Only a Conservative Military is Capable of Defending the United States

A ‘Neutral’ Military Cannot Defend Ordered Liberty

Last month a federal circuit court panel in Washington, D.C. upheld the Department of War’s ban on individuals who identify as “transgender” from being members of the U.S. military. The idea that a court must be involved in the armed services respecting biological reality is strange to observe. There are many reasons why the military filters applicants through medical and character checks, and subjects those accepted for service to lifestyle expectations that private employers are barred from enforcing on civilian employees. In placing individuals under arms on behalf of the nation, military commanders need to rely on the ability of the troops to endure hardship and use force honorably. Critics lambast such character requirements as discriminatory precisely because modern activists entirely miss the point of what the armed forces exist to do: protect, defend, preserve, and conserve a nation of ordered liberty.

The War Department is an institution, and institutions are not morally neutral. Yet a myth has pervaded in Western discourse for the better part of the last century that militaries are somehow “apolitical”. Though seemingly altruistic on the surface, this belief is ahistorical and defies the realities of what military forces do. The 18^th Century Prussian military philosopher Carl von Clausewitz noted in his seminal work titled On War that armed combat is the continuation of policy by other means.

“The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and the means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose.”¹

The U.S. government recognizes this condition, categorizing national power into four categories: Diplomatic, Information, Military, and Economic. Marketing efforts to cast all military action as defending freedom fall apart when you consider that most military deployments in American history have been in fact ordered for geographic expansion, or to achieve effects desired as part of the policy agenda of the administration in power at the time. Consider the overthrow of the Hussein regime in Iraq and the Gaddafi regime in Libya, as well as ongoing U.S. involvement in Ukraine. None of these campaigns defended the U.S. Constitution, or liberty at home. In fact, as my generation of veterans spent sands in the hourglass of life in Afghanistan and Iraq—allegedly to protect our fellow citizens from radical Islam—the U.S. and our ‘allies’ imported its loyal adherents at a rate that outpaced the body count of insurgents our forces rightfully eliminated by unimaginable orders of magnitude. Whatever those wars were about, they clearly weren’t for defending the Constitution or protecting American liberty.

War is not neutral, and neither is the purpose of a military force. The oath says it all: “I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same”. One must make a moral claim in order to defend and protect the constitutional order, a framework imbued by Christian worldview that asserts state defense of moral ontology in order to respect and enable ordered liberty. Put simply, one cannot embrace Frankfurt School ideologies and their neo-variants of our time and simultaneously embrace American exceptionalism and constitutionalism. Fidelity will be to one or the other. Militaries throughout human history have either defended or overrun the people of their group, tribe, state, and nation—depending upon to whom loyalties were placed, enforced, and obeyed by those who wield the tools of sanctioned violence. This is what made so important the cultural trend of the American military toward conservative thought historically.

Operationally and culturally, military organizations defy the basics of conservatism as linked to the principle of subsidiarity. In contrast to that philosophy in which power is best administered locally, military institutions operate through a hard, top-down, centralized power dynamic that assimilates individuals into a collective mindset through which they are conditioned to obey without question. Yet throughout most of American history, the majority of American troops personally identified with conservative political ideals. Those ideals were reflected in the culture, creeds, doctrine, and orders passed down the chain of command. It was not because military members actively wanted the force to be a Republican agency, but because you must love traditional American values and the basics of truth in order to be willing to potentially die in defense, or conservation, of them.

The Clinton administration leveled the first major assault on truth-based moral ideals by forcing an end to the ban on homosexual behavior by military members. The Obama administration finished the job by forcing an end to the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, over the objection of the armed service branches. Obama’s next move was to push for full acceptance of so-called “transgender” military members, a move blocked by the first Trump administration. The Biden presidency aggressively forced transgenderism, abortion travel funding, and overt support of radical social activism into the military and cracked down on expressing concern or dissent. Biden’s Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, declared the armed forces full of right-wing extremists and directed mass indoctrination as well as a purge of conservatives by the tens of thousands. With the military management class fully in the progressive corner, Democrats, for the first time in decades, held the White House and did not initiate a major reduction in forces.

We have been subjected in recent weeks to a narrative that the Trump-Hegseth Pentagon is issuing unlawful orders, a narrative first established by Democrats during President Trump’s first term. Those involved in crafting this myth found an ally in then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, who openly bragged about acting as a brake in the chain of command. Joe Biden laid claim to progressive ownership of the military shortly before starting his term as president, saying America’s armed forces would remove Donald Trump from the White House if needed. He echoed that philosophy later stating that Second Amendment supporters would “need an F-16” in order to challenge government edicts restricting firearms ownership. This parallels a growth in hard left-wing activism that I observed by military officers during my final years of military service. This trend was so strong that then commanding general of the U.S. Army’s famed 82^nd Airborne Division Christopher LaNeve rewrote history in an official ‘pride month’ letter to the forces under his rule.

“From the founding fathers of our nation through the Global War on Terrorism LBGTQ+ [sic] service members have fought with pride to defend our rights and freedoms.”

LaNeve is now a three-star and works as the senior military advisor to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. President Trump recently nominated him for promotion to full general as the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army. How can we trust that a man who will deal so openly in activist fiction will protect the American way and train our soldiers to do the same? On that note, how can we trust that military members who cheered the assassination of Charlie Kirk believe in—and will defend—virtue, free speech, and truth? If you can get the military to reject reality and basic decency, then you condition its members to merely follow whatever orders are given—with total disregard for whether they are in accordance with defending, preserving, protecting, and conserving the United States.

Many commentators speak of such instances in fatalistic lament, but the issue is of strategic importance for the continuation of ordered liberty. A military caste that holds itself unaccountable to the chain of command when Republicans are elected to the White House is one that departs from the tradition of what the late political scientist Samuel Huntington called Objective Civilian Control.² Such is an institution divorced from the mission of defending, preserving, and conserving the founding American values from which our homeland’s ordered liberties are protected and continued.

The military must be remade into a conservative institution. This has nothing to do with partisanship. It has everything to do with the institutional purpose of the world’s most powerful armed force in history. There is no such thing as neutrality. The Department of War will either protect, defend, and help conserve the nation, or it will become an active partner in its destruction.

Dr. Chase Spears (U.S. Army, Retired) served for 20 years in military public affairs. Among other pursuits, he enjoys writing about a wide range of topics, including civil-military relations, communication ethics, and policy. Chase holds a Ph.D. in leadership communication from Kansas State University. He can be found on X at @drchasespears.

1. Clausewitz, Carl Von. On War. Translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret, Alfred A. Knopf, 1993, 99.

2. Huntington, Samuel. The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations. The Belknap Press, 1959, 189-192.