As is traditional here, I am taking advantage of the Fourth of July this week to write something about the United States, this time a brief discussion of the nature of civil-military relations in the United States.
Civil-military relations (typically shortened to ‘civ-mil’ or sometimes CMR) is, simply put, the relationship between the broader civil society and its military. As you might well imagine, the nature of civil-military relations vary substantially based on institutions but are even more sensitive to norms, because institutional and legal structures can only restrain folks with arms to the degree that they collectively agree to be restrained.
In practice, as we’re going to briefly outline, American civ-mil is, in a sense, fundamentally based on a bargain, the foundations of which date to the American Revolution but which has evolved and solidified since then. That bargain has been remarkably successful: the United States has avoided the sort of major civ-mil disjunctures (like military coups) that are often distressingly common in many states and has done so for two and a half centuries.1 That isn’t to say the American civ-mil has been forever untroubled, as we’ll see: it is an evolving bargain, based on norms and thus fundamentally both precious and fragile.
Newburgh Foundations
The institutions, cultures and customs of the American civil-military relationship, of course, were not born out of nothing, but rather drew from two clear sources: the young country’s British inheritance and the long-running colonial militias, which now became state militias. Nevertheless, when I’ve taught American military history, I’ve often stressed to my students how contingent, how reliant upon personalities and choices, the founding of the country was. Somewhat famously, Benjamin West, friend and court painter to King George III, claimed the king “asked West what would Washington do were America to be declared Independent. West said He believed He would retire to a private situation.–The King said if He did He would be the greatest man in the world.” Unclear if the exchange took place, but it speaks to the degree that the foundation of the United States could have gone a great many different ways.
The first really firm step in the establishment of the American civil-military tradition comes in March of 1783. You will permit me to relate the story in full, because I think this is one of those events that often gets alluded to as if everyone knows it, but is in fact relatively rarely taught and so many folks do not know it or do not know the particulars.
The Revolutionary War was, at this point, effectively over, but the peace hadn’t been signed and so the Continental Army remained drawn up at Newburgh, New York. The issue was that the officers and soldiers of the Continental Army had been promised to be, you know, paid, something that had happened only irregularly because the Continental Congress was reliant on the states for funds (as would the Confederation Congress be under the Articles of Confederation; this gets fixed with the Constitution in 1789), In particular, the Congress had promised officers a pension of half-pay for life, which was a tradition in European armies, but it had taken no action to make that promise a reality.
This simmering discontent came in the context of debates about the nature of the new government and political disputes over the powers central government (under the Articles of Confederation). In that context, a group of officers drew up a petition to have their pensions converted into a single lump-sum payment and the faction (‘nationalists’) that favored maximum central government power in turn used that pressure and the implication that there might be a mutiny if Congress were not given the powers they wanted. When the Congress as a whole didn’t budge, the ‘nationalists,’ led in particular by Robert Morris encouraged the disaffected officers to raise tensions in order to put pressure on the Congress.
It’s not clear if any of the officers actually contemplated a real coup d’état, but this was transparently an effort to introduce the military, particularly the officer corps, as a political faction, an active ‘player’ in the politics of the nation rather than simply a servant of its civil authorities. Two anonymous letters were circulated in camp, one calling for a meeting (against regulations) and another putting the Congress on blast and threatening that the army would refuse to disband if Congress didn’t meet its demands. It’s important to recognize in this moment that it isn’t the Continental Army vs. the Continental Congress, so much as one faction of the Congress (that wasn’t winning) inviting the army to tip the scales in their favor.
Washington, who had been away due to illness, arrives back at the army shortly before this and moves quickly. The letters circulated on March 10th, calling for a meeting on March 11th; that morning (the 11th), Washington issued general orders objecting to the anonymous meeting, but instead called a regular meeting on the 15th. He also, in a bit of glorious misdirection, requested a report of the meeting, implying he would not be there. It feels necessary to stress that, “convene a group of your disaffected officers in a meeting where you aren’t present so when they vote you supreme power you can say you didn’t ask for it” was a fairly obvious trick even in 1783 and one wonders if some of the disaffected officers read the general orders that way. A second anonymous letter appeared the next day presenting Washington’s meeting as an endorsement of conspiracy of disaffected officers.
The meeting was opened by Major General Horatio Gates, who had been in command of the camp and was in sympathy with the conspiracy.
And it is at this point that George Washington turns in one of the virtuoso moments of his career. He enters the meeting – surprising all present, who assumed he would not be present – and asks to address the gathered officers. He then gave a short speech, the Newburgh Address urging his officers, “as you value your own sacred honor, as you respect the rights of humanity, and as you regard the military and national character of America, to express your utmost horror and detestation of the man, who wishes, under any specious pretences, to overturn the liberties of our country; and who wickedly attempts to open the flood-gates of civil discord, and deluge our rising empire in blood.”
Washington then drew a letter from Congress and, with a bit of theatrics, paused and fumbled with it, before taking our a pair of reading glasses – another surprise, they were new – and asked the officers’ indulgence, “Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country.”
The conspiracy collapsed basically instantly. After reading the letter from the Continental Congress, Washington left and the meeting approved a resolution drafted by General Henry Knox affirming their “unshaken confidence” in Congress and deploring the anonymous letters.
The Bargain
The event may have been the most dramatic one in the creation of the American civil-military relationship, but it was hardly the only one in those early years, which featured repeated debates over the size of the central standing army as compared to state militias, the establishment of fraternal societies for former officers (the ‘Society of the Cincinnati,’ which some feared might become a plot), a riotous mutiny of the Continental Army in Pennsylvania in April and so on. Many of these problems led to the stronger Constitution replacing the weak Articles of Confederation in 1789.
But I think the Newburgh Conspiracy is a good place to start because it represents the essential bargain that forms the backbone of the American civil-military tradition. The classic work on this topic, of course, is Samuel P. Huntington’s The Soldier and the State (1957), which rather unlike some of Huntington’s other works is worth reading. Huntington presents the civil-military relationship of countries as fundamentally a product of three factors: civilian ideology (pro- or anti-military), the political power wielded by the officer corps and finally the professionalism of the officer corps. It is the last of these factors he views as decisive. The goal is achieving ‘objective’ civilian control as compared to ‘subjective’ civilian control where the military is subordinate not to civilian authority as a whole but to civilian sub-groups, such as if a political party or ideology had the loyalty of the military, rather than the whole government. Huntington’s solution is professionalism, bluntly put, “Civilian control in the objective sense is the maximizing of military professionalism.”2
I find I agree and disagree with Huntington – or more correctly, I think he has some load-bearing definitions here which conceal as much as they illuminate. In particular while he details the emergence of professional officer corps as a specific historical process in the 19th century that plays out in the establishment of standards, institutions of training and the waning role of old aristocracies, he also uses ‘professionalism’ to mean an ideology, which – following Clausewitz (drink!) – subordinates military affairs to political considerations. In short, professionalism in Huntington’s reading by definition guarantees military subordination to civilian control, because while it is the product of a process it is also an ideology. The problem here is he has created a definitional identity: professionalism is both a process and an ideology, because he believes the process reliably produces the ideology. But that is begging the question – in the correct use of the phrase – demanding the reader concede by nature of definition the entire argument. It results in a situation where Huntington’s definition bears the load of his argument rather than his evidence.
This is a book that basically anyone doing military history has to grapple with, but I’ll be frank: I think Huntington is quite wrong or at least substantially incomplete. He recognizes almost immediately that Germany is an enormous problem for his thesis, because of its reputation as the most professionally military and yet at the same time…well, we’re talking about Germany from 1914 to 1945. Things went wrong. Huntington’s analysis of this problem, to my mind, doesn’t work; his claims that Germany had objective civilian control until 1914 (and thus that German civ-mil worked) is hard to sustain against something like Isabel Hull’s Absolute Destruction (2006) which successfully traces the roots of the Wehrmacht’s butchery in WWII to the military culture of Imperial Germany and its near total insulation from meaningful civilian oversight well before the First World War (and often successfully bucking weak Imperial German democratic institutions to do so). German military culture was already sick in the 1870s and 1880s when Huntington imagines it the picture of health.
Meanwhile, Huntington’s limited exoneration of the Wehrmacht’s officer class, “they were trying to behave like professional soldiers, and it is by the standards of soldiers that they should be judged. By these criteria they come off well. The evil was not in them. It was in the environment which would not permit them to live by the soldier’s creed” is simply a ‘clean-Wehrmacht’ apologia that has not remotely survived the last 70-odd years of scholarship on the behavior of the German officer corps in the Second World War.
But I would offer that a military order that acquiesces and comes to actively aid in allowing a single political faction to seize power, overturn the democratic system of government and then proceed to butcher substantial portions of the citizenry does not “come off well” in maintaining good civil-military relations. To be fair to Huntington, a lot of that scholarship wasn’t available in 1957, of course. But this book is supposed to be a general theory of military professionalism, rather than a specific study of its American version and so if the general theory falls apart in the face of modern scholarship, then it isn’t very much of a general theory. The trappings of professionalism – the war colleges, training programs, career paths and corporate professional identity – do not guarantee Huntington’s ideology of professionalism, the subordination of the soldier to the state and its civilian authorities.
The idea that simply because a group is professionalized that they might not come to see themselves as a distinct class with interests to drive politically strikes me as shockingly naive. As Adam Smith famously quipped, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices”3 It is not at all clear to me why military professionals should be made immune by their professionalism to this trend in human nature when no other profession is.
Instead, I think that the American civil-military relationship – which to be clear, I view as very successful – is predicated on a bargain, that we can see at work already at Newburgh, of which Huntington’s ideology of professionalism is only one part. The bargain is one between civilian authorities (mainly the President and Congress), the military (mainly the officer corps) and the citizenry. And I would frame it like this: the military agrees not to insert itself into (internal) politics broadly construed and in exchange the civilian authorities agree not to use the military in internal politics and finally in turn the military occupies an elevated place of trust in the citizenry.
(Attentive readers may note the three constituents of the bargain – political leadership, the officer corps and the public – correspond neatly to the entities which ‘manage’ each element of Clausewitz’ trinity (drink!): the political object calculated by political leadership, friction managed by the officers and will derived from the public.)
In that context, what Huntington terms ‘professionalism’ as an ideology is the military’s part of the bargain, a collective ideology and set of norms made by the military (occasionally reinforced by presidents, as we’ll see) to keeps its members within the terms of the bargain. It is in turn matched by a set of civilian norms where politicians actively avoid actions that might politicize the military or military figures while at the same time politicians and civilians go out of their way to praise the military as an institution and its members, according it a special, privileged place in the American social order. That bargain has not always held, but it has mostly held and I think those are its contours.
