We Don’t Live Under A Military Junta

Americans have long-trusted the military for a variety of reasons, but one big one is that it was always perceived as being above politics.

A sight soon to be common?

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Charles Brown, along with a slew of other top military leaders, has been relieved by President Donald Trump to the outcry of the Regime. Even though everyone knows the president is the commander-in-chief and reserves the right to create the leadership corps he feels most confident working with, as does any military superior, that didn’t stop establishment voices from decrying the move as just another step towards right-wing authoritarianism and the death of democracy. Unfortunately, this argument will find traction with millions of Americans.

But my readers are much smarter than that, right?

Unprecedented? Maybe. Out Of Bounds? Hardly.

In the wake of the news, many came to the defense of the president, pointing to an oft-mentioned purging of military officers that took place during the Obama administration. As always, skepticism is important - the reasons these officers were relieved weren’t politically-motivated, not entirely. The problem isn’t so much that these officers were sacked, but who they ended up getting replaced with. Anyone who thinks the administration wouldn’t take advantage of the opportunity get the kind of leadership they preferred is kidding themselves.

No matter how it went down, only hard-right partisans would’ve had a problem with Obama purging military leadership upon taking office, because not only did most Americans probably agree that reform in the military was necessary following eight tumultuous years of the War On Terror, but also that the president was entitled to military leadership he is comfortable with.

The prevailing trend has been to maintain continuity in military leadership as much as possible, but there’s no rule that says this has to be the case. Trump may be breaking a norm, but as commander-in-chief, he’s under no obligation to provide job security to military leadership. If anything, their jobs might be too secure - not a single high-ranking leader was relieved over the debacle that occurred during the withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, for example. Trump is also a change agent - if you want change, you have to be willing to depart from doing business as usual. We all want change, don’t we?

I can hear it: Obama made his choices for the right reasons! Trump is doing it for the wrong reasons! Certainly, motivations matter. But did Obama really do it for all the right reasons? Or did he do it for the same reasons any incoming president might want to change out military leadership: to have people in place who would put up less resistance?

It’s long since been forgotten, but Obama had his problems with military leadership, all of it well-documented. Jim Mattis, who served as Trump’s first Defense Secretary, later becoming a strong critic, was at loggerheads with Obama over Middle East policy. He wasn’t relieved, probably due to the political blow-back Obama would’ve received over firing a high-ranking military officer in good standing with both sides of the political aisle, as well as the public, especially following the notorious public clash with General Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan during the first few years of the Obama administration.

The thing is, no civil-military relations expert would’ve argued against the fact that Obama ultimately ought to have won any dispute with military authorities, relieved any leader he felt was out of step, simply by being commander-in-chief. This doesn’t mean Obama did everything right, with plenty of voices arguing to the contrary. But it does mean that having his way is exactly how the system should work. Even when it came to using the military to pursue explicitly social causes, like the normalization of LGBTQ+ persons and behavior, along with women in combat serving the cause of feminism, you would’ve found very few people who would’ve gone as far as to say Obama had no authority to make such decisions, just that they were bad decisions.

To understand how contentious civil-military relations were during the Obama years, read the following passage from an essay written in May 2010 [bold mine]:

2. We’ve still a long way to go before civil-military relations get as healthy as they should be. On the one hand, the U.S. military and its officer corps is seriously sick in terms of its relations with the elected civilian leadership. I subscribe to many of Richard Kohn’s worries that the officer corps is overly politicized. My cousin, who serves as an officer in the Marine Corps, just returned from Iraq and reports that officers there regularly make disparaging remarks about the president in front of subordinates. Have any of these guys ever heard of George C. Marshall? (The fact that these soldiers are serving in Iraq yet spare the younger President Bush any criticism is kind of hilarious if sad.) On the other hand, it seems clear the Obama Administration thinks “us vs. them” more appropriately describes the administration’s relations with the uniformed officer corps than it does the fight against the Taliban.

This brings us to the present. Nobody within the intelligentsia, at least the part of it loyal to the Regime, thinks the military is politicized. If the intelligentsia is worried about politicization, it’s exclusively over concerns the right-wing, led by President Trump, is doing so. The idea that the left-wing could also be engaging in politicization of the armed forces isn’t given even the slightest bit of due regard. Trump and the American Right certainly have not helped to improve civil-military relations, but the idea that politicization of the military is a recent phenomenon, instead of the logical outcome of trends dating back decades, is a shameless re-writing of history.

