Who Will the Military and Police Follow in an American Civil War?
When America Breaks, Episode 3. We explore what an American Civil War will look like if it were to happen.
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Militaries do not come apart in an afternoon, and they never have, including this one.
You are a staff sergeant in a National Guard unit. It is two in the morning and you have been standing in a parking lot for three hours. An order comes down that does not sit right with you. There is no lawyer beside you. Your platoon leader is twenty-four years old and looks like he is about to be sick. The men on either side of you are watching to see what you do, and you have about eleven seconds to decide. Everything in this piece comes back to that sergeant. The question is not which side the armed forces will pick. It is what he does at two in the morning, multiplied by a few hundred thousand men.
How the Army actually split in 1861
In June of 1860 the United States Army had about 1,080 officers and roughly 14,900 enlisted men. When the Southern states began leaving, 286 of those officers resigned or were dismissed and went into Confederate service. Of the 824 West Point graduates on the active list, 184 went south. The Navy lost 373 officers out of about 1,554.
Now the number nobody quotes. Out of nearly 15,000 enlisted men, roughly 26 violated their oaths and went south. Twenty-six.
Why the enormous gap? Because officers held commissions they could resign and enlisted men had no legal way out. The enlisted force stayed intact for the entire war. The fracture ran through the officer corps and through families, and it never ran along a map. Winfield Scott and George Thomas were both Virginians and both stayed with the Union. John Pemberton was born in Philadelphia and took a Confederate commission. Robert E. Lee was offered field command of the Union army and turned it down, and you can go read his resignation letter at the National Archives today.
Geography did not decide it and neither did politics. Individual men decided it, one at a time, and nobody could have predicted the outcome from a map of where they were born.
Spain, 1936
The better model for a modern institutional split is Spain, and almost nobody covering this subject uses it.
Peninsular Spain was divided into eight military districts. Of the eight district commanders, exactly one was part of the conspiracy against the government, and three of the eight district chiefs of staff were involved. The plot was not run by generals. It was run by mid-level line officers expected to seize their own garrisons and either overpower their seniors or talk them into coming along. In Madrid and Barcelona the uprising collapsed inside two days because local security forces stayed put and the other side moved first. In Navarre and western Andalucia it succeeded for the same reason in reverse. The Army of Africa, sitting in Morocco, went over as one intact formation, and that single unit tipped the balance of the entire war.
Soldiers do not split as individuals. They split as units, and what decides a unit is the local commander, the men immediately around him, and who moves first in the first forty-eight hours.
Your neighbor in the Guard is not going to sit at his kitchen table and reason his way through the Constitution. He is going to be standing in that parking lot, and the formation is going where the man in front of it takes it. Nothing about that is an insult to him. A military is designed to work exactly that way, and if it were not, it would be useless to all of us.
The two oaths
Enlisted personnel swear to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, to bear true faith and allegiance to the same, and to obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over them, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Commissioned officers swear to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, to bear true faith and allegiance to the same, to take the obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and to well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office.
Read them twice. The officer’s oath contains no clause about obeying the President. None, and it never has. An officer’s sworn obligation runs to the document and not to the man holding the office.
Somebody is going to take that and run straight off a cliff with it, so I will handle it here. The difference does not mean an officer gets to pick and choose which orders he likes. Officers fall under the same Uniform Code as everyone else and they go to prison for refusing lawful orders like everyone else. What the missing clause tells you is that the men who wrote it were working on a specific problem, and they built the officer corps to carry a personal constitutional obligation from the day it was founded. It is a design feature and not a hall pass.
The standard for refusing an order
Every military order is presumed lawful and the burden falls on the man who refuses it. Under Rule 916 of the Manual for Courts-Martial, acting under orders is a defense unless the accused knew the order was unlawful, or unless a person of ordinary sense and understanding would have known it was unlawful. Refusing a lawful order is a crime under Articles 90 and 92. Following a manifestly unlawful one protects nobody, which is the whole lesson of the Calley court-martial after My Lai.
So the bar is manifestly unlawful. Obviously and clearly illegal to a reasonable person. Ordering troops to shoot unarmed civilians clears that bar, and almost nothing else does in the moment it is given.
