President Donald Trump’s second term, characterized by shock-and-awe military activity, has been astonishing in its effectiveness and consistency. Critics are beginning to notice that, behind the scenes, some of his supposedly loyal military leaders have minds of their own — something the ancient Greeks warned could lead to disastrous consequences.
Trump’s foreign policy focus has produced major changes in South America, the Caribbean, Africa, and, most notably, the Middle East — all before the halfway point of his second term. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio often overshadow the less-reported disobedience within the military through their forceful alignment with Trump’s agenda.
By contrast, everyone pays attention when officials such as Maj. Jason Watson of the U.S. Air Force claim that members of the executive branch “violate our Constitution and their oath to it with impunity.”
The real struggle within the intelligence and armed-forces communities is not as showy as Hegseth’s grandstanding or Watson’s theatrics. Instead, it occurs between the generals and the administration as each side tries to define its role in achieving America’s goals.
General Dan “Razin” Caine, the president’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, defined his approach in a speech to the graduates of the National Defense University, as the Atlantic reports.
The joint force, Caine told the graduates, is meant to give teeth to the government’s goals by answering whether an operation can be carried out. The reasoning behind the operation, Caine said, “lands at the policy level, and we don’t do that in our business.”
When we see cases such as Watson’s rebellion against Trump, or even Trump’s first chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Mark Milley — who memorably said in his 2023 farewell speech, “We don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator” — we have to wonder what keeps the armed forces obedient to elected officials. Beyond that, should our most experienced and highest-ranking military officers be excluded from policymaking?
As is often the case with questions of governance, this one was asked long ago. The ancient Athenians offer a useful framework for deciding when a general should have a voice in policy — and when he should stick to his post.
Around 400 B.C., during the Peloponnesian War between the Athenian Empire and Sparta, two Athenian generals, Nicias and Alcibiades, represented opposing views of the military’s relationship to policy and government.
After the Athenian democratic government, composed solely of an assembly of several hundred citizens, decided to send its military to Sicily to help a friendly state defeat its enemies, it had to choose commanders for the expedition. Nicias, Alcibiades, and Lamachus — generals and politicians in Athens — were selected by the assembly and given nearly complete autonomy in the campaign against the Sicilians.
Of the three, Nicias was known for obeying the assembly’s orders even when he disapproved of its decisions. Alcibiades, by contrast, was outspoken in his opposition to the people’s orders, which he regarded as misguided and partisan.
Before the expedition departed, Nicias addressed the assembly and rightly urged its members to vote against the military campaign. After the people listened to Alcibiades’s opposing speech and voted to proceed, Nicias obeyed and assumed command. Alcibiades, meanwhile, was eager to go to Sicily in hopes of conquering the island and gaining riches from it, according to the Greek historian Thucydides.
Before leaving for Sicily, Alcibiades was accused of sacrilegiously defacing religious statues. The government sought to prosecute him and eventually recalled him from the expedition. Fearing an unfavorable judgment from the Athenian assembly, Alcibiades defected to Sparta, leaving Nicias in Sicily. Within two years of the fleet’s arrival, military blunders and Athenian mismanagement led to the deaths or capture of most of the Athenian soldiers, including Nicias, and left the democratic empire on its last legs.
The founders of the American democratic republic, having learned from the Greeks, understood that the American experiment would work only if the military were controlled neither by popular passion nor by the ambition of a few. Both the timidity of Nicias and the ambition of Alcibiades contributed to the destruction of the Athenian expeditionary force and, later, the Athenian polity itself.
The Athenian failure parallels today’s situation. Our military leaders may fall into Nicias’s camp, allowing the government to invoke the phrase “policy decision” while determining their fate, or they may resemble Alcibiades, whose ambition and pride overrode the government’s plans. America cannot function with either unquestioning or rebellious military leaders.
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“Caine and today’s other senior brass may ultimately be remembered for their choices about when to quietly defer to civilian leadership—and when the moment demands they speak up,” Missy Ryan and Nancy A. Youssef write in the Atlantic.
Drawing on the failure of the Athenian generals, Caine and today’s military leadership must recognize that elected officials provide both policy and guidance, while those officials must, in turn, be supported by obedient and competent military leaders. Only if America’s joint-force commanders strike that balance can the country continue to dominate on the world stage.