Laws governing domestic use of the U.S. military should be updated to prevent any abuses by a potential second Trump administration, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said Monday.

While acknowledging that any reforms to the laws would be a heavy lift with Republicans, Chairman Jack Reed, D-R.I., called for changes to the Insurrection Act and Posse Comitatus Act amid GOP presidential nominee former President Donald Trump's stated desire to use the military against "enemies from within" the U.S.

"I think that would be seriously considered, particularly if Trump was elected and continued this very, very harsh rhetoric," Reed told reporters on a call in response to a question from Military.com about reforming the Insurrection Act. "Because I would hope many of my colleagues on the other side would consider they have to put in checks and balances that are lacking."

The chairman of the powerful Armed Services Committee also used the call to allege Trump would "destroy" the Defense Department. He cast the election as a choice between "whether we continue as a constitutional democracy subject to the rule of law or the rule of a few people, led by Donald Trump, to the detriment of everything that we've sacrificed."

In recent weeks, Trump has repeatedly talked about turning federal power, including the military, against American citizens he describes as "the enemy from within."

For example, in an interview on Fox News earlier this month in which he repeated his baseless allegation of Democrats stealing the election, Trump said he thinks "radical left lunatics" should be "very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can't let that happen."

While some of Trump's allies, such as his vice presidential nominee, Sen. JD Vance, have claimed Trump is referring to rioters, Trump has named specific Democratic politicians he considers the enemies within.

Democrats have also been highlighting comments from Trump's former chief of staff, retired Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly, where Kelly called Trump a fascist and said the former president has privately praised Nazi leader Adolf Hilter.

Reed, too, pointed to those comments Monday, and said he is also concerned that Trump would "act like a fascist" if reelected.

"He wants generals that put total fealty to Trump above the Constitution," Reed said. "He will destroy the Department of Defense, frankly. He will go in and he will dismiss generals who stand up for the Constitution. He will try to insinuate his followers who are loyal to him and him alone."

"He already demonstrated at the end of his last term his willingness to essentially fire the civilian senior defense employees through his Schedule F," Reed added, referring to a plan Trump enacted in last days of his presidency that he has said he would revive to strip employment protections from civil servants and install political appointees in their place.

WILMINGTON, Del. — Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance says Russia is a U.S. adversary but suggests it's counterproductive to approach Moscow as an enemy.

The Ohio senator also said Donald Trump is committed to NATO, the transatlantic military alliance seen as the bulwark preventing further Russian aggression in Europe, although the former president has pledged to “finish the process we began under my administration of fundamentally reevaluating NATO’s purpose and NATO’s mission.”

Vance, in a series of television interviews that aired Sunday, nine days before the election, made clear that Trump, if back in the White House, would press European members to spend more on defense and that their administration would work to quickly wind down Moscow's war in Ukraine that began in February 2022 when Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered troops across the border.

“We’re not in a war with him, and I don’t want to be in a war with Vladimir Putin’s Russia,” Vance said when pressed during an interview with NBC's “Meet the Press” on whether Russia is an enemy. Vance said "we have to be careful about the language that we use in international diplomacy. We can recognize, obviously, that we have adversarial interests with Russia."

U.S. officials this past week confirmed that North Korea has sent 3,000 troops to Russia for training before potentially being deployed in Ukraine. U.S. officials say Russia has ramped up a disinformation campaign aimed at sowing distrust in the results in U.S. election on Nov. 5.

Officials on Friday confirmed Moscow’s role in creating a video that appears to show the destruction of mail ballots in Pennsylvania, in what was the latest effort linked to Russia on spreading false information on social media.

Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has argued that Trump is too cozy with Putin and that Trump's return to the White House would be calamitous for Ukraine and America's European allies.

Vance was circumspect about supporting further sanctions against Russia, saying the Biden administration's use of the tool for Russia's invasion of Ukraine has been as effective as a “wet firecracker.”

“I don’t think that we should overreact to anything. What we should do is encourage our fellow Americans to be careful,” Vance told CBS' “Face the Nation.” “Don’t trust everything that you see on social media. And of course, we should push back where appropriate. But that’s the big question is, what is an appropriate response to a country making social media videos? I’m not going to make a commitment to that sitting right here.”

For his potential second term, Trump says he wants to hire Cabinet and other government officials who will follow his orders without question, rather than people who might try to prevent his worst inclinations from being enacted.

Questions about dissent and disobedience will therefore likely fall on those at more junior levels of military service in a second Trump administration than they did in the first.

The U.S. military has long been dedicated to the principle of civilian control. To minimize the chance of the kind of military occupation they suffered during the Revolutionary War, the country's founders wrote the Constitution requiring that the president, an elected civilian, would be the commander in chief of the military. In the wake of World War II, Congress went even further, restructuring the military and requiring that the secretary of defense be a civilian as well.

For that reason, in a time of increasing political polarization, military educational institutions are focusing even more explicitly on the oath military members take to the Constitution, rather than to a person or an office.

As the Joint Chiefs of Staff reminded the military after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, and just before the inauguration of Joe Biden as president, military personnel serve the nation's interests, not those of a politician or a political party.

When faced with a potential order to deploy the U.S. military within the nation's borders, however, service members may find themselves in a situation where upholding the military's tradition of staying out of politics could itself appear partisan.

Military members have a duty to obey orders from superior officers. But as military ethicists, we recognize that the content of an order is not the only factor that determines whether it is a moral one.

The political motivation for an order may be equally important. That's because the military's obligation to stay out of politics is deeply intertwined with the mutual obligation of civilian officials not to use the military for partisan reasons.

If an elected official were to attempt to use the military for obviously partisan ends, the decisions of military personnel to either follow the order or resist it would open them up to accusations of partisanship – even if their actions were attempts to protect the military's strict partisan neutrality.

At the nation's founding, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson worried about a military that would be loyal to a particular leader rather than to a form of government. James Madison was concerned that soldiers might be used by those in power as instruments of oppression against the citizenry.

Trump has said the National Guard or the military could "easily handle" political protesters. He has recommended one "really rough, nasty" hour of police violence to curb criminal activity. He has expressed a desire for military officers to be obedient to him and not the Constitution.

It's not clear that military members could follow those kinds of orders and remain nonpartisan. By refusing to follow orders about military deployment to U.S. cities for political ends, members of the armed forces could actually be respecting, rather than undermining, the principle of civilian control. After all, the framers always intended it to be the people's military – not the president's.