Dan Maurer
Nov 13, 2025
https://dmaurer.substack.com/p/fighting ... -militarys
On American streets and off American shores, the U.S. military is fighting a three-front war – and it is going to lose them all.
On one frontline, armed troops commanded by a Republican president patrol urban centers in Democrat-led cities in response to greatly-exaggerated reports of civil unrest that this president casually calls terrorism. On this front, federal laws, the Constitution, and historical norms establish what right looks like – the boundaries on what the military can actually do with its personnel, arms, and equipment.
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source: Alex Welsh for the New York Times
On another frontline, the military has embarked on a new, bizarre counterterrorism campaign, targeting the illicitly-trafficked drugs and (by implication) the foreign drug traffickers as an imminent national security threat to the health and safety of Americans who may ultimately use those drugs.
[x]
source: ABC News
There are three common denominators in these campaigns. First, both frontlines are clearly law enforcement – not military combat – frontlines. Rioting, property destruction, and assaulting law enforcement are all well-established crimes that police, prosecutors, defense counsel, judges and juries are well-equipped and well-experienced to address. So is international drug trafficking. The U.S. Coast Guard has long executed this mission to interdict, investigate, search and seize, and then turn over the evidence and suspects to civilian law enforcement authorities.
Second, ironically, the Trump Administration’s reframing of these recurring criminal skirmishes as armed hostilities demanding military intervention makes its actions involving force – including those of the individual servicemembers – blatantly criminal. Both our troops and their commanders who enforce the law without express statutory authority (like the Insurrection Act) violate the Posse Comitatus Act and commit a criminal felony.
Third, the facts on the ground and at sea do not justify using the president’s extraordinary emergency powers at home or abroad. His exaggeration and outright fabrication of facts make his proffered legal defenses (that he has unreviewable authority to decide how and when to use the military, or that drug trafficking in international waters requires lethal force in self-defense) absurd and rightfully criticized. Both campaigns are terminally afflicted by the uncomfortable fact that legal prohibitions and norms governing the uses of military force are being ignored or stretched to their breaking point.
But while the American military puts boots on the ground on main street and bombs on target in the Caribbean and Pacific, its most important battle is largely unseen by the public. This third front is a layer of conflict less obvious than fighting crime and foreign drug-runners but is ultimately even more insidious and self-defeating. As a combat veteran and former career military lawyer (judge advocate, or “JAG”), I am disheartened because many of my former colleagues are ensnared as combatants on this third frontline.
The combatant on this third front is the military’s conscience, which is being torn by the commander-in-chief between two polarizing sets of duties. It is a fraying rope being stretched in a game of tug-of-war between the president pulling on one end and the military’s duty to support and defend the Constitution pulling on the other.
We could see this third frontline coming when Trump’s Inauguration Day fusillade of executive orders included his (and Defense Secretary Hegseth’s) sidelining of military lawyers viewed as “roadblocks” to aggressive and probably unlawful policies. Before their attack on JAGs, it was reasonable to assume that proposed military actions were thoroughly vetted by government lawyers. The more controversial the action, the more vetting it received. But the President has already declared that any legal interpretation he or the Attorney General may have on a subject (any subject) is the final and binding legal word within the executive branch. This systematic dismantling of consistent, accurate, objective, and forthright legal checks within the Pentagon and provided to the White House will continue to be a major part of the story of why the military will ultimately lose this war.
*****
The first front’s theater of operations is the domestic front. We might call this the “Making America Militarized Again” campaign.
Since the beginning of June, President Trump has deployed both the National Guard and active military to the streets of Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. and attempted to do the same in Portland and Chicago, ostensibly to “protect” Department of Homeland Security agents as they aggressively enforce the country’s immigration laws. Trump has falsely described these cities as “war-ravaged” and protestors as “paid agitators” or even as “domestic terrorists.” Putting troops, most of whom are not sufficiently trained in how to safely manage civil conflict while protecting constitutional rights, on city streets is like using a hammer’s claw to pry apart stubbornly stuck Lego blocks: it is an aggressive overkill with a tool ill-suited for the job and more likely to cause self-harm than to successfully accomplish the intended task.