The Best Features of Our Government
Of course this set of norms did not emerge instantly at the founding of the republic either, but rather they were solidified over time, often through testing. The story of the development of the United States’ military institutions is generally one of substantial skepticism: for most of American history, policy-makers (particularly in Congress) have openly worried about the danger a standing military of any sort poses to a free country and yet at the same time aware of the necessity of at least some standing military force. Teaching the development of the United States military as an institution, one gets almost tired of the repeated episodes of this sort: a security challenge or military innovation (usually in Europe) prompts an effort to reform the US military, which sparks congressional skepticism about the impact to the civil-military relationship and civilian control of the military. Usually the end result is that the reform happens, but in a watered down form.
So after the Revolution, Hamilton argued for a standing army and state militias patterned off of the Continental Army; the Congress disbanded the army and eventually raised a single hybrid regiment of 700 soldiers (the 1st American Regiment) to replace it. When that proved insufficient, the Constitutional Convention provided for a federal army, but Congress kept it small for a long time and it existed alongside state militias, which were only weakly regulated through the Uniform Militia Act (1792). A push for a larger standing army after the War of 1812 went pretty much nowhere. I am in love with the quip of Charles Fischer (Rep. for NC, 1819-1821, 1839-1841) that he “always thought that one of the best features of our government is its unfitness for war.”
Congress also notably resisted the creation of a European-style General Staff – that is, one modeled off of the Prussian Great General Staff (Großer Generalstab). This is a story we’ll need to come back to another day, but after the Napoleonic Wars, Prussia – embarrassed and smarting from defeat – set about a dramatic reform of both senior officer training and organization which created a single central planning organ (the General Staff) headed by a single chief planner (the Chief of the General Staff), and ‘feed’ officers by a single advanced officer training institution (the Kriegsakademie or ‘War College’). Especially after Prussian victories in the Second Schleswig War (1864), the Austro-Prussian War (1866) and the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1), there was a lot of pressure to imitate this system and most of the major European militaries did so.
But in the United States, Congress took one hard look at that system and balked at the potential threat to civilian control. After the American Civil War, William T. Sherman, Commanding General of the U.S. Army after 1869 promoted Emory Upton, who proposed something like a German system in 1875, backed up by a congressional commission headed by then-senator Ambrose Burnside (yes, that one) , but Congress calmly but soundly voted down basically all of the proposals. Secretary of War Elihu Root (1899-1904) made another attempt, backed by senior army leadership and he got the ‘General Staff Act of 1903’ which despite the name, didn’t establish a German-style general staff either. Instead the General Staff created was merely supervisory and coordinating, subordinate to the Secretary of War and did not exercise direct authority over army logistics or movements. Whereas the Großer Generalstab became the heart of the Imperial German military, by 1914 the weakened American equivalent had just twenty-two officers assigned to it.
When it came time, after WWII to reorganize the American defense establishment, the War Department suggested the armed forces be reorganized, again thinking in terms of something like a European model, with a single staff headed by a single chief reporting to the civilian secretary. Congress…did not do that. Instead Congress passed the National Security Act of 1947 (amended in 1949), creating the ‘National Military Establishment.’ Instead of a single chief of a general staff, this system split up the organizational, planning, advisory and actual command roles, which really only consolidate at the Secretary of Defense. There is no ‘general staff’ as such, but a Joint Staff headed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff headed by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs who is the highest ranking (living) officer in the US military, but who is forbidden by statute from actually commanding any troops, while a civilian council advises the president (this is the National Security Council (NSC)). Instead, actual combat forces are attached to the theater-based combatant commands, which report to the SecDef. That centralizes planning in the office of a much stronger Secretary of Defense, rather than an empowered general staff.
What I have always found odd, teaching the subject, is that the standard textbooks for American military history – notably For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States (1984, 1994, 2012), which is as far as I know, the most common general American military history textbook – treat these moments of skepticism as disappointing half-measures or failures of vision. And to be sure, some of them turn out to have been strategically foolish; Congress’ early reticence to fund a navy combined with whipsawing presidential policy under the first three presidents left the United States less prepared for the Quasi War, First Barbary War and the War of 1812 than it might have been, for instance.
But overall, that tradition of skepticism strikes me as not a tradition of failure, but of success.
The thing is, Congress’ fear that a European-style general-staff might subvert civilian governance in the event of a war, that it might resist civilian control was clearly correct. Of course the most glaring example in the First World War (commented on, inter alia, by Huntington, op cit.) was Erich Ludendorff, who by 1918 might as well have been the king of Germany given the degree to which he effectively ran not just the German war effort but Germany from his position as Quatermaster General (with Paul von Hindenburg as the figurehead Chief of the General Staff). But the problem occured even among the Allies in WWI: Sir William Robertson, Chief of the [British] Imperial General Staff from 1916 to 1918 had terrible relations with David Lloyd George, but was politically impossible to remove and in turn made it impossible for Lloyd George to sack Sir Douglas Haig, who he also thought little of. The French equivalent too, the Grand Quartier Général both steadily expanded its effective authority, while it was almost impossible to actually fire any of its members, save the Chief of Army Staff himself (and even then they had to generally be ‘promoted’ out of command for political reasons).
Of course Congress wasn’t alone in making and keeping the bargain. Thomas Jefferson had overseen the establishment of a permanent military academy out of the training post at West Point in 1802, which of course is now the United States Military Academy. Jefferson’s goal had been in part political, to break up the federalist dominated officer corps by creating an avenue for (Democratic-)Republicans to enter it, but over time West Point (and its naval equivalent at Annapolis and the rest of the apparatus of military education as it emerged) adopted an ethos of professionalism along the ideological lines Huntington advanced above: a responsibility to the country which demands non-partisan, ‘a-political’ execution of one’s duties. That ethos remains deeply embedded in how American officers are trained and how they understand themselves.4 Indeed, many officers today are sufficiently committed to the idea that the role of an officer in the United States military is non-partisan that many famously do not vote (voter participation among service members is somewhat lower than among the general population).
Dumb Son of a…
Of course the civ-mil bargain was never perfect. Officers in the age before instantaneous communication often had substantial local authority and through the 1800s frequently pushed that authority beyond their orders – Commodore David Porter raided Fajardo on then-Spanish Puerto Rico without orders in 1822 (he was cashiered); Captain John Downes burned Kuala Batu in Sumatra in 1832, killing hundreds, well beyond the remit of his orders (he was critiqued by then-president Jackson only in private); while Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s aggressive ‘opening’ of Japan in 1852-5 also clearly exceeded his orders, but it succeeded, so he was rewarded.5 This was curbed not by a crackdown on such officers – who often got off with little, if any, punishment – but by the steady expansion of communication technology enabling presidents and their cabinets to employ far more direct authority over overseas affairs.
More famously, of course, was the defenestration of Douglas MacArthur. The generation is now mostly passed, but it used to be that you could start a pretty fierce argument in a room of older folks simply by offering an opinion as to if president Harry Truman was right to fire Douglas MacArthur. Truman was right to fire MacArthur, because MacArthur had violated the bargain in a serious and significant way. Always a self-promoter, MacArthur had a strong public image and after WWII was essentially the American proconsul in East Asia, a dangerous thing in and of itself. MacArthur favored expanding the Korean War into a general war with China, which Truman (and many others) feared would draw in the Soviet Union and trigger a third World War. Rather than carrying out Truman’s strategy of seeking a negotiated peace, MacArthur effectively acted out his own foreign policy, among other things by communicating to other countries (Spain and Portugal) his intention to widen the war against the president’s wishes.
For Truman, the problem was that the evidence he had that MacArthur was doing these things was mostly classified. But in April of 1951, MacArthur sends a letter to representative Joseph Martin, deeply critical of Truman, which Martin read out on the floor of Congress. MacArthur was, essentially, directly challenging the bargain. Huntington (op. cit.) is right to note this behavior was a sharp deviation from American military ideology (what he terms “the military mind,” but again, I reject the generalization) and Truman responded, on April 10th, by removing MacArthur from command. Truman quipped later, “I fired him because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the President. I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.”
The move was deeply unpopular at the time but it was correct and a necessary reassertion of the traditional civil-military bargain in the context of a United States military establishment that was, after World War II, never going to go back to the small armies of earlier American history.
The Vietnam War represented a different challenge to the civil-military bargain, one in which the military and political establishment’s relationship with the public was the point to fray. Public opinion, which had been supportive of the war early on, turned decisively against it in 1968 (notably somewhat before the Tet offensive, though Tet intensified the movement). Americans objected not merely to the political decision – the decision to wage the war – but how it was being waged. While the My Lai massacre is the most famous, the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group – kept secret until 1994 – documented at least 320 substantiated war crimes. It did not help that the public saw – with some accuracy – senior military officers like William Westmoreland as complicit in Johnson administration political dishonesty. With declining public support, morale plummeted; towards the end of the war Creighton Abrams (Westmoreland’s successor as US Army Chief of Staff) concluded that the collapse in discipline and morale was so severe that he needed “to get this Army home to save it.”6
The All-Volunteer Force
This of course forms the context for the creation of the All-Volunteer Force (AVF), the effective conversion of the United States military into a professional, fully standing military, which I’d argue is the single most dramatic shift in the civil-military relationship in American history, the full impact of which is not yet clear. For almost 200 years, the United States military had been an essentially civilian force which relied on conscription. For the decades prior to the creation of the AVF in 1973, conscription had been a fact of life. While the United States had demobilized substantially after WWII, there had been at least some conscription in every year from 1940 to 1972 except for 1947. In every year between 1950 and 1972, conscription had never been lower than at least 80,000 new conscriptions a year.
This was a huge change. For such a major change, I find that it draws surprisingly little attention. The 50th anniversary of the AVF passed with relatively little fanfare in 2023. I’ve mentioned For the Common Defense (1984, 1994, 2012) as the dominant textbook for introductory American military history: the shift to the All-Volunteer Force is dealt with in a single page (page 568, for the curious). The textbook I’ve seen most recently used for US Naval history (and which I used), J.C. Bradford and J. F. Bradford, America, Sea Power and the World (2016, 2023), doesn’t even give it that much: the shift is discussed in a single paragraph on page 351 (308 in the 2016 edition).7
The likely impacts of the shift to an AVF were studied prior to implementation in the Gates Commission, a report that had a preordained conclusion – it was convened to provide Nixon the cover to do the thing (end the draft) he had promised to do already in his campaign – and which honestly I find disappointing in its approach, which is mostly ‘happy talk’ designed to justify what Nixon had already decided to do. It is striking to me, for instance, that the Gates Commission did not include a single historian to perhaps discuss how the shift towards fully professional militaries had gone for republics in the past. Instead, the focus is on the economics of the shift, with fairly blithe assertions that the civil-military relationship would remain unchanged despite the fairly obvious implausibility of that given the shift from “everyone serves” to “only a small portion of society serves.”8
As I’ve noted elsewhere, the Romans also seem to have thought that they could professionalize their army without reducing its ability to scale up in an emergency or altering the civil-military relationship and for quite a few decades that more or less worked, while the old norms held. But as those old norms decayed, the institution increasingly became what you’d expect from its institutional structure: a permanent political faction, advocating for its own interests, often with violence, to the point that the emperor Septimius Severus’ advice to his sons as he lay dying in 211 was, “Be harmonious, enrich the soldiers, and scorn all other men,”9 a fairly open admission that the soldiery was not just a political constituency, but the most important one. It took time for those norms to shift, but when one is building or rebuilding institutions, the long-term is the term that matters.
