Well, the nation survived a military parade on Saturday without collapsing into dictatorship. For all the concern about staging the event on the president’s birthday, tanks rolled through the streets of our nation’s capital without feeling oppressive. And the reason—whatever President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s intentions—was the endearing earnestness of our nation’s Army. This wasn’t an army of occupation, it was citizen soldiers trying to connect with our broader society.
This was a military parade in which smiling soldiers waved to the crowd through open tank turrets. It had a tribute to the Transport Corps featuring tow trucks. It celebrated wars fought and battles won, but also George Washington, Buffalo Soldiers, the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, and the protection of the Little Rock Nine as they went to school. It emphasized the renamed Fort Cavazos several times rather than terming it Fort Hood. Music included protest songs like Credence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son.”
Rather than feeling like a boot tramping down in support of authoritarianism, the parade felt far more like the Army’s “Twilight Tattoo” events, annual birthday celebrations that highlight the service’s history. And everyone could see that our Army is no match for the parade performance of the militaries of China and North Korea. But as one commentator on Bluesky put it: “listen if you want troops to march in step and have a dazzling parade, ours are bad at it. if you want a Burger King anywhere on the globe in 48 hours though, they got you.” Ours is an Army of logisticians and global combat power, not synchronized swimmers.
I was bracing for President Trump to behave badly, as he had at Fort Bragg last week, at the West Point commencement, at Arlington Cemetery on Memorial Day, trying to characterize our Army as his Army, and delivering inappropriate political commentary in a military setting. But Trump surprised me. He saluted the passing units, made brief remarks delivered unconvincingly, and mostly looked bored with the proceedings.
The worst part was the sponsorships. They were unseemly, coming mostly from defense contractors or companies reinforcing the perception of paying for presidential favors. But I was expecting much worse.
As a veteran summed it up on Bluesky, “It was refreshingly boring. Routine. Deliberate. Anticlimactic. Thousands of young men & women in uniform, many smiling & waving, was reassuring in a genuine way. The military is just our sons & daughters. Today America connected a little more with its Soldiers. For the good.”
This is the saving grace of our Army: the earnestness with which our soldiers almost always try to do the right thing. Lots of postmortems on the parade are gleefully criticizing the desultory marching, or presuming they marched badly as a political protest, or celebrating the contrast of civic protests around the country with the “low energy” of the parade, jeeringly terming it the Cybertruck or New Coke of parades. Please don’t do that to our Army. Our elected politicians put them in the position of conflating a civic celebration with a political one. As Will Selber wrote, the president is attempting to merge his legitimacy with the military’s. Don’t do it for him.
Politicians will attempt to associate themselves with the military for as long as the military remains more popular than politicians (so, likely forever). President Joe Biden gave a blistering political speech with Marine guards posted behind him, and practically everybody running for office tries to associate themselves with the military. What is different is that Trump and his allies in the executive branch and in Congress are corroding the good order and discipline of our military in the process. They are appointing and confirming people drummed out of military service to civilian positions in the Department of Defense. They are pardoning servicemen convicted at courts martial, even for war crimes. They are holding up military promotions to protest executive branch policies, penalizing officers for following legal orders by the previous administration, requiring promotable officers to take positions on issues like critical race theory about which the military knows next to nothing. They are aggressively attempting to expand executive authority to employ the military for law enforcement. And they are openly calling for violence by our military against fellow citizens. These are all dangerous.
It’s a struggle to keep perspective on what is genuinely dangerous when the Trump administration is committing so many excesses. But as the civil-military scholar Dr. Heidi Urben likes to say, the longest running war the U.S. military doesn’t want to fight is the culture war. The appropriate role for our military in politics is inertness. We need a military that tries as hard as ours does to stay out of the political fray. We can help them do that by not rewarding that behavior by our politicians, and not blaming our military for the politicians’ behavior.