This historically abnormal effort is the current subject of intense litigation in the lower federal courts in California, Oregon, and Illinois. The Department of Justice claims either that the President’s decisions to use the military in this way are unreviewable by judges or that existing statutes provide him the authority required for these operations to be legal. So far, courts have temporarily restrained these deployments; in L.A., a federal judge ruled that the military violated the Posse Comitatus Act (PCA) by executing the nation’s criminal laws without an express statutory authority. The military, by acting as if they were police, manifested the fears that both the federalists and anti-federalists expressed prior to the Constitution’s ratification in 1787 and the concerns that compelled Congress to enact the PCA in 1878 following Reconstruction. In other words, every time a servicemember now guards a detained protestor, secures a perimeter around an I.C.E. facility, or uses non-lethal force to disperse crowds, he – along with his entire chain of command – commits a crime.
And what of the military lawyers who would be on the ground at a tactical headquarters advising commanders as they planned these law enforcement support operations? Secretary Hegseth has harbored an irrational animus toward “jagoffs” ever since he was a young Army National Guard captain assigned to an active-duty unit that has earned a reputation for gross violations of the rules of engagement and the laws of war. Since becoming Secretary of Defense, his animus has found multiple outlets: Not long after he was confirmed in office, Hegseth commissioned his own personal lawyer as a mid-grade Naval JAG officer to restructure how military lawyers function in the field. It is no coincidence that Hegseth plans to fill the DoJ’s shortage of immigration judges with hundreds of hastily-trained JAG officers. Almost certainly, these JAGs will be taken from units that would otherwise need them to craft rules for the use of force to regulate troops’ conduct in our streets and off our shores. This realignment of lawyers as America fights on two kinetic frontlines is either reckless and imprudent or deliberate and deceptive.
The second front’s theater of operations is the counter-narcoterrorism front.
We might call this the “The Actual War on Drugs” campaign. Since the beginning of September, the president has waged an overt military operation using “lethal kinetic strikes” against so-called narcoterrorists on small boats, allegedly operated by various Latin American cartels and gangs trafficking drugs through the Caribbean. After 19 attacks and at least 75 suspects killed, the Administration has yet to provide any evidence that these victims were in fact doing what Trump claimed. These attacks, equated by the Administration to two decades of strikes against terrorists in the Middle East, are not the subjects of any current litigation. The Administration has told Congress that this military campaign is necessary under a national “self-defense” theory because drug trafficking by these violent cartels is an “armed attack” and previous efforts by the Coast Guard have been insufficient. Moreover, Trump told Congress that he has “determined” that we are already in an armed conflict with these non-state armed groups, members of which the State Department designated as foreign terrorists. Trump has tried to soothe the skeptics through reassurances that each lethal kinetic strike is consistent with the laws of armed conflict – most importantly, that no noncombatant civilians are being deliberately targeted.
While courts have not addressed the legality of these attacks, nearly all experts in international law, military law, and presidential war powers agree that Trump’s arguments are specious and unconvincing. Neither has Congress authorized the military to embark on this campaign, nor does Article II of the Constitution present presidents with a blank check to use the military as they see fit simply because they unilaterally “determined” that an armed attack is afoot. Furthermore, not only are these cartels not “organized armed groups” within the meaning of international law, neither the individual traffickers nor the drugs themselves constitute an “armed attack.” This leaves no other legal classification for these criminals besides that of “civilian.” To target a civilian or civilian property (like the fast-boats) under the laws of armed conflict, the person must be “directly participating in hostilities” and the property must be used for military purposes – legal terms of art that under no legitimate reading have ever included illicit drug smuggling.
