders Fought to Keep the Military Out of Politics
One of the quiet strengths of the United States has always been the apolitical nature of its military. George Washington stepped down from power rather than become a monarch precisely to show that the army would not rule the country. Later generations reinforced that norm again and again.
Civilian control over the military, a politically neutral officer corps, and a culture that treats partisan politics as something separate from military duty are not accidents. They are choices. Every time a leader has steered away from using the military as a political tool, they have reinforced the idea that the armed forces serve the Constitution and the country as a whole — not any one person, party, or movement.
Whenever nations blur that line, the results are ugly. Armies split along factional lines. Units begin to identify with political causes instead of national missions. In extreme cases, militaries stop seeing themselves as servants of a constitutional order and start acting as power centers in their own right. History has no shortage of examples of what happens when soldiers are encouraged to act as political actors: coups, crackdowns, civil wars, and broken states.
That is why previous generations of American leaders, whatever their other faults, treated the politicization of the military as a red line. They knew that once troops are openly invited to question the legitimacy of their own government on the basis of partisan narratives, the structure everyone depends on begins to shake.
Foreign Adversaries See Division as an Opportunity
None of this happens in a vacuum. Other countries are watching. Rivals and adversaries closely monitor American political messaging. They pay attention when domestic voices suggest that the President is untrustworthy, that the military should be wary of its own leadership, or that internal division is more important than external threats.
Those signals are extremely valuable to them. They tell adversaries that the United States is distracted. They suggest that Americans are turning on each other instead of facing outward together. They offer propaganda that can convince their own populations — and undecided audiences around the world — that democracy is messy, weak, and unreliable.
Even if political messaging at home is meant only for short-term gain, it can have long-term consequences abroad. Every time internal cohesion is chipped away in public, someone overseas is taking notes.
The Presidency Is an Institution, Not a Temporary Target
It is easy, in a heated moment, to see the occupant of the Oval Office as the entire story. But the presidency is bigger than the person holding the job at any given time. It is an institution that must endure changes in personality, party, and public mood.
When politicians aim their attacks at the structure of presidential authority — not just its temporary holder — they are playing a dangerous game. A message that trains soldiers to be suspicious of the presidency today will still be echoing years from now, when someone else is in office. A norm that says “it is healthy for troops to wonder whether to trust orders” will not switch off when power changes hands.
No leader, present or future, benefits from that kind of erosion.
Back to Basics: What Responsible Leadership Requires
The way out of this trend is not complicated. It does not require new technology or complex theory. It requires going back to basics that most Americans instinctively understand:
- There is one Commander in Chief at a time.
- There is one lawful chain of command.
- The military must remain above partisan politics.
- Concerns about legality must be handled through real oversight, not viral messaging.
- Leaders in every branch of government must prioritize the stability of institutions over scoring points in the next news cycle.
Debate will never disappear from a free country, and it should not. People will always argue about policy, character, strategy, and results. But when that argument starts to pull the military off its apolitical foundation and into the daily fight, the country crosses a line.
A strong America depends on more than weapons and budgets. It depends on a shared understanding that some structures — the chain of command, the rule of law, and the fundamental trust between elected leaders and the troops who serve under them — are not props. They are the frame holding everything else up.
That frame is not something we can afford to weaken.
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