The Dangers of Deploying the Military for Domestic Operations

Where is the national debate about this historic shift in the military's role?

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Yesterday I held my first Substack Live together with writer and journalist Anand Giridharadas. It was a joint event of Lucid and Anand’s essential newsletter The Ink. I could only stay a half hour but when I left there were over 2,200 people present.

Anand and I are planning a repeat: we’ll go live on Monday at 12:30pmET. This conversation is open to everyone. To watch, just download the Substack app and turn on notifications.

Here is the video of Wednesday’s event.

WATCH: Ruth Ben-Ghiat and I break down the hidden logic of Trump's first week

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The Trump administration is making good on its promise to swiftly transform American government, using as its tool a slew of executive orders that create the conditions for the policies and programs of Project 2025 to be implemented. As I did with Trump’s granting of pardons to participants in the Jan. 6 insurrection, it is important to place the actions now unfolding in America in context.

These include the idea of using the military for domestic operations. Along with a racist vision of national purity, a main rationale of mass deportations is to have an excuse to declare a state of emergency and justify a groundbreaking and ominous new role for the military.

Public and media focus on the person of Pete Hegseth, President Donald Trump’s unqualified and highly problematic nominee for Secretary of Defense, has meant that a national discussion about this historic shift has not materialized.

Now the administration is considering deploying the military inside the United States for the mass deportation campaign that will wreck the American economy. The plan would be to send as many as 10,000 troops to the border and use Department of Defense bases to hold migrants awaiting expulsion.

Where are the front-page debates and discussions on our most watched cable news shows about the costs and consquences of this giant change? Are we simply accepting this new role for the military because Trump wants it?

As a scholar of military coups, I know that when you deploy the military in this manner, it opens a door to ugly episodes of repression that can irreparably harm a military’s ideals and codes of conduct.

And so I am reprinting my essay of August 2021 on the dangers of this profound change in the military’s role. It starts off with the lesson of Chile after the 1973 coup and reminds us of Trump’s attempts to politicize the military in 2020. Remember that frightening display of unmarked but armed units used as riot police in Washington D.C. that summer?

Unmarked armed individuals used as riot police in Washington D.C., June 3, 2020. Wusa9.com image.

While this essay focuses on right-wing autocrats, the use of the military by leftist president Nicholás Maduro of Venezuela has given rise to similar negative outcomes. There, the regular military has colluded with paramilitaries and armed gangs (colectivos) to carry out violence against enemies of the state.

Around the world, when militaries become loyal to the person of the leader rather than to the Constitution, they set the stage for their corrosion from within.