Politicize The Military Because Orange Man Bad

In fact, something happened during the first Trump administration that still doesn’t receive the scrutiny it deserves. Under the premise that America’s most radical, right-wing president ever was damaging civil-military relations beyond repair, scholars argued that what the military needed wasn’t less politics, but more.

This change in mindset was encapsulated in an influential essay written by civil-military relations scholars Jim Golby and Mara Karlin in June 2020 [bold mine]:

That’s because the military is not apolitical. It never has been, and it should not try to be. The military is an instrument of policy, and there are always tensions between our security and our values; politics is the process we use to choose between competing tradeoffs that can advance our values and our interests, or both. Use of that term “apolitical” not only makes it harder for military officers to fulfill their responsibilities and maintain the trust of the American people, but confuses service members and the public alike when they see military leaders saying or doing things that have clear political consequences.

Fair enough, war is a political exercise and military affairs are never entirely divorced from political realities. However, this is quite different from saying what Golby and Karlin were arguing, which is that military leaders should in fact more openly engage in political issues that don’t have much to do with waging war:

Indeed, following the death of George Floyd, it took nearly a week before any of the service chiefs released statements to their service members about the killing or the unrest that had consumed the nation — although for at least a few of them, that silence was almost surely informed by heavy pressure from Secretary of Defense Esper to refrain from commenting on these issues at that moment. In fact, it wasn’t until after Kaleth O. Wright – in his own words “a black man who happens to be Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force” – posted a powerful Twitter thread on June 1stthat they did so. Since then, a flood of senior military officers have released statements and videos to their units, affirming the core values of the military, condemning racism, and promoting diversity and inclusion both in the military and in society — issues that, we hasten to add, should not be seen as political and instead rather as the ultimate comparative advantage of a capable U.S. military and society.

Later on, the authors caveat it all by saying that the military needs to establish clearer guidelines on what constitutes permissible political activity and what doesn’t. The problem is that once military leaders are encouraged to weigh in on the hot political topics of the day, the floodgates are open. In other words, if you offer an opinion on race, you’re inevitably going to be expected to opine on gender. Before long, you’ll be sharing your opinions on marriage, having children, etc. The only way to draw the line is to basically permit some opinions but not others. This is hardly a consistent, predictable system, which is why anyone with common sense would likely just shut up about politics altogether.

Note, also, that Golby and Karlin try to have it both ways, saying that condemning racism and promoting diversity and inclusion both in the military and in society aren’t political statements. Regarding racism, one would hope it’s not a political issue, but you’d need to be living under a rock to think it’s not. Few other issues have been politicized in the way racism has. I don’t know what a military leader is supposed to say other than “We don’t tolerate racism, we fight under a single identity in the services.” Anything more, and you’re likely crossing a line, especially in a time when nobody seems to agree on how expansive or narrow a definition racism should entail. For example, how can teaching troops about “White privilege” not be considered racist, while crime rates within the Black community is?

You see how quickly it can get out of hand. It’s why the military stuck to an apolitical norm, even as the military is a political institution. Law enforcement is an expressly political institution, perhaps more bluntly so than the military, but police are discouraged from speaking too openly about the reality of crime in America. Why? Because not only is crime a political issue, to do so would be construed as passing judgment on the very people law enforcement officers are sworn to protect and serve.

The thing is, the more focused an institution is, the more effective it is. If the purpose of the armed forces is warfighting, then it’ll do its best work when it’s allowed to focus exclusively on warfighting. Getting into the race or gender debate won’t make it a more effective fighting force. Nobody has yet to make a convincing argument to the contrary and I’ve examined a lot of literature on the topic. So much of it depends on assumptions we’ve been forced to accept as the gospel truth, without nary a question. We tend to accept conventional wisdom as self-evident, which is why it’s possible to deny any political overtones with a level of plausible deniability.

