**Left:** President Donald Trump speaks during the 81st United Nations General Assembly at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City, Sept. 22, 2026. Photo by Brendan Smialowski/Pool via Reuters

Author's note: Vote. Elections matter, and November matters as much as any election in our lifetimes. This article is my effort to accurately appraise the information environment so that we can have an effective response. Hope that isn’t tied to facts and quality intelligence is dangerous, and it actively harms efforts for an effective response. The military won’t save us. Knowing that tells us where to put our energy: our governors, who command the National Guard, and the people who count and certify the vote in November. That’s where my hope is, and it’s why this article ends with a call to action.

On Aug. 31, Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, answered a letter from Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan. The Joint Force has “no plans to send Federal military personnel” to polling places during the November midterms, he wrote, and he had “neither received nor anticipate receiving any unlawful order” about the election. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth received the same request from Slotkin and has not answered it.

The question comes up in group chats and family dinners and late-night conversations between people who are scared. Will the military stop him. Will they refuse if he orders something truly unconscionable. Will they choose the Constitution over the commander in chief.

The answer is almost certainly that they will abandon the Constitution and democracy. The research tells us exactly why.

I served in the Air Force, and when people ask whether the military will save us, I don’t need to guess. But my experience is one data point. The most valuable thing a scientific hypothesis can offer is predictive power: it tells you what will happen in a case nobody has studied yet, and it turns out to be right. Researchers earn that standard in stages. They map trends across every case they can find and record which conditions appear together, then test which of those pairings are causes and which are coincidence.

In 2018, a team led by Aurel Croissant, a political scientist at Heidelberg University, did that work on militaries. They published a study in the Journal of Democracy of 40 “dictator’s endgames” from 1946 to 2014, the cases in which an authoritarian leader faced nonviolent mass protests and the military had to choose sides. Their conclusion was blunt: “In nonviolent mass protests against dictators, the military is the ultimate arbiter of regime survival.”

In 19 of those cases, the military stayed loyal and helped crush the population. In the other 21, the military either defected to the protesters or, six times, staged a coup of its own.

The study covered dictatorships, and the United States is a democracy whose president is testing how far the armed forces will go for him. That narrows the question to one the study can answer: what makes officers refuse. Croissant and his co-authors, David Kuehn and Tanja Eschenauer, found that “militaries who have not engaged in gross human rights abuses before the endgame have relatively less to fear” from the regime’s fall. Militaries implicated in atrocities were far more likely to stay loyal, because officers whose conduct would be exposed under a new government protect the old one.

Factually speaking, the U.S. military has committed human rights abuses frequently for decades. My Lai, where soldiers killed more than 500 Vietnamese civilians and the one officer convicted, Lt. William Calley, served three and a half years of house arrest. The secret bombing of Cambodia. Abu Ghraib, where soldiers photographed themselves torturing prisoners. Guantanamo, which remains open today. Twenty years of drone strikes on wedding parties and funerals and first responders.

There is no decade without atrocities. There is no administration with clean hands, and almost none of it was punished.

The boat strikes in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific meet the study’s condition. This administration ordered them. Marine Col. Paul Meagher, the senior lawyer at U.S. Southern Command, warned the strikes could amount to extrajudicial killings before they began, and lawyers at the Justice Department overruled him. The campaign resumed in August after a two-month pause, and Southern Command now counts at least 223 people killed. The officers who carried out those strikes have the most to fear if the administration that ordered them loses power.

Admiral Alvin Holsey commanded Southern Command until he questioned the legality of the strikes. According to The Wall Street Journal, Hegseth told him: “You’re either on the team or you’re not. When you get an order, you move out fast and don’t ask questions.” Holsey retired one year into his command. He later told lawmakers in a classified briefing that his retirement was unrelated to the strikes.

Some people point to officials who held the line. James Schlesinger reportedly told commanders in Nixon’s final days to check with him before acting on White House orders. Mark Milley made back-channel calls to China. Mark Esper publicly opposed invoking the Insurrection Act during the 2020 protests, and James Mattis resigned and later called Trump a threat to the Constitution.

None of these men refused a direct order. Schlesinger’s instruction was never tested, and Milley later said he never received an illegal order from Trump. Esper was fired. Mattis wrote a statement. When the system faced pressure, it produced private concerns and departures, and it never produced institutional resistance.

Hegseth is removing even that friction. By November 2025, he had fired or sidelined at least two dozen generals and admirals, The New York Times reported, including Gen. C.Q. Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to serve as Chief of Naval Operations. He removed the judge advocates general of all three military departments, the lawyers who advise commanders on whether an order is lawful. He ordered a 20 percent cut in four-star generals and admirals.