I do not think necessarily that this is the direction the All-Volunteer Force must go. It has two and a half centuries of strong norms pushing it away from this direction. But careful maintenance of the civ-mil bargain is made all the more necessary when the military is effectively fully professional. For my own part, all cards on the table, while I greatly value the service of the United States’ military personnel (there’s that third part of the bargain!) and think they serve honorably, I am quite skeptical of the long-term implications of the All-Volunteer Force. Its creators assumed that fully professionalizing the military would not impact the civil-military relationship and that it would always be possible to shift back to a mass-conscript army in the event of a major war, but historical examples suggest it is not so easy.
But the All-Volunteer Force is not the direction from which I see now the principal threat to the civ-mil bargain.
The Fraying Bargain
It is instead, to my mind, an overweening executive that now most endangers the bargain, threatening to break the American civil-military bargain by dragging the military into politics. Remember, the civil-military bargain is not merely a pact of submission by the military to civilian authority, but also a determination by civilian authorities not to pull the military into politics, not to use the military in internal, partisan political ways, because repeatedly doing so will, inevitably, eventually wear down the a-political nature of the military, sandpapering away the professional ethos that keeps the military from using bullets instead of ballots.
Notably, the problem here really has come primarily from the executive. Reading all this way, it may be somewhat striking that there is so much Congress and so few Presidents so far. However, since 1933 (when Franklin D. Roosevelt became president) the powers of the presidency, as exercised in practice, have grown substantially; the usual term for this is the ‘Imperial presidency,’ and it seems apt to the increasing dominance of the executive over the legislative branch. Meanwhile, the United States military has never been truly demobilized at any point since 1941. Instead, it has remained almost always on an operational, if not war, footing somewhere more or less continuously. At the same time, Congress has seemed to effectively shrink as a political institution. So while for most of American history, the civil-military bargain existed primarily between a military and congress that were often opposed, increasingly it operates between the military and a president who views the military as an agent of their own authority.
Now you may be expecting this to be the start of a jeremiad against the Trump administrations and, to be fair, there is going to be some of that. But the fraying of the civil-military bargain goes back well before 2016. The First Gulf War (1990-1) was a clear ‘reset’ of public perceptions of the military: the victory, shocking at the time10 caused American confidence in the military to surge; even when the surge of confidence ended, it settled at a much higher new normal. I should also note that the current assumption that the United States military enjoys a large qualitative superiority over any potential rival is itself really a product of the surprise of lopsidedness of the Gulf War.
The result was that going into the aughts, particularly following the shock of the September 11th attacks, the United States military was one of the few institutions that retained broad credibility in the United States, while also being more completely under the sole control of the president (rather than the shared control of Congress). After all, with the shift to an All-Volunteer Force, the President didn’t need to go to Congress to request annual draft authorizations to simply maintain the force – instead there was an expectation of a ‘steady state’ military large enough to manage whatever the president deemed it ought. Likewise, extremely broad executive interpretations of the War Powers Resolution (1973) combined by equally extremely broadly worded post-9/11 authorizations for the use of military force (AUMFs), meant that presidents could and did wage what in any other context we’d call wars largely at their own discretion.
In short, American presidents have gotten used to initiating military strikes and combat operations almost entirely without consulting Congress, turning the military into a tool of the executive alone. That covers the Trump administration’s recent adventures in Yemen and Iran, but equally the Biden administration’s adventures in Yemen and Somalia, that latter risibly justified under the 2001 9/11 AUMF and the Obama administration’s adventures in Libya and Syria.11
That has collided with a culture that trusts almost nothing, but still trusts the military. One of the striking recent examples of this has been selections for the Secretary of Defense. The Secretary of Defense is, by statute to be a civilian position, with former officers being barred by law for selection within seven years (ten for general officers) after the end of their service, with special Congressional dispensation required to avoid this. Nevertheless, most Secretaries of Defense had fairly limited military service – just one of the first ten, George C. Marshall, was a career officer (and required the first congressional waiver). It was far more common to have Secretaries of Defense with no military experience than career officers, although by far the most common were men who had served for short periods as relatively junior officers during the periods of large-scale conscription before distinguishing themselves in business and law.
However, we can see a shift: of the last four confirmed (not acting) Secretaries of Defense, three required Congressional waivers to serve because of recent military service (Mattis, Austin, Hegseth). To put that in perspective, from 1947 to 2017, only once did a president select and congress confirm a career officer who would require a waiver to be the Secretary of Defense. But from 2017 to 2025, it has happened three times with just one exception. It speaks to a public that has lost faith in Clemenceau’s famous dictum that “War! It is too serious a matter to trust to military men.”12 It seems well worth noting that, contrary to expectations, entrusting the top job at the Pentagon to military men has not resulted in substantially better outcomes, either in the institution or on the battlefield. Indeed, a survey of the Secretaries of Defense and their forebears, the Secretaries of War, does seem to suggest that careers in business and politics may have been rather better preparation for the Secretary of Defenses’ job than purely military careers (though George Marshall is an obvious exception).
Instead, we increasingly only trust military men and our presidents are all too willing to seek to wrap themselves in that trust.
So George W. Bush landed a jet on the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) and gave a speech with a giant ‘Mission Accomplished‘ banner behind him, an effort to use the military to amplify his own political position. The Democrats responded with a candidate, John Kerry, who foregrounded his military experience, leading his nomination convention speech with, “I’m John Kerry, and I’m reporting for duty,” with a salute. Biden’s parting speech to the military was carefully calibrated to avoid stepping over the “no political speeches in military contexts” norm by the letter of the law, but hardly the spirit of it, as his call for soldiers to “remember your oath” had fairly clear political implications given the context. The Trump administration does not represent, to my mind, a break with this trend, but a dangerous acceleration of it.
In the first Trump administration, there were fairly clear efforts to politicize the military, which were resisted by an officer corps that remained ideologically attached to Huntington’s professionalism and its ideal of an a-political military. The president in 2017 wanted a large military parade, but was forced to cancel it. The president asked Gen. Mark Milley to use the military to break up protests, which was refused. Instead, Milley, aware of the need to present an a-political military, publicly apologized for being present in uniform at a presidential photo-op (which had required violently clearing a peaceful protest from a public space). At the same time, departing officers, like James Mattis, felt that their oath required at least a period of silence about their disagreements with the president, precisely because of those norms of a non-partisan, non-political military.
It is hard not to view the second Trump administration as at least attempting to directly attack those norms in response. The president by habit refers to ‘his military’ and ‘his generals,’13 while his Secretary of Defense began his term as SecDef with an unprecedented string of political firings – Gen. CQ Brown Jr. (Chair of the Joint Chiefs), Gen. Timothy Haugh (CYBERCOM), Adm. Lisa Franchetti (Navy CNO), Adm. Linda Fagan (Coast Guard commandant); Gen. Charles Hamilton (Army Materiel Command) and Gen. Jim Slife (Vice Chief of Staff). That is not the sort of thing incoming administrations generally do, but it also seems worth noting, particularly in the context of Hegseth’s open rejection of gender and racial inclusivity in the military, that those high profile firings removed every woman and person of color from the Joint Chiefs. That military parade happened this time, on Trump’s birthday no less. As President, Trump went to the renamed-in-defiance-of-Congress Fort Bragg to give a transparently political, partisan speech, with directions for a crowd of soldiers behind him to be selected for political affiliation, in a flagrant violation of the norms of that civil-military bargain that the military is not to be used for partisan political purposes.
Of course on the flipside of that, one doesn’t have to spent much time in left-leaning spaces to encounter folks who dream that perhaps a military rising would deliver the government to them from a man they detest. There are countries where it is a military tradition that the military launches a coup if the civilian government strays from certain ideological lines. The Turkish military famously worked this way, with coups in 1960, 1971, 1980 and 1997 before such an effort failed in 2016. This is, to say the least, not the habit of successful countries; you cannot make a democracy strong by developing a habit of launching a military coup every time someone doesn’t like the results. But this certainly seems to reflect an increasing politicization of the military, which has in turn coincided with diminishing trust (albeit still quite a ways to fall to reach the low ebbs of the 1970s). It would be the height of foolishness to try to defend the republic by attempting to call in the military to overthrow the government.
This is, clearly, quite a dangerous trend. The American civil-military bargain has been extraordinarily successful, but it relies on restraint and forbearance by both military and civilian authorities.
And, quite simply part of the reason this trend continues to get worse is that we do not generally talk about it or think about it in these terms. Journalists do not write about the civil-military relationship the way they write about congressional norms (which are also fraying) or perennial political issues like the budget. Where the civil-military relationship isn’t simply ignored, it is taken for granted, assumed that because the system has always worked this way that it always will. But the strong norms of the civil-military bargain are not typical or normal, they are unusual, the product of more than two centuries of careful construction and maintenance dating back to that day in Newburgh. It is one of the great American achievements, and we should not let it slip away out of indifference.
Mending the tradition likely requires shifting authority over the military back towards Congress and away from an imperial executive. But equally it requires attention and value placed on the bargain: it requires Americans to impose costs for politicians that violate those norms and for that to happen it requires Americans to recognize the norms upon which their democracy is predicated in the first place.
The American history of civil-military relations is certainly not without its blemishes and complexities (you may note I have left the complexities of Reconstruction entirely out here; that’s a topic for another time), but it is a tradition we ought to value and be proud of, one we ought to seek to protect and foster. It does not consist only in military submission to elected civilian authority – though it does include that – but also consists of a civilian determination not to make the military the arbitrator of our civil disputes. It is not to be taken for granted, but rather is something fragile, carefully built up over decades and now placed into our care. Our memory should never outlive the shame of it if we were to let fall something so carefully built up over two and a half centuries.
