Last week, President-elect Joe Biden announced that he would nominate Lloyd Austin, a four-star Army general who retired in 2016, for secretary of defense. However, to serve, Austin will first have to secure a bicameral congressional waiver, required by federal law since he has not been retired from active-duty military service for at least seven years.
In 2016, President Trump’s first defense secretary, Jim Mattis, required and received the same congressional waiver before his confirmation. Lawmakers in both parties expressed concern about granting another exception so soon after the last one. They are right to do so.
While this might sound like a procedural hurdle, the policy is designed to ensure one of our country’s most fundamental principles: civilian control of the military. Subordination of military force to political will has existed since the earliest human governments, and republican and democratic governments, such as ours, have always been acutely vulnerable to martial domination. Civilian control of a nonpolitical military was an immediate concern for the Founding Fathers and framers of the Constitution. “Even when there is a necessity of military power, within the land, … a wise and prudent people will always have a watchful & jealous eye over it,” Samuel Adams wrote in 1768.
In Federalist 41, James Madison likewise warned, “Security against foreign danger is one of the primitive objects of civil society. … [But a] standing force? It is dangerous, at the same time that it may be a necessary provision. On the smallest scale, it has its inconveniences. On an extensive scale, its consequences may be fatal.”
History is littered with such consequences. It was at the head of an army that Julius Caesar returned to Rome, and the Roman Republic fell to him just as it did Pompey and Crassus. Machiavelli, the great republican thinker of whom Madison wrote fondly, stressed the importance of a native army of civilian soldiers in each of his most famous works, The Prince, The Art of War, and his Discourses on Livy. The experiences of Florence led him to distrust mercenary militias, and he believed civilian soldiers less dangerous to state stability.
As Michael Cairo points out, the founders also had a more immediate example to which they could turn. “The Anglo-Saxon cultural heritage, dominant at the time of the nation’s founding, was another, more general, reason for [their] aversion to the military and military institutions, especially during peacetime,” he writes. “The British reaction to the Cromwellian period of the 1640s, when the British army was used to suppress political opposition, was a vivid memory in the 18th century.”
