President Donald Trump has gotten his way and will oversee a military parade in Washington, D.C., this summer on the Army’s birthday, which also happens to be his own. Plans call for nearly 7,000 troops to march through the streets as 50 helicopters buzz overhead and tanks chew up the pavement. One option has the president presiding from a viewing stand on Constitution Avenue as the Army’s parachute team lands to present him with an American flag.
The prospect of all this martial pomp, scheduled for June 14, has elicited criticism from many quarters. Some of it is fair—this president does not shy away from celebrating himself or flexing executive power, and the parade could be seen as an example of both—but some of it is misguided. Trump has a genius for showmanship, and showcasing the American military can be, and should be, a patriotic celebration.
The president wanted just such a tribute during his first term, after seeing France’s impressive Bastille Day celebrations. Then–Secretary of Defense James Mattis reportedly refused, effectively threatening to resign by telling the president to ask his next secretary of defense. Three secretaries of defense later, Trump has gotten enthusiastic agreement from current Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Criticism of the display begins with its price tag, estimated as high as $45 million. The projected outlay comes at a time of draconian budget cuts elsewhere: “Cutting cancer research while wasting money on this? Shameful,” Republicans Against Trump posted on X. “Peanuts compared to the value of doing it,” Trump replied when asked about the expense. “We have the greatest missiles in the world. We have the greatest submarines in the world. We have the greatest army tanks in the world. We have the greatest weapons in the world. And we’re going to celebrate it.”
Other prominent critics of the Trump administration have expressed concern that the parade’s real purpose is to use the military to intimidate the president’s critics. The historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote on her Substack, “Trump’s aspirations to authoritarianism are showing today in the announcement that there will be a military parade on Trump’s 79th birthday.” Ron Filipkowski, the editor in chief of the progressive media company MeidasTouch, posted, “The Fuhrer wants a Nuremberg style parade on his birthday.” Experts on civil-military relations in the United States also expressed consternation. “Having tanks rolling down streets of the capital doesn’t look like something consistent with the tradition of a professional, highly capable military,” the scholar Risa Brooks told The New York Times. “It looks instead like a military that is politicized and turning inwardly, focusing on domestic-oriented adversaries instead of external ones.” Even the military leadership has been chary. During Trump’s first term, then–Joint Chiefs of Staff Vice Chairman Paul Selva reflected that military parades are “what dictators do.”
But these critics may well be projecting more general concerns about Trump onto a parade. Not everything the Trump administration does is destructive to democracy—and the French example suggests that dictatorships are not the only governments to hold military displays. The U.S. itself has been known to mount victory parades after successful military campaigns. In today’s climate, a military parade could offer an opportunity to counter misperceptions about the armed forces. It could bring Americans closer to service members and juice military recruitment—all of which is sorely needed.
The American military is shrinking, not due to a policy determination about the size of the force needed, but because the services cannot recruit enough Americans to defend the country. In 2022, 77 percent of American youth did not qualify for military service, for reasons that included physical or mental-health problems, misconduct, inaptitude, being overweight, abuse of drugs or alcohol, or being a dependent. Just 9 percent of Americans ages of 16 to 24 (a prime recruitment window) are even interested in signing up. In 2023, only the Marine Corps and Space Force met their recruiting goals; the Army and Navy recruited less than 70 percent of their goals and fell 41,000 recruits short of sustaining their current force. Recruiting picked up dramatically in 2024 but remains cause for concern.
One possible reason for this is that most Americans have little exposure to men and women in uniform. Less than 0.5 percent of Americans are currently serving in the military—and many who do so live, shop, and worship on cordoned military bases. Misperceptions about military service are therefore rife. One is that the U.S. military primarily recruits from minority groups and the poor. In fact, 17 percent of the poorest quintile of Americans serve, as do 12 percent of the richest quintile. The rest of the military is from middle-income families. Those who live near military bases and come from military families are disproportionately represented. The Army’s polling indicates that concerns about being injured, killed, or suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder are major impediments to recruitment. Women worry that they will be sexually harassed or assaulted (the known figures on this in the U.S. military are 6.2 percent of women and 0.7 percent of men). Additionally, a Wall Street Journal–NORC poll found that far fewer American adults considered patriotism important in 2023 (23 percent) than did in 1998 (70 percent)—another possible reason that enthusiasm for joining up has dampened.
A celebratory parade could be helpful here, and it does not have to set the country on edge. Americans seem comfortable with thanking military men and women for their service, having them pre-board airplanes, applauding them at sporting events, and admiring military-aircraft flybys. None of those practices is suspected of corroding America’s democracy or militarizing its society. Surely the nation can bear up under a military parade once every decade or two, especially if the parade serves to reconnect veterans of recent wars, who often—rightly—grumble that the country tends to disown its wars as matters of concern to only those who serve in them.
The risk, of course, is that Trump will use the occasion not to celebrate the troops but to corrode their professionalism by proclaiming them his military and his generals. This is, after all, the president who claimed that Dan Caine, his nominee to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wore a MAGA hat and attested his willingness to kill for Trump, all of which Caine denies. This is also a president known to mix politics with honoring the military, as he did in Michigan, at Arlington National Cemetery, at West Point’s commencement, and in a Memorial Day post on Truth Social calling his opponents “scum.”
Even so, the commander in chief has a right to engage with the military that Americans elected him to lead. The responsibility of the military—and of the country—is to look past the president’s hollow solipsism and embrace the men and women who defend the United States.
Being from a military family or living near a military base has been shown to predispose people toward military service. This suggests that the more exposure people have to the military, the likelier they are to serve in it. A big celebration of the country’s armed forces—with static displays on the National Mall afterward, and opportunities for soldiers to mix with civilians—could familiarize civilians with their armed forces and, in doing so, draw talented young Americans to serve.
A version of this essay originally appeared on AEIdeas from the American Enterprise Institute.
