Celebrations of America’s founding and reflections on its ideals often overlook the central role of civil-military relations. This is a mistake. In the Declaration of Independence, a chief complaint was that King George III “affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.” George Washington himself worried about this abuse of power and went to great pains to avoid it in his own career. Throughout the Revolutionary War, he constantly deferred to the Continental Congress despite its calamitous delays and erratic instructions, because he recognized that his authority over the Continental Army flowed from the people’s representatives. Given his immense personal popularity, he was often encouraged to redress this or that political dysfunction, but he knew that the republic would suffer in the long run if the military were to become an instrument of the commander’s will rather than of the people’s elected leaders.

The United States has not recently had leaders of Washington’s popularity, but in other ways the present moment recalls the era that followed the country’s founding. Today, as it was then, there is gridlock in the civilian political system. Similarly, Americans today hold the military in high regard compared with civilian branches of government. When the public is confronted with a problem that seems too big for the civilian branches to solve, the reflex is to ask the military to handle it. Both Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden, for instance, looked to the military to play a leading role in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The temptation for mission creep is understandable: the U.S. military is the most advanced in the world, with a budget two to three times that of its nearest competitor. As the recent capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolàs Maduro demonstrated, U.S. service members can do things no other military in the world can do. And in the face of a genuine national disaster, the public will readily embrace the military’s help; during the Great Depression, for instance, President Herbert Hoover........

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