Who Would Support Deploying the Military to Domestic Protests?
Published by The Lawfare Institute
in Cooperation With
Editor’s Note: Former President Donald Trump has promised to deploy the military to fight crime, stop protesters, and otherwise play a policing role. Kolby Hanson of Wesleyan University and Austin Knuppe of Utah State University find that the American people often favor military intervention. Military leaders, however, are far more opposed and may use their institutional position to try to delay or avoid domestic deployments.
Daniel Byman
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In the final weeks of the presidential campaign, Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, warned of violence by “radical left lunatics” around Election Day. Both have said that, if necessary, uniformed military forces should be deployed to contain Democratic protesters, whom Trump referred to as “the enemy within.”
When the former president has made these threats in the past—most notably during the racial justice protests during summer 2020—national security professionals and scholars raised two major concerns. First, the military could be used selectively against domestic opponents. If a president can deploy military forces to suppress protests by members of other political parties while tolerating those by co-partisans, it threatens democratic expression and turns the military into a tool of domestic politics. Second, many argued the military is inappropriate for domestic policing at all. As Lindsay Cohn argued recently in this outlet (based on scholarly work with Jessica Blankshain and Danielle Lupton), expansive domestic deployments could undermine the legitimacy of key institutions in the eyes of U.S. citizens. Trust in the military and domestic law enforcement, they argue, relies on the roles of the military being limited and clear. Their surveys found that, when given a choice, most voters view domestic policing of protest as more legitimate when carried out by the National Guard or police.
If the president deploys the military for domestic policing, would public and military officers go along with the decision? Would the public—especially the president’s partisan supporters—embrace military action against progressive protesters or punish the president for violating norms? At the same time, would military officers consent to deploying into domestic protests, or would they oppose doing so?
In a recent journal article, we fielded parallel surveys among two groups: a representative sample of U.S. voters and a group of leadership-track military officers—students at the U.S. Naval War College, where Hanson was a faculty member at the time. Though opinions can change in the heat of a crisis, these surveys capture, to a decent approximation, how the U.S. public and military officers view civil-military issues. We found that the public, in general, is favorable toward military deployments but military officers are strongly opposed.
The heart of our survey asked how respondents would respond to two hypothetical protest scenarios. The first, inspired by the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, imagined a postelection rally by supporters of the losing candidate to stop the certification of state-level election returns. The second, inspired by the Black Lives Matter protests in Portland in summer 2020, imagines police-protester clashes escalating into rioting.
These incidents lay out the trade-offs that scholars and national security professionals have posed. On the one hand, the danger to the rule of law is potentially very high: the integrity of a democratic election and public order in a major city. On the other hand, they put military forces in a difficult position because supporting military deployment would mean curbing protesters with a particular partisan agenda and potentially arresting many of them.
The U.S. public was overwhelmingly supportive of deploying the military to contain protests that might turn violent. In our hypothetical scenarios, between 60 and 75 percent of the public approved of deploying the military, while just 15 to 25 percent disapproved. This support, moreover, was consistent across party—similarly large majorities of Democrats and Republicans supported deploying the military. This result is consistent with trends in institutional trust; while trust has declined in nearly every major social and political institution in the United States, bipartisan majorities still say they trust the U.S. military.
More surprisingly, public support for military deployments did not seem to depend on the partisan stakes of the scenario. To test whether Americans would prioritize principle or party, we randomly assigned each respondent to one of two versions of each scenario: one in which the protesters were Republicans and the other in which the protesters were Democrats. Yet this had no effect on respondents’ opinions. Even in a Jan. 6-type scenario with an election on the line, U.S. voters were just as likely to favor deploying the military against protesters of their own party as protesters of the opposing party.
This bipartisan support aligns anecdotally with real-world events. Even before protests in summer 2020 escalated into violence, polls showed that a majority of the public, including a plurality of Democrats, favored deploying the military to contain protests. While national security professionals expressed grave doubts about the potential danger to democratic norms, ordinary Americans generally appeared unbothered.
Our surveys, however, show that military officers are overwhelmingly opposed to deploying military forces into domestic unrest. In our scenarios, just 25 percent of the military approved of military deployments while 72 percent disapproved. The majority of these officers favored aggressive responses to protests—for example, sending in riot police armed with assault rifles and body armor—but felt it was inappropriate to deploy the military.
The divide between civilian and military attitudes with regard to military deployment illustrates the strength of years of training in professional norms in the armed forces. Current and retired military personnel have been among the most vocal opponents of domestic military deployment, and service training frequently paints interference in partisan domestic affairs as anti-democratic. We found evidence for this socialization in our data—the longer the officer had served, the more opposed they were to domestic military deployments.
Military opposition to domestic involvement was also evident in the events of summer 2020 and January 2021. While public support for the use of military troops was very high, there were significant signs of military resistance within the Trump administration. Even in instances when military officers do not explicitly refuse orders, they can still deflect, distract, and delay until conditions change and cooler heads prevail. Jeffrey Goldberg’s recent exposé in The Atlantic on civil-military relations under President Trump reveals the myriad ways Trump’s chief of staff, retired Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly, among others, tried to divert the president’s attention away from violating not only core civil-military norms but also federal law.
Our research suggests that military professional norms, not public opinion, may be the strongest bulwark against militarization of domestic policing. For the military, countering polarization poses real risks: When military figures stand up for professional norms, they may find themselves without significant public backing. Changing the public opinion calculus will have to involve persuading the public of the importance of self-restraining, nonpartisan armed forces. More importantly, it will require building trust in local and federal law enforcement so that the public does not feel they have to decide between militarization and ignoring public unrest.
