▲ Crossroads in Minneapolis where George Floyd was stopped by local police [Fibonacci Blue].

COMMENTARY / Salvador Sánchez Tapia [Brigadier General (Res.)].

In a controversial public statement on 2 June, US President Donald Trump threatened to deploy armed forces units to contain riots sparked by the death of African-American George Floyd at the hands of a police officer in Minnesota, and to maintain law and order if they escalate in violence.

Regardless of the seriousness of the event, and beyond the fact that the incident has been politicised and is being employee used as a platform for expressing rejection of Trump's presidency, the possibility raised by the president poses an almost unprecedented challenge to civil-military relations in the United States.

For reasons rooted in its pre-independence past, the United States maintains a certain caution against the possibility that armed forces can be used domestically against citizens by whoever holds power. For this reason, when the Founding Fathers drafted the Constitution, while authorising the congress to organise and maintain armies, they explicitly limited their funding to a maximum of two years.

Against this backdrop, and against the background of the tension between the Federation and the states, American legislation has tried to limit the employment of the Armed Forces in domestic tasks. Thus, since 1878, the Posse Comitatus Since 1878, for example, the Armed Forces Act has limited the possibility of using them to carry out law and order missions that the states, including the National Guard, are responsible for carrying out with their own resources.

One of the exceptions to this rule is the Insurrection Act of 1807, invoked precisely by President Trump as an argument in favour of the legality of a possible decision by employment. This is despite the fact that this law is restrictive in spirit, as it requires the cooperation of the states in its application, and because it is designed for extreme cases in which the states are unable, or unwilling, to maintain order, circumstances that do not seem applicable to the case at hand.

The controversial nature of advertisement is attested to by the fact that voices as authoritative and so little inclined to publicly break its neutrality as that of Lieutenant General (ret.) James Mattis, Secretary of Defence of the Trump Administration until his premature removal in December 2018, or Lieutenant General (ret.) Martin Dempsey, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff between 2011 and 2015, have spoken out against it. ) Martin Dempsey, head of the board Chiefs of Staff between 2011 and 2015, have spoken out against this employment, joining the statements made by former presidents as disparate as George W. Bush and Barack Obama, or those of the Secretary of Defence himself, Mark Esper, whose position against the possibility of using the Armed Forces in this status has recently been made clear.

The presidential advertisement has opened up a crisis in the usually stable US civil-military relations (CMR). Beyond the scope of the United States, the profound question, which affects the very core of CMR in a democratic state, is none other than whether or not it is appropriate to use the armed forces in public order or, in a broader sense, domestic tasks, and the risks associated with such a decision.

In the 1990s, Michael C. Desch, one of the leading authorities in the field of CMR, identified the correlation between the missions entrusted to the armed forces by a state and the quality of its civil-military relations, concluding that foreign-oriented military missions are the most conducive to healthy CMR, while non-military domestic missions are likely to generate various CMR pathologies.

Generally speaking, the existence of armed forces in any state is primarily motivated by the need to protect the state against any threat from outside. employment In order to carry out such a high task with guarantees, armies are equipped and trained for the lethal use of force, unlike police forces, which are equipped and trained for a minimal and gradual use of force, which only becomes lethal in the most extreme, exceptional cases. In the first case, it is a matter of confronting an armed enemy intent on destroying one's own forces. In the second, force is used to confront citizens who may, in some cases, use violence, but who remain, after all, compatriots.

When military forces are employed in tasks of this nature, there is always a risk that they will produce a response in accordance with their training, which may be excessive in a law and order scenario. The consequences, in such a case, can be very negative. In the worst case, and above all other considerations, the employment may result in a perhaps avoidable loss of life. Moreover, from the CMR's point of view, the soldiers that the nation submission has for its external defence could become, in the eyes of the public, the enemies of those they are supposed to defend.

The damage this can do to civil-military relations, to national defence and to the quality of a state's democracy is difficult to measure, but it can be intuited if one considers that, in a democratic system, the armed forces cannot live without the support of their fellow citizens, who see them as a beneficial force for the nation and to whose members they extend their recognition as its loyal and selfless servants.

The abuse of employment of the armed forces in domestic tasks can also deteriorate their already complex preparation, weakening them for the execution of the missions for which they were conceived. It may also end up conditioning their organisation and equipment to the detriment, once again, of their essential tasks.

On the other hand, and although today we are far from such a scenario, this employment could gradually lead to a progressive expansion of the tasks of the Armed Forces, which would extend their control over purely civilian activities and see their range of tasks increasingly broadened, displacing other agencies in their execution, which could, undesirably, atrophy.

In such a scenario, the military institution could cease to be perceived as a disinterested actor and come to be seen as a competitor with particular interests, and with a capacity for control that it could use to its own advantage, even if this were at odds with the nation's interest. Such a status would, over time, lead hand in hand to the politicisation of the armed forces, from which would follow another damage to WRCs that is difficult to quantify.

Decisions such as President Trump's may ultimately place members of the armed forces in the grave moral dilemma of using force against their fellow citizens, or disobeying the president's orders. Because of its seriousness, therefore, the decision to commit the armed forces to such tasks should be taken exceptionally and after careful consideration.

It is difficult to determine whether President Trump's advertisement was merely a product of his temperament or whether, on the contrary, it contained a real intention to use the armed forces in the unrest sweeping the country, in a decision that has not occurred since 1992. In any case, the President, and those advising him, must assess the damage that could be done to civil-military relations and, therefore, to the American democratic system. This is without forgetting, moreover, the responsibility that rests on America's shoulders in the face of the reality that a part of humanity looks to the country as a reference letter and model to imitate.