Instead, even in difficult times – especially in difficult times – we are called to rise to George Washington’s closing exhortation at Newburgh, that “you will, by the dignity of your conduct, afford occasion for posterity to say, when speaking of the glorious example you have exhibited to mankind—‘had this day been wanting, the world had never seen the last stage of perfection to which human nature is capable of attaining.'”
- Of course we had a Civil War, but that was initiated on the ‘civ’ side of the civ-mil, with secessionist southern state governments breaking away.
- Huntington, op. cit., 83.
- Wealth of Nations (1776).
- As an aside, while a lot of attention is put on the West Point graduates who joined the Confederacy in 1861, it is worth noting that West Point graduates took to the Stars and Stripes – over the Stars and Bars – at a rate of more than 2-to-1, including quite a few southerners. There were, for instance, in 1861, two generals and nine(-ish) colonels from Virginia; only one general (Joseph E. Johnston) and one colonel (Robert E. Lee) chose the slaver’s rebellion (two more resigned entirely, serving neither). Notable among those Virginians to stay loyal was George Henry Thomas, the Rock of Chickamauga, one of the most capable commanders of the war.
- Perry’s orders authorized the use of force only in self-defense. Perry arrived at Edo Bay on July 8th, promptly fired all of his guns, purportedly to celebrate the Fourth of July, and then against Japanese orders, steered into the bay with his ships readied for battle. When the Japanese protested, he responded by sending them a white flag for them to use when they wanted to surrender. In short, Perry did everything he possibly could to signal his intent to open Japan by force, against his orders, and violence was really only averted because the Japanese opted not to fight an unwinnable battle against Perry’s gunboats.
- For the Common Defense (2012), 562 for the quote.
- In that book’s defense, the Navy has a really big set of reforms associated broadly with CNO Elmo Zumwalt that happen at basically the same time and are connected and it opts to focus on those. I will note that the position of the paragraph has changed because the updated 2023 version of the book has opted to grapple more extensively and more successfully with this period as one of increasing diversity in the navy, with a chapter by Kristy N. Kamarck on that specific topic. It is a marked improvement over the first edition, though I think both FtCD and the Bradford and Bradford remain too hagiographic, too willing to sweep the military’s problems under the rug and only comment on military diversity when they can tell the story as a happy tale of progress.
- Especially as that small portion tends to be concentrated, a thing the Commission essentially refuses to consider as a first principle of their analysis; they assume cheerfully that the AVF will naturally continue to reflect a cross-section of the United States. In some ways that is true, but in other ways it is very much not – there certainly are ‘military families,’ where service tends to ‘run in the family’ in the United States now – and the emergence of those patterns would have been a pretty obvious thing to expect, given that the same trend is extremely visible in the Roman army of the early empire.
- Dio 77.16
- And it was a shock. I am just barely old enough to remember how worried folks were (I recall my parents being quite worried) as the war loomed. Looking back, one can see media coverage in the run-up to the war itself that was deeply concerned: American military equipment was untested, the memory of poor combat performance in Vietnam lingered and the Iraqi army was battle-hardened and well equipped with relatively modern (for the time) Soviet equipment. The overwhelming Coalition victory, repeated again in 2003, radically confirmed a major change in the balance of conventional military power, that the United States could casually disassemble what was the world’s fifth largest army at the time.
- There is something of an irony here that the Bush administration, hardly without fault, was the last administration to take seriously the need to get specific congressional authorization to engage in military operations, getting an AUMF for Afghanistan in 2001 and another for Iraq in 2002.
- La guerre! C’est une chose trop grave pour la confier à des militaires.
- And has done even since the first administration.
Point of order — GEN Hamilton’s firing (AMC) was for misconduct; interfering in a command selection process. If you want to point to a dangerous partisan firing, the firing of all the senior Staff Judge Advocates of the services is the one that should be most chilling, as it took out those officer most likely to provide sound legal objection to illegal orders.
And also note, Hamilton’s firing was one of the final acts of the Biden Administration, not an act of the Trump Administration.
From my own perspective, it feels quite odd to compare this to the situation in Sweden, where there is quite low trust in the military (for decades a majority of the population has believed that the military will be unable to defend Sweden if invaded) and where until recently soldiers have not been especially honoured by general society, and yet I don’t think we’ve ever had any risk of coups in modern times.
Surely you answer your own question—the lack of respect and perceived weakness of the Swedish military forestall a coup attempt.
Well, depends on what you mean by “modern”; the last time we *did* have a coup (1809) it was by the military.
I don’t think anything like that can happen in modern Europe: any country in which something like that happened would immediately become a pariah with all its neighbors, with actual foreign intervention to restore elected government a real possibility. The USA is obviously in a very different place in this regard.
Portugal and Spain were fascist until the mid 70s. Hungary is doing its best to get there now, Poland has been similar in recent years, and currently the most popular party in the UK is, at the very least, a big fan of fascist policies.
The Hungarian army did not install Orban at gunpoint, and I’ve not heard of him wielding that military for domestic politics, while he has ruthlessly deployed every other tool he has to hand. What moves this particular forbearance?
I see two hypotheses: fear that such an order would bring mutiny, and fear that the army moving against dissent would grant his detractors outside Hungary license to intervene.
Orban’s government has been extremely corrupt and generally unpleasant in a lot of ways, but so far it hasn’t been especially ruthless.
The ‘recipe’ to Orban’s rule is buying off the major media groups, choking off foreign funding to NGOs, and good old fashioned clientelism.
Askarn, why the need to choking off foreign funding to NGOs?
@Ad9 it stymies their ability to create an alternative information ecosystem.
If you mean why foreign funding and not (private) domestic funding too, well, that’s my point. Orban is on the soft end of the authoritarian spectrum.
Right-wing authoritarians tend to be very suspicious of any foreign group that might express opinions in their own country, with the occasional exception of fellow right-wing authoritarians who are being helpful.
Left-wing authoritarian leaders’ mileage varies a little more; some are ultranationalist just like the right-wingers, while others are internationalist.
However, any kind of authoritarian leader has a strong desire to control the information flow and publicly accessible narratives in his own country, and will tend to view the very existence of alternative narratives and outside sources of information as a form of treason to be denigrated, prevented, or punished.
Hungarian here: the reason Orbán doesn’t use the military as a political tool is that he largely can’t. Hungary had compulsory military service for men up to the 90s, and most people’s experience in the army hasn’t been a positive one, so he’s dealing with a population that not only views the military as largely ineffective, but one where a large chunk actively detests it. Because of this, he can’t use it as a propaganda tool or to apply political pressure.
As for using the military as a direct tool of oppression, he once again can’t. During the Hungarian revolt against the Communist Party in 1956, the Soviet army opened fire on Hungarian protesters, which is still regarded as one of the worst atrocities inflicted during the communist regime, so trying to use the military as a force of coercion would most likely backfire on him, causing an outright civil uprising.
Interestingly the Portugeuse dictatorship both began and ended with a military coup.
I mean the revolução dos cravos was so bloodless because the regime’s popularity was below 0. It was less of a coup and more of the army laying down arms and refusing to defend the indefensible (in the moral but very much also in the strategic sense) any further.
The legacy of fascism in Spain also appears to contribute to particularly low trust in its military. While the 2018 poll below shows that said trust is still above water at 66%, and markedly higher than in the other institutions in the country, it is also some 5-20% lower than in the other major Western European countries (including Germany at 70%, and contra Jaojao’s comment, Sweden, where said trust is at 77%.)
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/09/04/trust-in-the-military-exceeds-trust-in-other-institutions-in-western-europe-and-u-s/
We have a notable pop-culture artefact attesting to this as well. That is, it seems unlikely that the legendary Macarena could have achieved its status while fundamentally being not only a song about the titular woman’s infidelity, but about her unfaithfulness to a boyfriend who left for the Army, if the society did not already hold the Army in fairly low regard. And vice versa, when the song was remixed and partially translated to English by The Bayside Boys, they omitted the part about military service – no doubt because they figured the American audiences would be far more upset by it.)
“Actual intervention”? By who?
If all the armies in Europe are small and held in contempt by their publics, I can’t see an intervention into a foreign country’s politics by those armies.
Or was this going to be another appeal to the US to intervene somewhere?
“If all the armies in Europe are small and held in contempt by their publics”…. the army of Hungary must also be small and held in contempt by its public.
And outnumbered 20-to-1 by the rest of Europe.
another “special operations” to remove the facist goverment, like what Russia did.
Well, that would rather depend on how desperately the average Hungarian fought against having an election, and for the illegal military dictatorship that, in this eventuality, had just openly overthrown the government elected by the average Hungarian.
1. It would not really be necessary to send boots on the ground, like realistically if say Belgium had a coup, neighboring states would just blockade it until the Belgian Army comes to its sense. European countries are small and hardly autarkyk
2. There are different levels of distrust. The French are quite fond of their military and quite fine with foreign interventions (if anything, they have a pretty inflated view of their actual importance). If again, the Belgian Army staged a coup, maybe the Germans would be unwilling (and unable) to intervene, but the French would not. It only takes one determined country to bring down an unpopular, internationally isolated, economically doomed regime
“for decades a majority of the population has believed that the military will be unable to defend Sweden if invaded”
That means they don’t think Sweden would be able to fight off a much larger country on its own. That is not the question Americans answer when they are asked if they trust their military.
Well, when your military strategy consists of “fighting till the last Finn,” you don’t need much of an army, and the military you do have won’t get much respect.
Surely the Swedish (and most other European countries’) strategy these days is “fighting till the last Ukrainian”? I don’t see Sweden doing much to help Finland fight Russia, but they’re doing some things (tho not nearly enough) to keep Russian army bogged down in Ukraine and unable to invade Sweden.
I think you take the wrong question as the measure of trust. The Swedish Psychological Defence Agency has conducted opinion polls on the Swedish defence attitudes for decades, and the question you mention is probably “What level of capability does Sweden, in your opinion, have to counter and handle a military attack against our land?” As you say, the answer has been for decades “not good enough” for the majority. However, the question “Assume that Sweden is attacked. Should we oppose it with a force of arms even if the result seems unclear?” Here, the answer has been 75 % “Yes, absolutely” or “Yes, perhaps” quite as adamantly. (The poll is here. Questions are on pages 66 and 82.)
I think you don’t really see here point that in a small country, nobody in their right mind really believes that an armed attack by a great power can be reliably countered, but in any case, you need to try, even if you might lose. This is not really the same thing as not having a low opinion on the military.
I think you’re conflating two different understandings of ‘confidence in the military’, which is not necessarily surprising as no-one really asks the question directly.
The first is ‘is the army competent in defending the nation from an aggressor’, and the second unasked question is ‘is the army an important tool for bringing about political change’. It’s that latter one that’s the important one in terms of confidence. ‘Would the army do a better job of running the country/producing a transfer of power than the civilian system’.
