Charles Q. Brown Jr. used a Friday essay in Foreign Affairs to warn that the military is being pulled into politics at a moment when civilian leaders are asking it to do more at home. He said the armed forces can be welcomed in a genuine national disaster, but that domestic missions tied to crime or other politically charged fights make military work far more fraught.
Brown argued that turning to soldiers instead of fixing broken civilian institutions diverts the military from its primary combat mission. He said the service is not there to rescue the republic from political deadlock, and that asking too much of it risks the whole enterprise.
The essay lands now because Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have pushed to deploy the National Guard in blue cities, with the National Guard already sent into Washington, D.C. Brown, a retired top general and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is not writing from the sidelines of military life. He was nominated by Trump for Air Force chief of staff in 2020, later nominated by Joe Biden to lead the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and then fired in February last year.
That history gives the warning extra force. Brown criticized the military’s politicization even though he had already been elevated by presidents from both parties, and last week he went further at the Aspen Institute, saying the current purge of top generals was “not about merit” and that those being removed were “very well-experienced.”
The friction is hard to miss. In 2024, Hegseth questioned whether Brown’s rise had anything to do with the color of his skin, and in November 2024 he said on the Shawn Ryan Show that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs had to be fired and that any general tied to DEI should go. Brown’s essay now reads less like an abstract warning than a direct challenge to a leadership culture that sees military loyalty as something to be enforced from above.
What remains open is how far that purge reaches and whether the White House or the Defense Department will answer Brown’s criticism with policy or silence. For now, his message is plain: once the military is used as a political tool, it stops looking like a force focused on defense and starts looking like one asked to carry problems it was never built to solve.