Which reveals what this is ultimately all about: leveraging public trust in the military for political purposes. People with guns by your side is the oldest form of legitimacy. Having military leaders endorse your politics is even better. But it comes at the cost of the military losing professional credibility. Americans have long-trusted the military for a variety of reasons, but one big one is that it was always perceived as being above politics.

No more.

Experts Say “Civilian Control Is Praetorianism”

Critics of President Trump’s decision to remove General Brown, along with other military leaders, argue that the president is the one politicizing the military. Longtime readers know that I think otherwise, that the military has been politicized for a long time. I’m not ready to argue that Trump is de-politicizing the military, returning to its more apolitical norms, but the idea that everything was fine and dandy before Trump returned for his second go-around is a lie.

I try hard - I really do - to just laugh off the lies people in the establishment like to peddle. But this one really irks the hell out of me, to be perfectly honest. It’s a very dangerous accusation, honestly, to say the president is out of line in his dealings with the military. We’re not talking about the president going into a theater of war to command troops on the ground. We’re not talking about the president using the military to go after political dissidents. We’re just talking about the president using his rightful authority to create a leadership corps that isn’t going to make problems for him.

Even the suggestion that Trump just wants personnel “absolutely loyal” to him, who’ll obey his orders, regardless of legality or wisdom, is pernicious. It assumes that these personnel, many of them officers, lack the intellect or moral compass necessary to make the right choice. Look, if we’re going to decide which military leaders to trust based on which president appointed them, then we can’t really trust the military, can we?

I don’t want to highlight too many of these critics, as most of them have little to offer besides their own partisan criticisms not so different from anything else you’ve heard before about how Trump is “threatening democracy.” I want to highlight one, though, as it’s emblematic of everything wrong with the establishment’s critique of the current political moment.

Self-professed gatekeeper of expertise, Tom Nichols, characterized Trump’s purge of military leadership as thus:

Trump wants to create his own Praetorian Guard, an armed force that answers only to him. That has never ended well either for the military or for the civilians.

To which French political commentator Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry came back with a corrective for the ages:

“Praetorianism” is when the military can remove the civilian government at will, not when the civilian government removes the heads of the military, you absolute moron

Remember: Tom Nichols once wrote a book titled The Death of Expertise. Irony poetic as it gets.

Most likely, Nichols didn’t like what he sees happening to the institution he sold his soul over to and looked to rage over it, but as Gobry further states, you either know what you’re talking about or you don’t:

It’s one thing to pull out a semi-obscure concept and get it slightly wrong. People make mistakes. It’s quite another to get it exactly, precisely, diametrically 180 degrees wrong. That takes a special kind of fatuous stupidity.

Imagine: what Trump did is beyond the pale because exercising civilian control of the military is praetorianism! Is this the best the Regime has to offer at this point? Anyway, the problem is, there are those out there who’ll swallow the argument hook, line, and sinker, despite it being a lie. That’s the danger in any lie: that people might actually believe it.

It does raise an interesting question worth examining: is the U.S. in danger of praetorianism? Should Americans be worried about the military becoming further politicized, to the point it becomes involved with governance itself?

It’s a loaded question, one we could talk for essay upon essay about. Let’s begin by acknowledging the fact the U.S. is very fortunate to be one of the few countries that have never been under military government it’s entire history. That’s a tough act. It’s why we’ve managed to remain a republic for so long, that we’ve only become a more free country with time.

Civil-military relations scholar Mackubin Thomas Owens explained in January 2011 the significance of this fact:

The United States remains fortunate in that its military has defended the Republic successfully on the battlefield while avoiding threats to civilian control. The most extreme and dangerous threats are coup d’état and praetorianism. But tensions have always existed and demonstrate that periodically from the American Revolution to the present, civil-military relations in America essentially have constituted a bargain among three parties: the American people, the government, and the military as an institution.

The reason why we have civilian control of the military is quite simple, maybe even quite boring: to remain a democratic society. Thus, anyone other than an outright authoritarian should insist that the civilians have ultimate control of the military at all times, no questions asked. Otherwise, you’re asking for trouble.

The drawback to civilian control of the military is that it presumes that everyone, the president included, respects boundaries. It assumes the president will never ask anything foolhardy or inadvisable of the military, in turn assuming the military will always recognize the chain of command. It’s a much tougher balance to strike than it seems, with real-world events proving that civil-military relations are a constant negotiation of sorts, as Mackubin Thomas Owens put it.