The two are sort of tangentially linked (an incompetent army is unlikely to be believed to be capable of achieving success at running the country, or producing a change in power), but they’re not necessarily directly linked.
Also, from what I’ve read it was quite common for antebellum southern aristocrats to use high officer titles from militia service in most social occasions, which was remarked on by northerners; I wonder how that fits into civil-military relations
The Constitution forbids the establishment of Titles of Nobility, and there was a *lot* of chafing at this by the hereditary slaveowners of the South and their pet state Governments; the use of military titles as Titles is one expression of this frustration, as is (arguably) the tendency of those families to pursue officer training in the first place.
The Kentucky Colonel thing, which you’ll know from KFC ads, is the baldest case of this. It is essentially a knightly order bestowed by the Governor of Kentucky and always has been, and Harlan Sanders was expected to contribute militarily at roughly the same level that Judi Dench does, with earlier eras have notional but not really real expectations of service.
I think that there is one misinterpretation here. The polling on the Vietnam war was on the question of whether it was a good idea to get involved in Vietnam. This is different from the question of whether it was a good idea to remain in Vietnam. I’m old enough to remember that many voters thought that Vietnam was a mistake, but we couldn’t afford to leave. This is a pro-war attitude. (I think that this might also be common in Russian popular opinion on the Ukrainian invasion.) I doubt that a majority of Americans turned against the war until around 1969. And Nixon was very careful not to surrender until he got reelected.
Yeah, agree with this. The Ken Burns documentary on the Vietnam War makes clear that at least some of the discontent among the American public was along the lines of MacArthur in the Korean War – that we should be going in even harder, because clearly we’d be winning then. “I’m opposed to the war because we don’t appear to be winning it and think we should be” is basically a pro-war attitude. It’s very frustrating – polls apparently found people mostly cited with the National Guard on the Kent State massacre, not the people getting shot at, and people made wild and incorrect assumptions that the people getting shot were like crazy anti-war hippies who started it rather than innocents attacked by panicking Guardsmen, some of whom were there for reasons that had nothing to do with protest at all.
Indeed. I would also say that this whole passage
Is rather revisionist, in that it additionally erases the apparent majority of the American public who were supportive of the My Lai perpetrators.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ghosts-my-lai-180967497/
I also think one of the points about the breakdown of Civil-Military relations during Vietnam is how the military kept misinforming the civilian leadership. (and how deferential the civilian leadership was to the military)
To what extent was the military misinforming the civilian leadership and to what extent were the military and the civilian leadership colluding to misinform the public?
So in the UK we haven’t had a civil war since this 1600s, and we don’t have any interest (for better or worse) in the military akin to what is normal in the US.
Is this better or worse? (from a (military) historian’s perspective)
The UK fought a civil war from 1919-1921, and again from 1960-1998; we just didn’t call it that.
Also I think the Zinoviev letter and Clockwork Orange weren’t overt enough to be called coups; but they were definitely military attempts to put their thumbs on the scales.
Never heard of Clockwork Orange, but the Zinoviev letter had nothing to do with the military. It was a document received by MI5 containing evidence that the Soviet Union was secretly bankrolling the Labour Party. What exactly are they supposed to do in such circumstances? What should they have done if they thought the Nazi Party was bankrolling the Conservatives in the run-up to WW2?
Its obviously unclear, but the letter was a forgery created by someone who was later (probably) a british agent. Which makes the entire thing a lot more suspect, though it involved the security forces and not the army per se.
To claim that an office called Military Intelligence, staffed by military officers who received military promotions while working there and that was a department of the British War Office, had “nothing to do with the military” leaves a great deal to the imagination.
Regardless of the line you draw between the military and the security services in the mid-1920s, the standard operating procedure that they followed was to pass evidence of treason or espionage to the Special Branch of the Met who would arrest the suspects. I would have…preferred them to follow their standard operating procedure? This does not feel like a difficult question.
Ironic that you ask what they should have done if they’d discovered that fascists were bankrolling a UK political party. Would you like to take a guess which UK security agency bankrolled a certain B. Mussolini (a cool $11,500 per week in today’s money) so he could get started in politics? It begins “MI5” if you need a hint.
James, in spite of its name and origins, MI5 belongs to the Home Office.
Incidentally, IIRC in his book Next Stop Execution, Oleg Gordievsky describes being the KGBs point of contact with a number of Labour Party members. Of course, that was a couple of generations later.
There is something of a gap between saying “a number of people who knowingly or unknowingly have connections to the KGB are also members of the Labour Party” and saying “the Labour Party is being bankrolled by the USSR.”
It was historical Soviet policy to cultivate what agents it could find among socialists in Western countries. Many Western socialists aggressively rejected these connections (e.g. George Orwell). Others accepted the connection. Still others were genuinely ignorant that they were interacting with Soviet agents. The USSR sometimes also found itself able to get information or other advantages out of people who were not, themselves, socialists.
They were running national intelligence operations, and with national intelligence operations, you subvert who you can get and it doesn’t mean you’re puppeteering everyone in the target country who has a certain ideological slant.
If you’re referring to Ireland, that’s more like a foreign occupation.
It is much more complicated, because Ireland was a pressing domestic issue. The Home Rule Crisis of 1914 was a situation where the British military officer class refused to act against Ulster volunteers, a protestant Irish movement that was in armed opposition against an act of parliament establishing the Irish home rule. Essentially, the British army took the side of the opposition party. (The British army had been often used to quell domestic unrest, so there was no tradition about not taking arms against the own population.) It was not a couple but it was clearly a situation where the British government was unable to rely on its ability to command the military to enforce the will of parliament.
“The Home Rule Crisis of 1914 was a situation where the British military officer class refused to act against Ulster volunteers, a protestant Irish movement that was in armed opposition against an act of parliament establishing the Irish home rule.”
I believe you are thinking of the Curragh incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curragh_incident
“With Irish Home Rule due to become law in 1914, the British Cabinet contemplated some kind of military action against the unionist Ulster Volunteers who threatened to rebel against it. Many officers, especially those with Irish Protestant connections, of whom the most prominent was Hubert Gough, threatened to resign or accept dismissal rather than obey orders to conduct military operations against the unionists, and were privately encouraged from London by senior officers including Henry Wilson.”
Note that this is not a case of the Army leadership trying to overthrow the central government: it is case of Irish Protestant soldiers resigning to avoid a position in which they would have to shoot at Irish Protestants.
If someone at Kent State had resigned rather than shoot at the students, would that have been a crisis, would that have been a similar act? If your answer depends on whether you thing the students or the loyalists were in the right – that is why soldiers and public servants generally try to stay out of domestic politics. Whatever you do you will infuriate somebody else in domestic politics – and that someone might end up your boss.
This is mainly a reply to ad9, because the software won’t let me respond to ad9’s point directly (too many layers down?):
If you count the Turkish Memorandum Coup as a coup ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971_Turkish_military_memorandum ), then I’d say by the same standard, you’d have to count what happened at the Curragh as a coup, too. In both cases, the military made it very clear that it was unhappy with the way things were going, and as a result, the government at least partially changed course.
Raphael, by the ordinary definition of a coup, someone has to seize control of the leadership of the state by threatening to have the army imprison or kill the existing leadership. That is not what happened at Curragh.
It is not obvious to me that the British government did “change course” because of Curragh. The one promise made – not to use force against the Ulster rebels – was immediately repudiated by the government and the people who made it forced to resign. The thing about a successful coup is that the people it was against don’t stay in power and the people who sympathised with it are not forced to resign.
@ad9
There is a clear difference between and individual officer resigning for reasons of conscience and officer corps of several regimental resigning en masse. The latter is collective action.
Second, the British military was routinely used for maintenance of domestic order. British military was deployed against riots and strikes in all four “home countries”, and officers did not resign. The idea that fighting against “fellow protestants” is only justifiable if you think that the Home rule, a democratically made statute, which would have established a unified local goverment for the whole Ireland was an unjustifiable use of power. Because if you believe in the rule of law, the British parliament was clearly acting within its powers and the Ulster protestants were about to engage in a mutiny against the Crown. In such a situation the idea of “refusing to shoot fellow protestants” is essentially an act of taking the rebellion’s side in an impending civil war – and telling the government that it is not allowed to pursue policies that are not preferred by the officer corps.
And the truth is that the British government acquiesced: the Home Rule Act was never implemented, and Ireland remains divided even today, which was the demand of the Ulster protestants in the summer of 1914
Finnishreader, in 1914 the balance of power within the British Parliament was held by the Irish Parliamentary Party, which supported the Liberal government in exchange for Home Rule. That is why the Liberal government was so willing to impose it on Ulster – their allies in Parliament insisted upon it. The next year, in the middle of WW1, the Liberals went into coalition with the Conservatives, who were adamantly opposed to Home Rule, and that was the end of Home Rule.
The decision was made by the shifting alliances of the elected officials within the British Parliament. Parliament changed its mind.
In the meantime, Ulster Protestants were a minority in Ireland, and the Irish were a minority in Britain, so Irish Protestants who were prepared to resign rather than suppress a rebellion were a subset of a minority of a minority of Army officers. And a self-purging one at that. Common sense might also suggest not using units raised in Ulster to fight a rebellion in Ulster, which would further sideline such officers.
The governments real problem was that whichever decision it made risked rebellion and civil war in Ireland, and there is nothing you can do about “civil-military relations” which will make that a non-problem.
Yes, if American military officers started refusing orders in the wake of Kent State, that would be a crisis. It wouldn’t be a coup, but the military refusing to act against civilians is how the Iranian Revolution happened.
Whether it is a ‘crisis’ for the military to refuse orders to act against civilians depends heavily on whether the civilians are moving in the direction of overthrowing the state.
Whether Ireland was (is?) “foreign” or not was in fact the question that the two aforementioned civil wars were fought over.
Obviously the Irish nationalists won the first one (discussing the results the second one is just going to get people mad), so it’s now taken as self-evident that they were right, but that was not the case at the time.
I’m not sure a regional secessionist movement (especially in the bulk of Ireland c. 1920, which had been treated as occupied territory full of second-class citizens and not of proper British subjects for centuries) really counts as a civil war. Britain had made it very clear by that point that while Ireland belonged to the United Kingdom, it was not an equal partner in the UK as a whole.
The Troubles are an even more ambiguous example of a ‘civil war’ because the IRA, for all that it crossed the Irish Sea to strike at Britain proper again and again, was not really interested in more than what amounts to revanchism over a relatively small border province.
The American Civil War honestly might not be called a civil war either if not for the fact that the two competing factions were of something close to equal size and that there were at most relatively minor ethnic and cultural differences between them.