With no legal justification, these lethal strikes are nothing more than extrajudicial killings – murder, if you prefer the technical criminal law designation. So, even if the U.S. is in a true armed conflict with these groups as Trump has declared, the very laws that regulate military force in such conflicts should have functioned as roadblock to prevent these strikes. In other words, every time a missile is fired from a military-operated drone, piloted aircraft, or naval warship, servicemembers and their commanders are committing war crimes. This unrestrained use of lethal force after decades of training on rules of engagement and the laws of armed conflict is like gorging on frosted, crème-filled donuts after strictly observing a low-sugar diet for years. They probably knew it was wrong but couldn’t help themselves from falling off the wagon – in the military’s case, because the President and Secretary of Defense told them to and no lawyers stood in the way.
*****
These domestic deployment and Caribbean counter-drug fronts are just the external faces of the predicament in which the U.S. military leadership now finds itself. One common piece of professional knowledge nearly all of the generals and admirals at Hegseth’s Quantico conclave shared is a lesson taught by the Prussian war theorist Carl von Clausewitz. In his opus On War (1832), a book read and studied by every generation of senior American military leaders since Vietnam, Clausewitz wrote:
the first, the grandest, and most decisive act of judgment which the statesman and general exercises is rightly to understand in this respect the war in which he engages, not to take it for something, or to wish to make of it something which, by the nature of its relations, it is impossible for it to be.
The unique character of the three-front war at home, in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, and inside our armed forces is defined by several attributes: deceit, embellishment, and the fallacious legal framing of the threats by Trump and his civilian cabinet. Just as there is no “rebellion” in L.A. and Portland is not “war-ravaged,” the criminal cartels in the Caribbean are not attacking the U.S. and military lawyers are not “roadblocks.” Facts matter because they provide honest, good faith presidents with the justification for wielding the extraordinary emergency powers entrusted to them. Without those facts, wielding such powers is only an exercise in authoritarian lawlessness. Because I said so and because I can have replaced because there are no legal objections or because it’s the right thing to do as the common algorithm.
It is becoming increasingly impossible to ignore this character of the three-front war; most (and hopefully all) the generals and admirals in Hegseth’s audience rightly understood this. The question is how their professional judgment and ethos will influence what they do from here. The problem is that they have no good options left.
The character of the two external fronts opens the third front and requires the military to fight it. It is an identity crisis of honor and rectitude triggered by external pressures.
On the one hand, this internal conflict embodies a demanding presumption that military orders are legal and must be followed even if the recipient of the order disagrees with it on moral or professional expertise grounds. This is compounded by the military’s long-held duty to remain nonpartisan and tradition to execute the President’s domestic and foreign policy agendas. On the other hand, the military is equally obliged to remain stalwartly professional by giving the best possible advice to its civilian masters, to raise objections based on prudent judgment born from experience and expertise, to respect norms of civil-military relations, to retain the trust of the American people, and to husband its lethal resources for the day it might face genuine military threats. Above all, the military is sworn to support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America.
For the profession’s senior leaders, the clash between these two sets of duties is not at all surprising. And it places them on the horns of dilemma. If they choose to dissent from, disagree with, or disobey lawless or factually-unjustifiable commands, they risk being relieved or even prosecuted by court-martial. Even if not relieved or court-martialed, our military leaders face the ignominy of being targeted by the President’s vocal nongovernmental advisors, like Laura Loomer, now an ever-present shadow trailing those in uniform – especially those in positions of relative prominence in Washington, D.C. These risks are not hypothetical or exaggerated tales of purges from autocratic countries. As a warning shot to all, some senior officers were fired before they could even object to a command that might be unlawful; some were fired after they questioned the legality of proposed actions; and others were fired based on mere association with programs and policies favored by the Biden administration. Finally, to avoid the drama, some opted to retire.
But none have publicly resigned in principled protest despite the courageous stand some junior officers and many Justice Department and other senior career government officials have taken.
