Charles Q. Brown, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who was fired by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in February 2025, published an op-ed in Foreign Affairs on Friday arguing that using the armed forces for domestic law enforcement missions risks diverting the military from its core purpose. The piece lands as the Trump administration has deployed thousands of National Guard troops and hundreds of Marines to cities including Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles to crack down on crime.
Brown co-authored the essay with Duke political science professor Peter Feaver and North Carolina lawyer Andrew Kragie. The three writers did not name President Trump or any current administration official in a critical capacity, CNN reported. But the target of their argument is unmistakable.
The op-ed frames the issue as a matter of institutional survival. When presidents send troops to handle tasks that civilian agencies should manage, the authors wrote, the military gets pulled away from the mission it exists to perform, and the civilian failures that created the problem in the first place go unaddressed.
Brown, Feaver, and Kragie wrote in Foreign Affairs:
"(W)hen presidents use the armed forces for more politically contentious missions, such as addressing domestic crime in cities, the work of the military becomes more fraught."
They went further, warning that leaning on uniformed personnel to fill gaps left by broken civilian institutions carries real costs. The op-ed stated that "resorting to a military solution rather than fixing the underlying incapacity or dysfunction in civilian institutions diverts the military from focusing on its primary combat mission."
The sharpest line drew a boundary around what the armed forces should and should not be asked to do:
"And... it is not the military's job to save the republic from political impasses. Indeed, if you ask too much of the military, you risk the entire enterprise."
That phrase, "you risk the entire enterprise", is the kind of language a retired four-star general does not use lightly. Whether one agrees with Brown's framing or not, the claim deserves scrutiny on its merits rather than dismissal based on the messenger's circumstances.
Brown and Admiral Lisa Franchetti, then the chief of the Navy and the first woman to serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were both fired in February 2025. The dismissals came as the Trump administration banned diversity and inclusion efforts across the military and the broader federal government. CNN's reporting does not attribute the firings explicitly to the DEI ban, but it presents the two events in close proximity.
Brown was the second Black man to serve as America's most senior general. His removal, alongside Franchetti's, fit a pattern of personnel changes across the Pentagon that have drawn both praise and concern. Hegseth has made clear his vision for a military focused on lethality over ideology, telling West Point cadets the force should be defined by combat readiness, not social programming.
At the Aspen Ideas Festival last week, Brown pushed back on the wave of dismissals. He told the audience that the removals had moved beyond questions of performance.
"What's starting to happen now is not about merit."
He added that experienced leaders were being removed and questioned the effect on those still serving: "It's important we understand that all these people that are being removed are very well experienced and my concern is that the impact it has on those that are still continuing to serve." He asked plainly, "Are they going to have a fair opportunity to advance in their career going forth?"
Those are fair questions, but they also come from a man with an obvious personal stake in the answer. Brown's credibility on this point depends on whether the firings were genuinely merit-blind or whether the administration had defensible reasons it has not fully articulated.
Hegseth offered his own defense of the military's domestic role on Thursday, pointing to the National Guard's presence in Washington amid protesters. He rejected the idea that the deployments carried any ideological freight.
"They can't see law and order and common sense in front of them, that there's nothing ideological about this group, there's nothing political about this exercise."
He added: "Law and order is something all Americans deserve."
Hegseth called the protesters "ingrates", a characterization that will strike many taxpayers and law-abiding residents as blunt but not unreasonable, depending on the circumstances. CNN's report does not specify who the protesters were or what they were protesting, which makes it difficult to evaluate the label.
The broader question Hegseth's comments raise is whether deploying the military to restore order in American cities amounts to a political mission or a legitimate exercise of federal authority when local leadership has failed to keep residents safe. Congressional Republicans have pressed Hegseth on Pentagon priorities in recent hearings, and the domestic deployment question sits squarely within that debate.
Brown's op-ed carefully avoids direct confrontation. It mentions both Trump and former President Biden as having "looked to the military to play a leading role in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic," spreading the critique across administrations. The essay also pivots to America's 250th anniversary and the meaning of patriotism, calling it a moment to "rejuvenate the national interdependence that our founders proclaimed along with independence."
That bipartisan framing is diplomatic. It is also somewhat misleading. The scale and nature of the current domestic deployments, thousands of Guard troops and hundreds of Marines in major American cities, goes well beyond pandemic logistics. Brown knows this. His op-ed reads less like a balanced historical essay and more like a carefully lawyered objection to a specific administration's specific decisions, wrapped in enough generality to avoid a direct fight.
The deeper tension here is real, though, and conservatives should not wave it away. The military's strength rests on its distance from partisan politics. Every president who uses troops for domestic purposes, whether to enforce desegregation orders, respond to riots, or patrol city streets, tests that distance. The question is not whether the president has the legal authority. The question is whether the mission is worth the institutional cost.
When cities like Washington and Los Angeles cannot or will not maintain public safety, the federal government faces a genuine dilemma. Residents in those cities deserve protection. But Brown's core point, that sending troops to compensate for broken civilian institutions leaves the underlying dysfunction untouched, is not wrong on its face. The administration's willingness to remove senior military leaders it views as misaligned with its priorities is well documented. The question is whether the replacements and the missions they are being handed will produce a more capable force or a more politically entangled one.
For all its careful language, the op-ed sidesteps the reason troops are in American cities in the first place. Crime surged in several major metros during and after the pandemic. Progressive prosecutors declined to enforce laws. Local officials in some cities openly resisted federal immigration enforcement. When civilian institutions fail not because of incapacity but because of ideological choice, the calculus changes.
Brown writes that "service to a cause greater than oneself, a virtue cultivated in military training, is accessible to all regardless of whether they wear the uniform." That is true. It is also true that the mayors and district attorneys who let their cities slide into disorder owe their residents the same standard of service. Hegseth has told West Point graduates they belong to "an army of warriors," not a social experiment, and the administration's domestic deployments flow from the same logic: if local leaders will not protect their people, someone must.
Whether that someone should be the United States military is a legitimate debate. Brown has earned the right to participate in it, even if his timing, months after his own firing, invites skepticism about his motives.
The op-ed does not identify specific Trump administration policies or officials by name in a critical capacity. It does not specify which legal authorities govern the current deployments. And it does not grapple with the political failures that created the vacuum the military is now being asked to fill. Those omissions matter.
Brown's essay and his Aspen remarks together paint a picture of a retired general worried about the force he once led. He sees experienced officers being removed, domestic missions expanding, and a military increasingly asked to do work that belongs to civilian agencies. Those concerns are not frivolous.
But neither is the administration's argument. American cities that refuse to enforce their own laws create a vacuum. Somebody fills it. If local officials want the military out of their streets, the fastest path is to do their own jobs.
A retired general warning about overreach deserves a hearing. So do the taxpayers and residents living with the consequences of cities that stopped enforcing the law long before a single guardsman showed up.