Part of the historical British solution as I understand it was to not maintain more than a token army in peacetime (but to maintain a strong navy). The navy sufficed for territorial defense for an island nation but could not hold territory, and so could not mount a coup.
IIRC, there were ~ 100,000 troops in Britain itself in 1914, around 1 for every 300 people. Akin to the American Army having a million soldiers in the United States today. Is that really a token army? Is that not enough to seize power with?
Having said that, the Army Act used to authorise the government to raise an army for one year only – it had to be rolled over the following year. So if any government had tried to suppress Parliament, like the Emperor in Star Wars, a year later at the most, its legal authority over the Army would lapse.
I’m not sure what the army would do then, but there was no way to permanently suspend Parliament without finding out.
The further I get into both life and the current American administration, the more I’m convinced that ‘legality’ is simply a thin veil of legitimacy over ‘norms and public opinion over expected behaviour’.
For instance, should a British government attempt to suppress Parliament using the military for more than a year and their legal authority elapses…the only consequence of that legal authority elapsing would be if the army or the government (or any other group capable of restraining the army/government) actually followed/enforced that law…which boils down to the norms and behaviours of the people involved.
I’m sure this isn’t some great revelation to a lot of people, but it’s slightly worrying for me to come to the realisation of how much of our current civilisation is effectively built on foundations of sand. That’s also not saying that legality is unimportant. If *all* that’s holding this together is the perception of legitimacy and ‘correct action’, then fictions that uphold this are potentially the *most* important tools we have.
Law is only law if a critical mass take it seriously.
As I recall, the modern US Army’s assessment is that it doesn’t have the manpower to occupy more than about five major American cities in the event of major civil unrest.
By and large, absent an extreme willingness to inflict the most gruesome slaughters, and maybe not even then… 1,000 men cannot effectively occupy a population of 300,000. The size of the area being ‘controlled’ is unmanageably large in that the 1,000 men cannot patrol it without spreading their forces into tiny, easily ambushed penny packets. The population is so large that it becomes too easy to conceal weapons and for guerillas to hide, if they are inclined to resist the occupation force. The risk of some riot forming that actually has enough sheer numbers to outright roll over the soldiers by force and burn them out of their homes is… not zero.
In general, if you are trying to rule or occupy a territory by force, you need a ratio of armed enforcers to civilians of much higher than 1:300. Unless, of course, you enjoy broad legitimacy and most of the civilians accept your rule and are even assisting you, which eases the occupier’s job and also enables them to recruit auxiliaries from among the civilian population.
Then again, Hungary once spent some time under a military dictator who was an admiral but didn’t even have a navy, given that, by that time, the country was landlocked.
TIME Magazine in 1942 on how Hungary might have had declared war on the U.S. following Pearl Harbor.
https://time.com/archive/6822263/hungary-how-war-came/
Lol, thank you. I’m reminded of Nathan Goldwag’s overview of the war aims of the smaller Axis countries: https://nathangoldwag.wordpress.com/2021/03/16/the-war-aims-of-the-lesser-axis-powers/
I was trying to remember the source of that hilarious story about “we dislike the Slovaks/Romanians and have territorial disputes with them, but we’re all on the same side”, because I’ve definitely heard it before. I didn’t realise it involved (or was said to involve) FDR though.
Yes, when I first encountered this tale, it was regaled as a conversation between the (unnamed) Hungarian ambassador and Cordel Hull. It took me a while to track down the origins of the story to ensure it wasn’t simply a postwar fabrication (like the apparently fictitious claim Churchill described a “5-minute conversation with an average voter” as the best argument against democracy.)
I should note that while that is an admirable effort at a “bird’s eye view” summary, I think a few points warrant more attention than it offers them. I.e.
Romania had maintained a mostly pro-Western foreign policy…Following the conquest of Poland, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and the Fall of France, Romania found itself totally isolated and forced to submit to Axis demands rather undersells the fact that Romania had both a mutual defence treaty with Poland* and that France was its top military supplier in the 1930s, providing a number of artillery pieces, tanks and gun tractors, to name but a few examples.
Moreover, while the Romanian state certainly had its territorial reasons for aligning with the Axis, the summary omits that, in the words of a Romanian factchecker, “fully committed to the Axis and to Hitler, Antonescu was as motivated by anti-Semitism as he was by patriotism, as he understood it.”** Hence, the Romanian military was an enthusiastic participant in the Holocaust, to the point that ~10% of Odessa’s (heavily Jewish) population was murdered in the first week after its capture by the Romanian troops, and they continued to murder Jews, including children, as they accompanied the Germans on their 1942 push into the Caucasus.
Likewise, both that summary and the joke I quoted omit that Hungary did in fact have aims on territory which never belonged to it, such as Voronezh Oblast of Russia, which was initially (mostly) captured by the German troops in 1942 who then mostly left it to Hungarians to administer as they pushed on towards Stalingrad – with their own share of war crimes, including the administration of concentration camps and the General Staff order to burn down the villages of suspected partisans and hand over every Jew they found to German authorities.
*Which the latter chose not to invoke in 1939 for reasons I still don’t quite understand. Apparently, there was the perception it would somehow interfere with the French and British military aid to Poland which they were convinced was imminent? (Even though neither army was in a remotely fit state to mobilize at the time, which even a barely functioning intelligence service should have been able to point out.)
**Quote from the article which provides a surprising look at the political legacy of the coup which finally removed Antonescu from power inside Romania itself.
https://www.veridica.ro/en/opinions/august-23-1944-a-turning-point-in-romanias-history-constantly-seen-through-a-political-lens
One of the true classics.
@YARD,
Re: the “Kingdom of Hungary”, was there any serious consideration after Horthy took over of digging up a relative of the Jagiellon or Zapolya families, and setting them on the throne?
Not that I could find – and I tried. I suspect that when Charles IV was attempting to retake power twice in the 1920s, few people had the mental bandwidth to consider the previous dynasties. Perhaps modern Iran is an illustrative example: you hear quite a bit about the current Pahlavi’s attempts to style himself as the leader-in-waiting, and every once in a while some protesters (regrettably) carry banners with his family’s crest (though at least as many seem to be chanting against both the current state structure and the Pahlavi monarchy), but do you even hear about attempts to seek out the descendants of, say, Qajar or Afsharid dynasties? And both of those have ruled Iran a lot closer to present than the two dynasties you mention have ruled Hungary, so if anything, that ought to have been more likely.
However, I did discover this, which is quite interesting.
https://mikloshorthy.com/succession-regency
Once Hungary invaded USSR, though, Horthy did get his eldest son, István, rammed through as Vice Regent (even exaggerating the severity of his bout of flu in order to scare the Parliament with the nightmare scenario of him dying while the line of succession remained unclear) – only for the latter to join the fighting in the USSR as a fighter pilot, stalling and crashing after his 25th take-off just half a year after becoming Vice Regent.* The next, obvious option was the aforementioned Gyula Károlyi, since he was Horthy’s son-in-law…except that he was also deeply into flying at the moment, and managed to crash fatally (along with his unfortunate instructor) a mere two weeks after István’s funeral! (In fairness to Hungarians, the list of leaders and leaders-to-be who managed to die in the air for fairly avoidable reasons is surprisingly long – Wikipedia’s list runs into double digits just for the leaders who were already in office at the time!)
*Notably, his death echoes that of Cahangir Baghirov, the son of the contemporary Azeri SSR leader Mir Jafar Baghirov (eventually executed not long after Beria, and for similar reasons.) While he wasn’t really in the same position, given the deep antipathy to anything resembling dynasties in any part of the USSR, it is still remarkable how he had the opportunity to completely honorably retire from further service for at least a year after having already been wounded in the arm during a previous flight (and before that, in both arms as an infantryman at the start of the war) – yet still insisted on going back as soon as possible, and ultimately rammed a German fighter near Kursk in June 1943 – less than ten months after István’s demise.
There have been a couple of coups launched by navies, to be fair. So its not quite that simple.
I have also heard that naval officers were historically more competent, while army officers bought their commissions, bececause competence was less dangerous for the navy.
This is a duplicate with worse spelling, feel free to delete.
I have also heard that naval officers were more competent, whereas army officers bought their commissions, because competence was less dangerous from the navy.
This is true. An explicit argument in favour of purchase (heard from, among others, the Duke) was that purchase meant that only very wealthy aristocrats could become senior officers, and they would have no incentive to launch a coup because the current setup, under which they were very wealthy aristocrats, suited them just fine.
I mean given the Duke’s persuasion, one can very well hear the implied threat that if the current setup were to be changed, then everyone in command *would* have an incentive to launch a coup.
Alas, it’s not clear their men would have followed them.
Jacobites! Rebellions that were essentially civil wars in 1689, 1715, 1719, 1745.
Dr. Devereaux, what qualifications should the ideal secretary of defense have in your opinion? You make convincing arguments for why the secretary of defense shouldn’t be a recent military officer. At the same time, you’ve claimed on X and Bluesky that Hegseth doesn’t understand how military strategy works because his army career stalled before he received relevant military training. How do civilian secretaries of defense gain the understanding of military operations and strategy that you say Hegseth lacks?
In principle they could gain that understanding by academic coursework (apparently it’s not unusual for civilian legislative staff to audit classes at the war colleges for this reason) or the same way any interested amateur would. That said i think OP’s ideal would be something like the typical postwar secdef who’d been a junior officer then worked their way to some senior position in the private sector. This gets you people who are highly qualified and experienced administrators while having some sense of how the military works. Hegseth is kind of worst of both worlds; he’s enmeshed in a military lifer worldview in a way a career soldier is but as a perma O-4 hasn’t either learned higher-level military strategy or had to hold significant administrative responsibility.
As Doug suggests, one obvious way for a Secretary of Defense to acquire the needed understanding of military operations and strategy would be to get the training via formal post-graduate career development coursework. The War College and the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, as I understand it, teach civilians as well as military for a reason.
Another alternative is to pick a senior military officer, or mid-ranking officer who has staff experience but who has been retired for a long period of time, long enough that they can reasonably claim to be “just a civilian” again.
Yet a third alternative is to accept that the Secretary of Defense has little or no direct military experience but instead choose one who will listen closely to professional advisors who do have that experience. Rather than, say, selectively firing all the ones who tell them things they don’t want to hear or who don’t match the “look” he seeks for his idea of what a ‘proper’ military looks like.
…
Hegseth’s problem is not that he lacks any one thing, it is that he lacks all three. He lacks the academic training to have learned how military affairs work at high level- lack of formal training at the War College, ICAF, or other such institutions that might have taught him to do more than, say, lead an infantry platoon or file paperwork that informs someone else’s important decisions.