Several theories could explain this reticence to “put their stars on the table.” First, a senior military officer’s public resignation on principle is highly abnormal and would create a minor scandal itself – and no senior leader would wish to spotlight his career and subject his family to that scrutiny if it can be avoided. Second, they may view resignation as a retreat in the face of adversity. No general or admiral would ever do anything so cowardly and endanger the morale and cohesion of their organizations and units. Third, they may believe that their personal honor, integrity, and resolve have not yet been directly tested by this Administration but that when they are tested, they will stand up for what’s right at the risk of being relieved. No general or admiral believes they lack moral courage. Finally, following the example of General Mark Milley, they may believe they can better protect democratic norms, the professional reputation of the armed forces, and the assure compliance with the rule of law by working diligently from the inside.
But for those who remain, should they choose to sidestep those risks and continue to accept the character of this three-front war, something hard to recover is lost. They will be deceiving themselves into believing that putting troops in our streets and bombs on fast-boats are nothing more than two missions in an exhausting line of controversial and disagreeable military missions they have a duty to execute to their fullest abilities. They will continue to place American servicemembers in positions where they put fellow Americans in harm’s way or chill their constitutional rights, or where they kill foreign civilians in violation of the laws of armed conflict. They will ignore the fact that they and the troops pulling the triggers are committing crimes.
And aside from any criminal sanction they may face, their violations of federal law, the constitutional rights of Americans, and the laws of armed conflict will destroy the military’s professional legitimacy, dishonor and discredit them individually and likely taints the armed forces as a whole; and they create a new norm where the rule of law simply gives way to the rule of presidential dictate. Regardless of whether violent crime rates in our nation’s cities, illegal immigration, or illicit narcotics flowing into the U.S. drop to zero, the president’s tactical victories will not mask the strategic loss the military will suffer from being forced by its own commander in chief to choose between obeying his orders and acting in accordance with a professional ethos that includes good faith and honest effort to comply with the rule of law and honoring its oath to support and defend our Constitution.
By even fighting on these fronts, the military will lose its war within.
*****
If there is any winner of this three-front war, it will only be President Trump. The military will see its public esteem, credibility, and trust on the domestic front slip away. Internationally, committing war crimes on the high seas will erode any semblance of moral high ground and legitimacy the U.S. military needs when it trains and exhorts partner nations to fight honorably by complying with the laws of armed conflict. Our military’s behavior may also encourage America’s enemies to forsake compliance with the laws of armed conflict, thereby putting American civilians at greater risk of being attacked and denying captured American servicemembers the legal protections to which they are entitled as prisoners of war.
Trump is a second-term president who is immune from domestic criminal accountability and unlikely to ever face any international tribunal. His aggressive wielding of the military in ways that break norms, break laws, and break trust really matters. It will undoubtedly satisfy his own belief about his constitutional powers and satisfy his urge to demonstrate strength. But for every norm and law he breaks, Trump creates a new precedent that will be hard to reject by future presidents in either party and he leaves the armed forces he superintends diminished for this show of force.
This leaves Americans with only a few legitimate options: voters can reject the party that enables this three-front war at the election booths; Congress can exercise its constitutional powers over national security to reign in an out-of-control Department of Defense by wielding its power of the purse, closing loopholes in the statutes that grant presidents extraordinary authority to use the military in emergencies, and protecting the roles of military lawyers; courts can follow the rule of law and hold the executive branch accountable for its abuses of power, rejecting manufactured facts and rejecting claims that a president’s decisions are unreviewable; troops can raise objections to orders that seem unlawful and disobey illegal orders; senior uniformed leaders can resign in protest and explain in public why their principles demanded that recourse.
There is another irony here. The military is meant to protect the United States and its people; but Trump’s three-front war leaves the military largely unable to protect itself from the commander in chief’s follies and authoritarianism – only civilians and the other two co-equal branches of government can now support and defend the Constitution and, with it, the military’s professional soul.
Will they?