From Lawfare: Who Would Support Deploying the Military to Domestic Protests?

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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.

. . . 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.

. . . 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.