The reason why the arrangement has proven resilient, however, is for three reasons.

One, the U.S. military has never held much political power, formally or informally. In other countries, like Brazil, serving in the military as a high-ranking officer used to be a stepping stone to a political career. In the U.S., while many generals ended up becoming president, still many others came from non-military backgrounds. For one reason or another, the military was never given the opportunity to dominate politics as was so often the norm throughout the world.

Two, the U.S., up until after World War II, has never maintained a large permanent military establishment. It has preferred the “citizen-soldier” model, where able, fighting-age men, alongside much of society, are mobilized into the war effort, then subsequently demobilized once the war ends. Beyond wartime, the professional military was never allowed to become so large as to have a seat at the proverbial table. Size matters.

Three, the norm that the president has the “right to be wrong” has held strong. In some ways, this has worked to the military’s benefit: it can ultimately eschew accountability for anything, since the military just follows orders issued by the commander-in-chief. For one reason or another, both civilian and military leadership agree that the president is not only in charge, but that going against the president is a non-starter. Hence, we’ve never had a serious civil-military crisis. No matter your political leanings, this is a good thing.

In fact, the U.S. has taken many measures to ensure it’s “coup-proof.” X mutual “Armchair Warlord” explains how in this informative post:

The first is by breaking up unity of command at the high levels of the military. If the generals are split into a dozen warring factions, none of whom has real authority to mobilize troops - or at least a large number of them - without the involvement of the civil government, all the better.

The second is through the creation of trusted regime guard troops, whose loyalty can be counted upon without question. If some divisional commander in the hinterlands does decide to march on the capital, he will be confronted and defeated by this elite corps. Of course there’s always the danger the praetorians will decide to play kingmaker themselves, but their loyalty can be assured in a number of ways - such as giving command to trusted family members, or recruiting them from the regime’s favored ethnic groups or even foreign mercenaries.

The third is to purge the officer corps. Simply getting rid of the political dissidents, free-thinkers, and overly ambitious among the ranks may lead to a loss of combat performance, but a general staff packed full of stupid yes-men can be counted upon to stay on the right side of politics. And as every tinpot dictator knows, that's the important thing.

The U.S. has clearly done the first and the third. It’s in danger of heading down the road of the second. The big concern going forward, in my view, is that the military will increasingly come to be viewed as a fourth branch of government, a fail-safe in the event the president comes to be perceived as exceeding his authority, and neither Congress nor the Supreme Court can restrain him as they’re supposed to. The military has been viewed, in all societies throughout history, as the ultimate arbiter of legitimacy - if you have the men with guns on your side, you have power. As a result, it’s also viewed as the one institution which can thwart or, if needed, remove a political leader from power.

More ominously, the military doesn’t even need to take over the government to carry out a coup. All it’d need to do is disobey the president’s orders, while having enough of the civilian government’s and the public’s support. If the military doesn’t obey the president, nobody has to. The president cannot carry out his duties without the military’s cooperation, becoming something of a lame duck. Once a new, more favorable regime is in charge, maybe the military will go back to obeying the rightful authorities, but don’t be fooled: all that means is the military now picks and chooses whose orders to follow, meaning they’re ultimately the ones in charge.

So maybe the military isn’t the literal government, but it’s certainly the “deep state,” as it was in places like Imperial Germany, the same way the federal administrative bureaucracy is the deep state today. Either way, it’s praetorianism, and it’s little better than an outright coup d’état. These things sound nice when you think about it happening to your political opponents, but we all suffer for it in the end. Though military governments tend to not encroach on people’s personal lives, political repression is a part of the deal, and any dissent is squashed as it’d be in the military. Expect tremendous turbulence, maybe even bloodshed, in the event of an armed takeover of government. Military governments also don’t last for very long in relative terms, always eventually ceding power to a democracy in the end. Whatever benefits or stability they provide can often prove fleeting.