He also lacks applicable civilian and military professional experience. Effectively his entire career was spent as either a junior officer working closely under someone else, or as a Fox News anchor reading scripts into a camera. He has never run a large organization in an executive capacity. He has never been responsible for handling large sums of money responsibly (the one PAC he did manage frittered away much of its budget on giving itself Christmas bonuses). He has never handled military procurement decisions before and he is now firmly in charge of them. He has never run a military base or large command where he would have had responsibility to act sensibly without constant close supervision by commanding officers, and so on, and so on.
And he also demonstrably lacks the willingness to listen to more experienced professionals, follow military procedural norms (such as not discussing classified military operations on Signal chatrooms), or honor and take seriously military professionals who do not meet his perceived aesthetic views of what a ‘proper’ military is.
The lack of any one of these three things would be a problem. The lack of two would be disqualifying. The lack of three invites the question of why Hegseth, personally, was even considered by Trump when there are surely thousands of other men who are at least as intelligent and capable and have much more impressive resume documents. And it is difficult to answer “why Hegseth in particular and not any other 45-year-old former infantry platoon leader in America?” It would seem reasonable to suppose that Hegseth’s main credential is the fact that he can be relied upon to be extremely loyal to President Trump’s directives and agenda, even if those orders might happen to be illegal or contrary to the traditions of the United States and its military.
I think what’s implied is that they need some significant accomplishment *outside* the military. So eg Mitt Romney (or, as much as I’d dislike it, Peter Thiel) for the conservative side, or Buttlieg or Pritzker or Bill Gates for the liberal one.
As a regular reader from the UK, I deeply appreciate the writing out in full of events that may be part of the American cultural consciousness, but rather less well-known abroad!
I also fear that increasing control of the military comes under the umbrella of things that, once implemented, are unlikely to be repealed by the opposition – even when they return to power years later. Presidents are reluctant to hand the military reins back to Congress, because it’s politically and practically expedient for them to retain control themselves in order to drum up some good headlines and photo ops during their own terms. Of course, the cost of that expediency is discovered when the next President turns up and starts dropping bombs on a whim, with potentially catastrophic results. It goes back to a point I think you made a while ago about how the mechanisms of many institutions are predicated on the assumption that the person in control of them is a fundamentally decent, rational human being. Which is great, until… they aren’t.
Likewise, in many other areas there are things which a President (or here in the UK, the PM) could notionally fix, in order to prevent abuses or unfairness, but doing so would harm their own grip on power and therefore are not in their short-term interest. ‘Gratitude for finally implementing some form of proportional representation instead of a centuries-old electoral system’ is not going to carry you to victory in the next election, but could very well dilute your power or even directly lead to your defeat, and the ethical recompense is probably cold comfort when you lose the vote.
I’d heard about the ideological purges when Trump took office, but had no idea that they’d culled literally every woman and non-white person from the Joint Chiefs. That’s just… wow. But until there’s protection in place to prevent things like this happening again, there’s nothing to stop it.
The electoral system is one of the few things that’s legally totally out of the president’s hands. It requires massive supermajorities in both houses of Congress and a massive supermajority of atate legislatures to amend the Conatitution to eliminate the Electoral College and reform or eliminate the Senate. There isn’t even a role for the President to veto changes.
Part of the problem is that there is a strong argument for some degree of independent-rapid fire control over the military. (quicker than what a congressional resolution can achieve) with modern war being so quick there *is* at least some legs to the argument that someone needs to be able to make independent decisions at a moments notice.
The more reasonable solution is of ourse the classic “President can make the snap decisions but congress has to approve them afterwards”.
I find it funny that with the exponential increase in information and telecommunication technology, gathering the opinion of less than 500 people is just as slow as ever. You’d think it’d actually be easier to rule by council these days but no, we still depend on one person’s conscience.
Well, it’s now pretty trivial to get an up-or-down vote collected, or a poll with a constrained set of options, but the problem with quick decision-making in Congress is that it’s a deliberative body that doesn’t just choose from a menu of options. With hundreds of people there are likely to be at least three opinions, none of which may have a majority. And Congress is structured to actually debate these options (though my impression is that actual changing of minds mostly happens off the floor and floor debate is grandstanding for constituents) so it takes a long time to make a decision. Past councils were mostly in a single city, so they could be assembled in a couple hours, which was a much shorter timeframe than a single ruler in the city could communicate with the front in any case.
Advancing communication technology has actually made the problem harder because a lot more decisions can be passed up the chain. Presidents have a much greater capacity to micromanage, down to authorizing specific drone strikes. In the Age of Sail, a captain got a set of orders when setting out and it was an extremely involved process to edit them, so when dispatched on a commerce-raiding mission they’d get told to interdict any commerce not carrying a friendly or British flag, and it’d be up to their discretion to decide if interdicting a neutral flag would cause an unacceptable diplomatic incident. So there’s a lot fewer decisions a council can reasonably even attempt to make.
“In the Age of Sail, a captain got a set of orders when setting out and it was an extremely involved process to edit them, so when dispatched on a commerce-raiding mission they’d get told to interdict any commerce not carrying a friendly or British flag, and it’d be up to their discretion to decide if interdicting a neutral flag would cause an unacceptable diplomatic incident. ”
The other control on captains was that they wanted to capture ships, not sink them. Because captured ships could be condemned in a prize court and then sold at auction, as well as the cargo.
However, if the prize court ruled that the ship was actually a neutral, then the captain was on the hook for damages. This usually bankrupted him. and bankruptcy was a lot more damaging than it is today.
I’m not sure what happened with a ship that was sunk. It would have been difficult to adjudicate due to lack of witnesses, presumably the owners could still sue the captain though.
I actually think the problem isn’t the speed of Congressional deliberation so much as the members of Congress no longer wanting to involve themselves in decisions on whether to go to war or not. From their perspective, voting on wars entails a ton of political risk for zero benefit.
If I had to attribute this to something specific, it’d be Iraq. Like Bret said in the piece, the Gulf War in 1990 was expected by many to be a disaster, a new Vietnam, but worse since we were fighting what was assumed to be a competent and well-armed military.
One lawmaker who famously opposed involvement on these grounds was Georgia Senator Sam Nunn, who wound up with egg on his face after we beat the Iraqis easily. Nunn’s ambitions towards higher office were dashed because he got the big call wrong. And just over a decade later, Hillary Clinton doomed her presidential ambitions twice over by voting the other way on Iraq in 2003.
With this recent history in mind, Congressmen focused more on their personal advancement than the overall health of the republic just don’t see an incentive to fight for control over military decisionmaking. Far safer to let the President do what he wants and all the associated blame.
Particularly since the president is already at the zenith of his career and only has to worry about the political consequences for a second term in at most 4 years, not the reputation harm of decades.
Related to that last paragraph.
https://archive.md/1QEbg
I must say, I am ordinarily not a fan of either The Washington Post or of this kind of an article, which takes pains to affirm over and over the author’s deep-held loyalty (generational, in this case) to an institution which ultimately never warranted that trust or investment in the first place, as it proved by its own latest actions. Although, it does also highlight an underappreciated dimension of that relationship.
Funnily enough, Soviet Union managed to create apolitical military of their own managing to build up all three pillars that you named in this article. Soviet military was subordinated to the civilian authority and didn’t participate in the internal politics of the Union overtly.
I think ‘overtly’ is an important qualifier because American military definitely participated in American internal politics even before 2016 (or 1991 or whatever other possible cut-off date) indirectly and/or covertly.
Soviet leadership also had strong preference of not involving military in the political affairs because I think one rule cannot exist without the other. The moment the government starts using the military as a political tool, military begins to gain political power and aspirations.
Contract with the public is the first Soviet pillar of civilian-military relationship that began to crumble. Because prestige of the military service decreased alongside with the development of the Soviet society and as military was loosing its status as one of the best access points to social ladder, the prestige of the service degraded.
And honestly, Soviet civilian-military relationship frayed in a way very similar to how you describe ongoing American problem. First flashpoint was obviously 1991 when elements of the civilian government (with presumed support of ministry of defense) tried to launch a coup and to use military force against civilian protests BUT FAILED. Because even KGB-controlled special forces of the Alpha Group wanted legitimate written orders to engage in open violence against civilians or political opposition. So coup failed and relationship was seemingly reasserted for a bit.
Of course this relationship didn’t survive the next flashpoint in 1993 when military prestige dropped to negative levels, officer corps professionalism evaporated and therefore military was directly and openly used against political opposition without much resistance from officer corps or anyone else.
After 1993 only one pillar actually remained and in a very sorry state – Russian Armed Forces continue to be firmly under control of the civilian government and have no political ambitions of their own. Ghost of Stalinism still lingers and informs people actions to this very day.
Well, I’d never thought of the Soviet Armed Forces as a good example of civil-military relations, but it does make a great deal of sense!
I guess, to speak of the present, that Prigozhin’s last adventure did not make the possibility of a military coup against Putin to look too appealing
Prigozhin might or might not have ever had a chance against Putin, but if he ever had a chance, he committed a (very literally) fatal mistake when he hesitated and stopped his troops to negotiate.
(Alternatively, he knew his attempt was doomed and was trying to use ‘we have stopped’ as a bold cover for ‘I am begging the boss for mercy’)
Tbh the guy conquered what, three main cities and had a lot of leverage before very stupidly agreeing to meet disarmed. Had he started taxing the territory he controlled, recruiting men there, etc, he could have plausibly graduate from mercenary to de-facto tyrant under only nominal Russian rule.
So it’s unclear whether the lesson is “don’t start coups” or “don’t stop coups”
Communist regimes in general seem to be quite good at keeping their militaries politically defanged.
Or early modern states once true standing armies were established. In most of them, it was pretty rare (though occasionally happened) for the military to do a regime change. For the most part inheritance followed its proper channels (very unlike the Middle Ages) and where it didn’t there were generally bigger reasons than “Cousin X promised to raise salaries 20%.” The big exception was the Russian Empire. Eventually Paul formalized the succession and ended the ‘to the strongest’ (aka most popular with imperial guards) succession system and he ended up the last overthrown in a coup.
In practice the range of political inaction has limits even where there is relatively good civilian control. Stalin could purge his military officers with impunity, but it still helped prop up the authority of the regime. Anyone trying to overthrow the ancient regimes might not be persuaded the military was a neutral actor either…
Communist regimes in general seem to be quite good at keeping their militaries politically defanged.
In the industrialized communist countries, yes, I think that’s right. In some of the African countries that went far-left though, the military (or, i guess, cliques of left-wing officers within the military) *was* the communist movement. Possibly because these countries didn’t yet have enough industry and industrial workers for a significant-size communist mass movement to develop on it own.
