America is in a strange constitutional place until this inauguration on Wednesday.
The House of Representatives, the uniformed military, and the Justice Department agree that the United States experienced an insurrection on Jan. 6. Some 25,000 soldiers guard the Capitol, a display unseen since the Civil War.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell reportedly believes that President Trump committed high crimes, yet he did not bring back that body to try the president after his impeachment. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley that she distrusts the president to handle the nuclear arsenal.
Yet, Vice President Mike Pence rejected the speaker’s plea to invoke the 25th Amendment for presidential inability to discharge his office. In the post-riot, pre-inauguration period, rather than do the right thing themselves and lawfully remove Trump, McConnell and Pence are instead apparently relying on the military’s good judgment to maintain order while leadership from the very top is missing.
This is a practical but extralegal and constitutionally dangerous solution, like when former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger quietly ordered the Pentagon to disregard unusual orders from President Richard Nixon in the summer of 1974 after he was overheard drunkenly muttering about nuclear weapons.
Today, acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller stays silent in the crisis, other than whining that he “cannot wait to leave” his job. Milley earlier stated that the military would take no role in the resolution of the election, but after push came to shove (and gunfire) on Jan. 6, the Joint Chiefs flatly stated that Joe Biden would be the next commander in chief. This was the American version of the Catholic formulation “Roma locuta, causa finita.”
If any American institution can be relied upon to exercise this ambiguous power with restraint, it is the military. Under President George Washington, the Army established the Republic. It preceded even the Constitution, and as shown by the infantry now sleeping in the Capitol Visitors Center, it is the ultimate guarantor of both.
At the same time, if the military is to assume this sensitive role, it must also act decisively to clean its own house.
An Army special operations captain, a retired Air Force fighter squadron commander (carrying zip ties allegedly to restrain congressional hostages), a former Navy SEAL, a former Marine, and several reservists were among the rogues who sacked the Capitol. A former airman was shot dead by a Capitol officer while trying to advance further into the Capitol building. It’s probable that more will be discovered who wore our country’s cloth and then betrayed their oaths.
It is a problem as old as Benedict Arnold. From the Newburgh mutiny, the Whiskey Rebellion and the San Patricios, from leaders of the antebellum U.S. Army defecting to the Confederacy and killing 360,000 Union soldiers to the Bonus Marchers, history shows that though service members are exceptionally loyal to the state, that does not preclude some from turning against it.
In recent memory, American servicemen spied for the Soviets and killed colleagues for al Qaeda. A decorated veteran murdered 168 fellow citizens at a federal building in Oklahoma City. Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn suggested that Trump impose martial law to “rerun an election.”
An aggressive internal security program is needed, and seams in our defenses must be addressed. Just as the military responded too slowly, first to KGB espionage and then Islamist radicalization, it has responded too slowly to the rise of extreme right-wing and psychotic fantasies such as QAnon within the ranks.
This reticence comes from an understandable reluctance to examine troops’ ordinary political beliefs for fear of promoting officers on the basis of suspected Republican or Democratic sympathies, a bad practice corrosive of any fighting force. But far short of inappropriate partisanship, the military needs to separate out members of extremist groups such as the Boogaloo Bois, Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, Three Percenters, and other crackpot militias, as well as any members of equally far-out leftist organizations.
The military does not yet do so effectively. Counterintelligence elements look for communist spies and Islamic State sympathizers in the ranks, but the intel efforts have not done enough to tackle threats from domestic extremists. The military should be aggressively mining social media and running confidential human sources to look for members who make false statements on their SF-86 “Questionnaire for National Security Positions.”
For the Jan. 6 riot, intelligence officials could and should look at geolocated social media and cellphone advertising data to identify any handsets inside the Capitol that belonged to military members.
Any counterintelligence program can get lost in a wilderness of mirrors, as CIA’s once did under James Jesus Angleton, but there was a targeted assault on the government on Jan. 6. Congressmen now privately admit to casting votes with which they disagree for fear of their lives. Threats of violence used to influence policymakers is the definition of terrorism.
Further, if it is determined that a foreign intelligence service abetted the deadly attack on our Capitol, that’s an act of war. If any Americans aided it, that’s treason. Any military members who took part must, to paraphrase former President Andrew Johnson, be made odious.
Our armed services make the very best among us, such as Capitol officer and 101st Airborne veteran Eugene Goodman, who saved the Senate from the lunatic mob. But a person’s military credentials do not necessarily insulate him from contributing to these dangerous problems. The military’s hard and uncomfortable look in the mirror needs to begin right now.
Kevin Carroll served as senior counselor to the secretary of homeland security and the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, as well as a CIA and Army officer, including in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen. He is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog.