I’m not saying we need to fear a military-led coup d’état. I don’t think it’ll happen. But praetorianism? Maybe. A big maybe. The fact is, the military is a critical institution, and no politician out there wants to not have it on their side. It’s just that any serious, perhaps even illegal, attempt to remove President Trump from power or at least render him powerless will be led by civilians, not people in uniform.

Already, we see troubling signs of praetorianism emerging. Five former Defense Secretaries signed a letter criticizing Trump cleaning house at the Pentagon, going as far as to call on Congress to hold hearings and demand the president justify every firing.

Note that not only are four of the five signatories veterans, two were generals:

Source

I can’t underscore enough how dangerous this is. Despite being careful to emphasize that it’s Congress who should take the president to task, the implication is clear: we don’t like what the president is doing and you must take action. If the commander-in-chief’s decisions need the approval of retired officers & top defense officials to have legitimacy, that’s the very definition of praetorianism. Then there’s the blatant falsehood that the military is becoming politicized and distracted thanks to Trump, when this is already very much the case.

Ironically, during his time as Defense Secretary, Jim Mattis was concerned about politicization of the military due to efforts by the Left to impose policies which today be associated with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) upon the services and that these could prove to be a distraction from its primary purpose. The thing is, he was right to be concerned. So what changed? Even if Trump is politicizing the military further, none of this is new and Mattis knows it.

Retired officers may feel compelled to speak out for one reason or another. The fact of the matter is, expecting the military to stay above the fray, focusing entirely on protecting America, is a big ask when the country they’re supposed to protect is spiraling out of control. In other words, the military’s involvement in politics may be inevitable at this point. When governance is in crisis and the legitimacy of the state is at risk, there will eventually be calls on all sides for the military to step in, if only as a last resort.

If we ever see a concerted effort to remove the president from power should means of doing so legally fail, expect the military to get involved, even if led by civilians, which is most likely to be the case. An example is the 1991 Soviet coup attempt - dissatisfied with both the weakening of the state and Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms, Communist Party hardliners enlisted the help of military elements and the KGB in a failed attempt at ousting the Soviet leader. However, it also turned out to be the final nail in the coffin for the superpower - by year’s end, the Soviet Union was history.

My suspicion is that any future coup attempt will observe the Soviet model. The greatest unit of resistance against Trump is the administrative state. I can see state bureaucrats joining forces with the Democratic Party, and enlisting the aid of federal law enforcement agencies and military units under the control of loyal leadership in an attempt to remove Trump. All easier said than done, but if the power struggle intensifies, if the federal administrative state’s power is strongly threatened, we could see more desperate measures taken to restore the status quo. History provides very few examples of where this doesn’t happen under similar circumstances.

It seems as though it’s the generals who need to be reminded: we don’t live under a military junta. It’s very easy to justify breaking the rules, though, when you think someone else is breaking even bigger rules. That seems to be where our generals are at.

Integrity Matters

A few thoughts before closing things out. First, let’s take a look at the outgoing Joint Chiefs Chairman General Charles Brown.

From CNN’s Jim Sciutto:

Some things to know about General Brown:

- 41 years of military service
- F16 fighter pilot and instructor with 3000 flight hours, 130 in combat
- Master’s in aeronautical science - son of a U.S. Army colonel and Vietnam veteran
- grandson of a WW2 veteran

It’s an impressive resume, no doubt. I certainly can’t top that. But not only does it not make Brown a better man than any of us, it only proves that professional accomplishments are no substitute for character.

Despite it all, in the end, Brown sacrificed his dignity and integrity in the name of pushing an explicitly political agenda. For what? Revenge for past crimes against “his people,” as he might put it? So he could reach the top of the pyramid? Brown certainly isn’t the first to do so, he may not be the last, but someone who pushes a political agenda like DEI in the armed forces isn’t a trustworthy figure. Whether he did it because he wanted to or because he was ordered to, Brown still made a choice to play the game.

When he was first nominated in 2020, Brown filmed a video statement where he aired personal grievances and made reference to the George Floyd incident. Clearly, he felt like he needed to get some things off his chest, but nobody forced him to. If integrity means doing the right thing no matter what, Brown failed to resist the temptation to involve himself in political discourse.