I worked about thirty years under a version of that same standard, and I will tell you how it feels from the inside. It is a use of force decision. In the classroom it is clean and everybody in the room gets the right answer. On the street you have partial information, a supervisor waiting on the radio, and about a second and a half, and then a review board watches the video for six months with a fresh cup of coffee and full knowledge of how it turned out. Our sergeant in the parking lot is standing in that exact spot. Eugene Fidell, who teaches military justice at Yale Law School, put it plainly to UPI last year. A service member who refuses is rolling the dice.
So here is the honest answer to the question in the title. Some will refuse and they will pay for it. Most will not, and most of the men who do not will be doing exactly what the law requires of them. Institutional splits never happen cleanly. They happen slowly and unevenly, one career at a time.
The last two years
On June 7, 2025, a president invoked Title 10, Section 12406 to federalize a state’s National Guard over that governor’s objection for the first time in American history. Roughly 4,200 California Guard personnel deployed to Los Angeles along with about 700 active duty Marines. California sued, and in August of 2025 a federal judge found the deployment violated the Posse Comitatus Act. Similar attempts in Portland and the Chicago area drew injunctions. On December 23, 2025, the Supreme Court declined the administration’s emergency request to lift the block in Illinois, with Justice Kavanaugh concurring in the judgment and Justices Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch dissenting. By early January of 2026, about 500 federalized Guard personnel had been demobilized.
Most coverage stops there, and stopping there gets the picture wrong. In December of 2025 roughly 350 Louisiana Guard personnel deployed into New Orleans under Title 32 at their own governor’s request. Same soldiers, similar mission, no lawsuit, no injunction, no headlines. The Washington, D.C. deployment has continued the entire time and was extended this month to January 20, 2029, with more than 5,100 Guard personnel in the District as of July 8. The District is not a state and the federal government holds far more authority over its Guard than over any state’s. In January of 2026 the Insurrection Act was publicly threatened over unrest in Minneapolis and it was not invoked. It has not been invoked since the Los Angeles riots in 1992.
I am not going to tell you who was right in any of those cases. You are a grown adult and you can work that out. The takeaway I want you holding is structural, and it holds no matter which way you lean politically.
Every one of those confrontations was settled in a courtroom rather than in an intersection. No unit refused orders over it, and no governor and president ever put armed men on the same street corner. Governors sued, judges ruled, appeals were filed, and the parties complied. The system did precisely what it was built to do, and I consider it the single most reassuring fact in this episode.
It is also the first thing that would fail. The day a court order in a case like that gets ignored by anybody, you are somewhere new, and you will not need me to point it out. Watch for that one specific thing and stop worrying about the rest of the noise.
Law enforcement is built differently
This is my ground so I will be blunt about it. There is no national police force in this country. There are roughly 18,000 separate agencies answering to different masters. County sheriffs are elected by the county and can only be removed by the county or by a state process. Municipal chiefs serve at the pleasure of a mayor or a city manager. State police answer to a governor. Federal agents answer to Washington. The structure makes a clean national fracture nearly impossible and a messy local one very easy.
Watch what is already happening with immigration enforcement, and watch it in both directions, because it runs both ways. Ten states now bar local agencies from participating in the 287(g) program. Maryland passed such a law this year, Maryland sheriffs sued their own state over it, and the federal government filed suit against the state in July. Texas went the opposite direction and requires nearly every sheriff in the state to join. In Florida, 272 of 394 law enforcement agencies hold active 287(g) agreements, and only 163 of those have made a single arrest under one, which tells you a fair number of agencies signed the paperwork and then quietly did nothing with it.
Real fragmentation looks like that. It does not look like officers throwing badges on the ground in front of a camera. It looks like a patchwork of state statutes pulling opposite directions, sheriffs suing governors, governors suing presidents, and 18,000 agencies landing in different places one county at a time. It is slow, it is legal, and it is already underway. The consequence for your family is simple enough. In a serious event the response you get will be decided by county and city politics you have never paid any attention to and by mutual aid agreements you have never read.
What Scripture says about refusing an order
The verse people reach for here is Acts 5:29, and most of them are using it wrong.
