The state of U.S. civil-military relations is the most precarious it has been in many decades. Public confidence in the military has fallen sharply: a 2024 Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation survey found that only 70 percent of Americans expressed a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the military, down from 91 percent in 2018.
The trend lines are troubling.
What was once among the most trusted institutions in American public life has seen its standing erode in tandem with the broader collapse of institutional trust. Gallup data shows that confidence in the military peaked in the early 2000s and has declined in nearly every survey cycle since. When the military’s legitimacy fractures along partisan lines, the consequences extend well beyond polling numbers.
Accelerated erosion of trust
The Trump administration’s deployments of National Guard soldiers to major metropolitan areas have accelerated this erosion. A 2025 NPR/Ipsos poll found that such deployments are deeply unpopular outside Republican voters. President Eisenhower’s use of the 101st Airborne to enforce school desegregation after Brown v. Board shows the executive’s authority in this area is real and long-established, but legality and legitimacy are not the same thing.
When citizens see soldiers in their streets, they form judgments about the institution those soldiers represent. The unexplained firings of senior military leaders have compounded the damage.
In February 2025, President Trump dismissed six top-level military officers, including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Chief of Naval Operations and the Commandant of the Marine Corps. The president’s authority to remove flag officers is unambiguous, as the Supreme Court affirmed in Myers v. United States.
But when firings occur without stated cause, the public is left to supply its own explanation. Taken together, these create a perception that the military is being reshaped as a political instrument. Social media has made these events extraordinarily visible. What once might have registered as a Washington story now lands in every pocket.
Crossing into political arena
The problem is not entirely that of executive overreach; sometimes officers cross into the political arena. Gen. Mark Milley, who served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was himself acutely aware of the reputational hazard his tenure created. His reported efforts to constrain the commander-in-chief’s access to nuclear options and his back-channel communications with Chinese military counterparts near the end of the Trump administration were defended by some as responsible crisis management and condemned by others as insubordination. Whatever one’s view, the episode undercuts the military’s claim to institutional neutrality.
Even in calmer times, the pattern held. In 2010, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, then-commander of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, was forced to resign after a Rolling Stone profile depicted him and his staff making disparaging remarks about Vice President Biden.
Liberal commentators largely treated the resignation as a routine corrective; conservatives were incensed. This episode was a preview of a dynamic that has since intensified: a single military action reads as heroic or sinister depending on party affiliation. This pattern now mirrors public opinion of the judiciary — institutions trusted only when they produce preferred outcomes. The stakes here are higher: unlike judges, who wield only gavels and pens to establish their authority, flag officers have divisions and carrier strike groups at their disposal.
This creates a strategic problem.
A military perceived as partisan will struggle to recruit across the political spectrum, an issue already visible in the services’ collective shortfall of more than 40,000 recruits in 2023. Low public trust threatens unit cohesion, erodes civilian control and hands adversaries a narrative about American institutional dysfunction. If civilian leaders are elected because of their hostility toward the services, and military leaders are promoted based on partisan reliability, the result is a dangerous feedback loop.
Fixing the problem
Two legislative fixes are obvious.
First, the Senate should reinvigorate its advice-and-consent function for senior military and national security appointments, using confirmation hearings to establish and enforce norms. This should include adhering to the requirement that candidates be at least seven years removed from active-duty service rather than waiving it.
Second, lawmakers should pass legislation codifying conduct standards for flag officers in public communications, particularly on social media. The military’s own regulations restrict political activity by uniformed personnel, but those rules were written before platforms like Twitter and Facebook became the primary channels of political speech. Updating is a readiness issue.
Dr. Kori Schake, a leading scholar of civil-military relations, is correct that the two formal pillars of American military health remain intact — the president’s ability to remove officers and the military’s obedience of lawful orders.
Strong as those pillars are, they rest on a foundation of public trust that is visibly cracking. Civilian control of the armed forces is the beginning of healthy civil-military relations. It cannot be the end.
