When the Military Comes to American Soil Domestic deployments have generally been quite restrained. Can they still be?

“In the past, military deployments have been forgotten because the wave of unrest broke gently. This time, however, the wave may crash violently,” Joshua Braver writes:

Come for the dire analysis of civil-military breakdowns—
Stay for the scenes where Abbie Hoffman successfully negotiates permits to levitate the Pentagon, make it spin, turn orange, and exorcise its demons. Then 2,500 protesters try to break into the Pentagon!

When the Military Comes to American Soil Domestic deployments have generally been quite restrained. Can they still be?

If we lose the norms that kept domestic troop deployments from becoming disasters, we may not be so lucky next time.
I explain more here: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Today? Both the public and the elites are polarized. The expert class is more distrusted. The systems that kept past troop deployments from spiraling—planning, legal caution, expert input—aren’t guaranteed.
They were built by consensus. And that consensus is breaking down.

But something deeper has changed, too.
In the 1960s, the public was divided—but the elites who planned these deployments shared norms, and they trusted expert advice.

Today, those guardrails are slipping.
Marines—combat troops, not military police—are now being deployed alone in Los Angeles. That’s a big shift. Marines weren’t used for these missions before, and for good reason: they’re trained to win battles, not manage civil unrest.

It came from careful planning, bipartisan consensus, and the central role of military police—not front-line combat troops.
The goal was to de-escalate, not dominate.

When the Military Comes to American Soil Domestic deployments have generally been quite restrained. Can they still be?

Between 1957 and 1968, there were eight deployments of active-duty troops on U.S. soil. Only one ended in a civilian death.

Today, the guardrails keeping those deployments nonlethal are eroding as I explain in the Atlantic. 🧵

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Opinion | The Military May Find Itself in an Impossible Situation in Los Angeles Law and ethics can be at odds.

See my piece at NyTimes arguing that military officers on the ground in Los Angeles are in an impossible bind. They may have to decide whether to disobey lawful but unethical orders, unethical in the sense that it violates their professional code.

www.nytimes.com/2025/06/11/o...

Opinion | The Military May Find Itself in an Impossible Situation in Los Angeles (Gift Article) Law and ethics can be at odds.

Congrats to @joshuabraver.bsky.social @law.wisc.edu for making the home page of @nytimes.com for posing a question tied to this week’s highest profile national story — www.nytimes.com/2025/06/11/o...