At a gathering of senior officers at Quantico in September 2025, Hegseth told them that if his words made their hearts sink, “you should do the honorable thing and resign.” Two people told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg that Trump said he needed “the kind of generals that Hitler had.” Trump denied it.

This year, one senior officer did refuse. For months, Gen. Randy George, the Army chief of staff, and Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll refused to remove four officers, two Black men and two women, from a list for promotion to one-star general, The New York Times reported. In April, Hegseth forced George out in the middle of the war with Iran.

When six Democratic members of Congress reminded troops in November 2025 that they can refuse illegal orders, Trump called it “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH.” Hegseth censured Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, a retired Navy captain, and moved to cut his retirement rank and pay. In February, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon blocked the demotion, writing that Hegseth had “trampled on Senator Kelly’s First Amendment freedoms.”

Some will point to a June 2025 poll of 818 active-duty troops by the Human Security Lab at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which found that four in five understand their duty to disobey unlawful orders. The same poll asked troops whether they would follow an order to drop a nuclear bomb on a civilian city. Among those who got that question first, 69 percent said they would obey.

What matters is what happened to Hugh Thompson, the helicopter pilot who stopped the My Lai massacre by positioning his aircraft between American soldiers and Vietnamese civilians. Thompson was called a traitor and received death threats. The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee said he should be court-martialed, and the Army didn’t acknowledge what he did for 30 years. The system protects those who comply. It destroys those who resist.

If you think they wouldn’t do it here, to Americans: at Kent State on May 4, 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen fired 67 rounds into a crowd of unarmed students in 13 seconds, killing four and wounding nine. No one was convicted.

Since June 2025, the administration has sent troops into American cities. Los Angeles received 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 active-duty Marines over the governor’s objection, and U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer ruled that the deployment violated federal law. At Quantico, Trump proposed using American cities as “training grounds for our military.”

The National Guard Bureau ordered every state to build quick reaction forces totaling more than 23,000 troops, trained in crowd control. Trump’s response to legal challenges was a Cabinet meeting declaration: “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States.”

In a January interview with The New York Times, Trump said he regretted not having the National Guard seize voting machines after the 2020 election. Federal law makes it a crime to station “troops or armed men at any place where a general or special election is held.” In December 2025, the Supreme Court refused to let the administration deploy Guard troops into Illinois over the governor’s objection. Of the House seats rated competitive by Inside Elections, 38 of 60 are in states with Democratic governors, according to Votebeat.

Caine’s letter to Slotkin reads like Milley’s statement. A general who says he has no plans and has received no unlawful order has refused nothing. Caine was Trump’s choice to replace Brown, and the officers who would receive an order in November serve under Hegseth.

The conditions that predict defection do not exist here. Leadership has been replaced with loyalists. Legal advisors have been purged. The military benefits from this regime and is being empowered by it.

If you are waiting for the military to save us, you will wait forever.

So who is left? Each other. The people who will protect our communities are the people already in them. Mutual aid. Local organizing. City and state-level resistance where possible. Pressure on your governor, who commands your state’s National Guard, and on the officials who will run the election in November.

The military will not choose the Constitution. They will follow orders. The history says so. The structure says so. Everything happening these last two years says so. The science says so. The only variable that matters now is what we do with that knowledge.

So if you’re asking yourself “this is all horrible, what do I do about it?”

The Existentialist Republic has good news. We are not helpless in the face of autocratic consolidation, you have tremendous power and change for the better can happen.

At the bottom of this article you’ll find a quick Call to Action, and below that you’ll find The Existentialist Republic library which is full of free training materials, resources, and much more. Take a look if you have a moment.

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CALL TO ACTION

Who you are contacting and how

Contact your governor. You can find your governor’s email, phone number and mailing address through USA.gov’s directory of state governors. Email, call, send a free fax through FaxZero, or print a letter and mail it.

What you are asking for

Ask your governor to publicly commit, before the Nov. 3 election, that your state’s National Guard will not be sent to any polling place, ballot drop box, counting center or election office, in your state or any other state, and to turn down any federal request to use the Guard for an election mission.

What that is

Each state’s National Guard answers to its governor unless the president federalizes it. The federal laws against troops at polling places are written for federal forces. In 2025, Republican governors sent their Guard troops to Washington, D.C. when the administration asked.

How to write it

Use your own words. Form letters don’t work, and identical messages get counted once, so don’t copy and paste this text. Say who you are and where you vote, why this matters to you, the commitment you want and the deadline, Nov. 3. If you call, cover the same points.