“But Peter and the apostles answered, ‘We must obey God rather than men.’” Acts 5:29, ESV
That is the whole verse, and the quoting usually stops right there. Look at what happened around it. The apostles were ordered by the Sanhedrin to stop preaching Christ and they kept preaching. They were arrested, hauled in front of the council, Peter said that line, and then they were beaten and released. They did not resist arrest, they did not raise a force, and they did not go to war with the Sanhedrin. They refused one specific unlawful command and absorbed the specific penalty for refusing it.
The same shape shows up every time Scripture records a believer defying a governing authority. Shiphrah and Puah were given a direct order by Pharaoh to kill infants, which is about as manifestly unlawful an order as has ever been issued by anybody.
“But the midwives feared God and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but let the male children live.” Exodus 1:17, ESV
They refused it, they lied to Pharaoh’s face about it, and God dealt well with them. And again, they did not overthrow anybody. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego did the same thing in front of a furnace that was already hot.
“But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the golden image that you have set up.” Daniel 3:18, ESV
Catch those two words, “but if not.” They were not counting on rescue. They refused the command and walked toward the consequence.
Now set that against the passage the other half of the church reaches for, and they are not wrong to reach for it.
“Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.” Romans 13:1, ESV
Paul goes on to say that the authority is God’s servant for your good and does not bear the sword in vain. You do not get to skip that line. The default posture of a Christian toward lawful authority is submission, and any teaching that runs around it is not being honest with the text.
Put the two together and what you get is narrow and demanding instead of convenient. A believer submits to governing authority as a matter of course. When a specific command requires him to sin, he refuses that specific command and takes the specific consequence, without resisting it and without expanding it into a general license to fight the government. Every biblical example follows that shape, and not one of them looks like a man choosing which faction to join. If somebody in your circle is quoting Acts 5:29 as cover for something outside that shape, he is using the verse and not obeying it.
What your household does with this
Build a plan that works either way. Do not build around law enforcement being there and do not build around them not being there. You will not know in advance and the answer can change from one week to the next.
Learn your sheriff’s name this week. In most of this country he is the most consequential public safety official in your life and he stands for election. Sit through one county commission meeting. Find out whether your county holds mutual aid agreements and with whom. It is the least dramatic item on this list and the most useful.
Learn to read a deployment headline. When the Guard shows up somewhere, the only question worth asking is whether they are under Title 32 or Title 10. Title 32 means the governor still commands them and it is a state mission. Title 10 means they have been federalized. That one detail tells you more than an hour of commentary, and almost no headline will make it clear for you.
If you have family serving, have the conversation while it is quiet. Do not ask them what they would do, because that question only produces posturing. Ask them who they would call before they decided. The right answer involves a judge advocate. Frank Rosenblatt, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, runs a group called The Orders Project that provides free legal counsel to service members facing exactly that question, and calls to it went up sharply starting in late 2025. Knowing that number in peacetime is the entire point. A man who has thought this through in advance makes a better decision than a man doing it cold at two in the morning.
Point your Readiness Team’s intelligence role at your own county. National news is context. Your sheriff’s posture, your county’s mutual aid agreements, and the location of the Guard armories near you are what you will actually act on. The Readiness Team Assignment Worksheet in the library walks you through all ten assignments.
Where this leaves you
Most soldiers will follow most orders because that is what the law requires of them. Some will refuse and will pay for it. Units will go where their commanders take them, and law enforcement will keep fragmenting through statute and lawsuit rather than mutiny. None of it is under your control and Scripture never asked you to control it.
“The horse is made ready for the day of battle, but the victory belongs to the LORD.” Proverbs 21:31, ESV
Prepare the horse. Feed your household, learn your county, train your team, teach your children, and settle in advance what you will and will not do. Then leave the outcome where it has always belonged.
Now I want to hear from you in the comments. Do you know your sheriff’s name without looking it up, and do you know whether your county has mutual aid agreements in place? Answer both honestly, because that gap is the whole point of this episode. If you have family serving and you have already had the conversation about unlawful orders, tell me how it went, because other readers need to hear how that conversation actually starts.
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