Militaries are commonly deployed in response to domestic disasters. However, our understanding of this phenomenon remains incomplete, partly because the particulars of disasters make it hard to generalize about deployments used in response. This article leverages the COVID-19 pandemic’s global reach to systematically evaluate common hypotheses about when and how militaries are used to respond to domestic disasters. It presents original global data about domestic military deployments in pandemic response and uses it to assess common theoretical expectations about what shapes whether and how militaries are used in such contexts. The results suggest that decisions about whether to deploy militaries stem from the securitization of domestic disaster relief rather than being responses to specific disaster-related features, state capacity shortcomings, or other social or political factors, even as some of these elements shaped how militaries were used. The article concludes by outlining some hypotheses for future research about the impact of this securitization on civil–military relations.
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