Brown pushing DEI in the military was totally unacceptable. He can make arguments in favor of ensuring the ranks are exactly representative of America’s demographics all day long, but it’s all nonsense, in the end. It’s one thing to consider diversity something “nice to have.” It’s another to make it policy. Once you make diversity a requirement, you need to devote resources and time to achieve it; it obviously doesn’t happen on its own. A general who involves himself in the project of pursuing race-based outcomes isn’t concerned with warfighting. He’s either concerned with his personal benefit or he’s pursuing a political agenda. Either way, it’s unbecoming of the nation’s top military officer.

This isn’t a matter of “Walk And Chew Gum At The Same Time”. At some point, you need to prioritize one or the other. It seems that Brown wanted the military to prioritize diversity. We also know that no amount of diversity will ever be good enough. Just look at the MLB - despite being tremendously diverse, critics still insist it’s not diverse enough, which is another way of saying there aren’t enough Black baseball players. Note that the NBA suffers no such criticisms.

Second, note that the military is the one institution the majority of Americans - around 60 percent, still trust. Though it has proven resilient in this regard, this trust has fallen precipitously since the high-water mark of the War On Terror. Maybe 80 to 90 percent confidence was unsustainable and we’re returning to a much healthier norm, but the problem is that the military is one of only two institutions - the other being small business - that Americans across all walks of life still trust. Maybe this doesn’t really mean much of anything, but remember what I said earlier about the military being viewed as not only the ultimate arbiter of legitimacy, but also a fail-safe against the president of last resort?

The deeper we get into the crisis, the more both sides will attempt to wrest control of the military. Or will they call their own shot?

Finally, a military without a war to fight will inevitably run in to problems like this. Historically, the concept of a standing armed force has been controversial, due to the threat it can pose to civil society in the absence of war. Either the guns are trained outward or inward; there’s no in-between. The in-between is to put away the guns until the next war. Maintaining a permanent military establishment following the end of World War II, instead of demobilizing, as was done after previous wars, was an unprecedented decision, done primarily due to the threat posed by the Soviet Union.

Even as the U.S. continues to wage the Global War On Terror, our men and women in uniform haven’t had to fight a knock-out, drag-out war pushing the services to their breaking points. In fact, there’s been something of a predictable rhythm to it all, setting aside the sacrifices and stressed endured by servicemembers and their families. Few leaders today, civilian or military, would argue that we’re a country at war. In fact, even at the height of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the country itself was at a state of peace. No tangible changes to our lives were made in response to being at war, and after a while, the wars themselves faded into the background, even as Americans were dying overseas.

I’m not here to say any of it was good or bad. To fixate on that is to miss the point, which is that the military is a necessary institution, but it’s also an extremely dangerous one at that, one rife for abuse. It has to be strong enough to defeat our enemies, but that means it must also be strong enough to threaten the society it’s charged with protecting. This is where, in democratic societies, civilian control of the military is paramount. It’s really the only way to prevent it from threatening those it’s meant to protect.

But what if someone like Trump ends up in control of the military? comes the predictable refrain. To that, I say, “You cannot have it both ways.” You cannot, on the one hand, say that civilians should be unquestionably in charge of the military to protect democracy, then say the military should be able to resist a “bad” president at will. “Civilian control” means a civilian is in charge, full stop. It doesn’t mean a “good” civilian is in charge.

Nobody wants the military to follow illegal orders. Until the president actually issues an illegal order, however, there’s nothing to be done, because either the civilians control the military or they don’t. The chain of command is absolute. It has to be.

Of course, if America was a healthy society, if we weren’t in the midst of a crisis which rolls around every 80 years or so, we wouldn’t be talking about any of this. Consider the burgeoning civil-military crisis to by symptomatic of the times we’re living in.

How To Control The People With Guns?

This essay ran on much longer than I anticipated. Civil-military relations isn’t just a loaded topic, it also happens to be an area of fascination of mine. It’s also the question at the heart of every democracy: how to restrain the people with guns. Until this question is answered satisfactorily, democracy is impossible.

Let’s discuss - what do you think about President Trump’s “purging” of military leadership? Is the U.S. in danger of praetorianism? Or maybe even a coup involving the armed forces? What’s the appropriate relationship between civilian leadership and military leadership?

Post your thoughts in the comments section.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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