‘far left” is the wrong word, i really dislike that terminology in general. I more meant communist and communist-adjacent as opposed to vaguely socialist. not all of those guys were far left by any stretch of the imagination.
It is interesting that some people think of militaries as naturally conservative institutions though- historically that’s definitely not always and maybe not even usually the case.
“Conservative” has many meanings, but one of them is “resistant to change,” so one could be both conservative and socialist, anarchist, or libertarian. The political meaning of “Conservative” is different, but usually involves strong belief in institutions (corporate and religious) and existing hierarchies (class, caste, race, what-have-you) over individuals. Many modern Conservatives are also strong believers in social darwinism.
Authoritarian communists definitely can, though that’s often because they ARE the military.
Democratic socialists on the other hand are particularly vulnerable to military coups. That’s a bit because when there’s a military elite it generally is in bed with the commercial elite (who the democratic socialist wants to expropriate the land of) and democratic socialists often win elections in places that don’t have good civil-military relations in the first place. Example:Guatemala.
“Communist regimes in general seem to be quite good at keeping their militaries politically defanged.”
Sure, by having political officers (chosen for Party loyalty) in every unit down to the platoon level, who can override the commander at will.
And by having their own private army, again chosen for loyalty, with often first choice on equipment, on call in case of disloyalty of the military.
They don’t trust that the military will be apolitical, they make sure of it.
Note that political officers in the Soviet military didn’t have the authority to override the commander outside a period before 1938 and a short stint in 1941-42.
Soviet military and military of their European satellites had traditional unitary command system. What you call ‘political officers’ were essentially a chaplain equivalent with slightly broader portfolio.
True political officers didn’t have a command role. They could denounce regular officers for political ‘crimes’ however. Recommended: some passages in Vassily Grossman’s great war novel., Life and Fate.
I think that you should note two points here: the Soviet military proper was rather apolitical, but the semi-military security service, with various names (best known as KGB), became the leading organ of the state, culminating in Andropov and, later, Putin becoming leaders of the country. And the only time that the Soviet military seriously participated in internal politics was when when Beriya was toppled by the support of the Soviet Army, preventing the chekists becoming the leading block of the state, two decades before Andropov’s rise to power.
The Soviets were afraid of Bonapartism, and succeeded in curbing it, but the cost was the security service becoming the governing power block.
I consider both Andropov’s and especially Putin’s KGB background as extremely overrated in the Western ‘Russology’ and general political discourse.
The thing about KGB (and Soviet AND Russian security services in general) as they are as politically defanged as military almost of the same reason. Specter of Stalinism is in everyone’s memory, so nobody wants a repeat of Yezhov-Yagoda-Beria NKVD.
It is important to remember that KGB was utterly under control of the country political leadership. During the dissolution of USSR, KGB was never a separate player and KGB highest leadership supported the coup, most of the actual KGB bureaucracy and rank and file were either ambivalent or outright on Yeltsin’s side, a person who had no direct ties to the security apparatus.
Simply because a taboo on direct involvement in internal conflict between political elites was very very strong. So in situations where answer to the question ‘who is in charge’ was unclear, Soviet security apparatus responded in a fashion very similar to the military – ‘sort this shit out without us, we will follow whoever will win’.
It extends to Putin nowadays too. He is in charge not because he is from KGB, but because a whole bunch of people agrees that he should be in charge (both informally across Russian political elite and formally because of elections). KGB skills probably helped him to achieve that status of indispensable person by making right connections and knowing how to know stuff about people, but KGB was not the only source of such skills in Soviet or Russian society.
Fixation on KGB/FSB/whatever is basically a red herring only good for tabloids.
You’re missing “Murder” in the middle of those Putin-related reasons.
I consider both Andropov’s and especially Putin’s KGB background as extremely overrated in the Western ‘Russology’ and general political discourse.
FinnishReader is making the same claim as Eric Hobsbawm, who was broadly speaking a Communist, pro-Soviet, and no fan of the western capitalist powers, so no, I don’t think it reflects “western russological” perspectives.
(i.e. that the Soviets overlearned the lessons of past revolutions in the western countries, and were so anxious to avoid a Napoleon or Cromwell from taking over the state, that they ended up with a state dominated by the security apparatus instead).
The main reason why Putin was able to get to where he is in the first place was because he proved to Yeltsin and his closest associates that he could guarantee their personal safety after what he did for the man who brought him into politics in the first place by making Putin his key deputy – the former St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak. The latter’s wife claimed he was having a heart attack when the investigators arrived to question him about all the corrupt dealings he did during his tenure and they allowed for him to be taken to a hospital (whose administrator was allegedly already paid off) – and from there, he was out of the country on a “medical” flight to France.* These are security service skills, I suppose – but probably not the ones people are usually thinking of.
(Reasons why Yeltsin felt forced to hand over power by the end of 1999 included a personal popularity stuck at <5% after the 1998 economic crisis and an impeachment attempt that year which included votes on five separate charges – from dissolving the USSR in the first place and "undermining the defensive capability of the country", to launching the Chechen War, shelling the holdover Soviet Parliament after the previous impeachment attempt and “being responsible for the genocide of the Russian people” (in reference to the “Russian cross” demographic collapse when deaths sharply exceeded births under his administration.) Those only failed because of the two-thirds requirement, since all had been supported by over half of the Duma members – the closest one of those, the Chechen War charge, was 17 votes away from clearing even the two-thirds barrier. (Though then it would have still had to pass the Senate equivalent, the Federation Council, before taking force.))
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/344805.stm
*Sobchak then came back after Putin got the charges dropped against him to assist him in his first election campaign in 2000 – only to die of a heart attack when in a remote region, with both of his bodyguards also briefly falling ill according to some reports. You probably aren’t surprised to hear about this, though – what is likely to prove a lot more surprising is that his daughter, Kseniya, permanently entered the public consciousness of Russia soon after this as…the host of what became Russia’s preeminent reality show, Дом-2 (House-2), which effectively combined dating show with Big Brother – while still nominally tasking the contestants with housebuilding work. (Hence the name and the tagline, “Build your love”.) The show is apparently still ongoing, although she left in 2012 with near-universal name recognition, remaining a fixture of Russia’s “showbiz” afterwards. She even ran for the Presidency in 2018 – although that was universally perceived as a cynical, precoordinated gambit to discredit real opposition to Putin after Navalny was blocked from running.
I would say that the Soviet civ-mil system “worked” insofar as it can work when the political system breaks down completely. The military only intervened when it (correctly) saw the constitutional order breaking down entirely, and attempted to save it.
The constitutional order it was dedicated to happened to be bad, but hey, that’s not a problem of civ-mil relations.
Well, yeah. Military in 1991 was very much willing to participate in crowd control. It just balked against the orders to actually start shooting. Soviets didn’t have this American idea about forbidding military to operate on the domestic soil. But the spirit of the idea is still mostly the same.
“Ghost of Stalinism” seems like a rather roundabout way to describe the aftermath of Yezhov-Beria purges. Starting from 1937 and ending in 1941 (some executions on the basis of confessions obtained before the war were actually still allowed to take place near the end of 1941), it’s been counted that 3 out of 5 Marshals, effectively all the Army/Corps Generals and Admirals (described as komandarmy, komkory and flagmany under the contemporary classification scheme) and around half of the divisional and brigadier general equivalents (komdivy and kombrigi) were executed.
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A0%D0%B5%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B5%D1%81%D1%81%D0%B8%D0%B8_%D0%B2_%D0%A0%D0%9A%D0%9A%D0%90_(1937%E2%80%941938)#%D0%9F%D0%B5%D1%80%D1%81%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%BB%D1%8C%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B0_%D0%BF%D0%BE_%D0%B7%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%8F%D0%BC
There’s been some debate over just how destructive this was and how much it had contributed to the massive defeats of 1941-1942,* but few now argue this didn’t have a significant destructive impact in the first place.
* On one side, there is a supposed Hitler quote about “the need to strike before the officer corps of their decapitated army is regenerated”, implying not going through with the purger could have bought years of rearmament. I believe Zhukov also expressed similar ideas (simply retaining the existing command corps would have had deterred Hitler) in his biography. Arguments for the other side include both the suggestions at least some of the victims really did harbour Bonapartist ambitions, to the idea a lot of those top officers got their ranks due to Civil War experience which was irrelevant or even counterproductive in 1940s (i.e. causing them to overestimate the role of horse/cavalry – although it was the biggest advocate of cavalry, Budenny, who lived, and the biggest “mechanizer”, Tukhachevsky, who died). There is also the evidence a lot of the purged Marshals and top Generals were also responsible for a litany of awful technical-organizational decisions: from the aforementioned Tukhachevsky having advocated for seemingly every failed weapon system developed in the 1930s, to his key protege, Iona Yakir, being responsible for the defence of Ukrainian SSR – and his tenure left Kiev with a belt of fortifications that had a ~5 km gap right in the middle.)
What were Budyonny’s arguments for the benefits of cavalry, as opposed to mechanization?
i can see why cavalry might still have marginal uses in environments like Cuban swamps or Afghan mountains where tanks can’t travel well, or in situations of supply chains of fuel break down, or in very poor countries where people can’t afford fuel, but none of those seem super relevant to the Soviet situation.
Budyonny is actually one of the most misrepresented military leaders in history, I think.
While I seriously doubt that he was ever capable of operating on the highest level of military command (I think his ceiling was at division/corps level tops), he was also never this caricature of ‘old guard’ traditionalist.
Budyonny’s argument for cavalry was essentially: we cannot afford to fully mechanize our army yet, so cavalry and horses in general will have to play an important role in the years to come. And he wasn’t wrong at all about that. Cavalry had a lot of action in WW2 and horses were indespensable till its end.
He was not a retrograde, he was an opponent of blind technological optimism and fetishism that some other military leaders and theorists (not only in USSR) had in the 30s. And because of that he never actually opposed any moves to introduce mechanization in the military. He was on record arguing for heavier armored tanks, issuing more submachine guns and advocated for mechanization of the artillery arm.
I think what harmed him the most, was his status of one of the great heroes of the Civil War, which kinda stopped him from growing professionally. Because otherwise he looks like a pretty smart person, but fame gets to people.
Horses don’t do mountains or swamps very well, so they wouldn’t be useful there.
Horse cavalry had important roles. One was that of scouting. When you effectively have no radio communication, horses can also be useful for messengers.
Horses were also useful for transport, since engines required fuel. They do eat some of what humans eat, but that still reduces the variety of things you have to transport.
The more or less universal problem with horse cavalry advocates was that they still thought that a cavalry charge could be victorious over infantry troops armed with repeating magazine rifles and machine guns that weren’t already running away. As opposed to all being shot from several hundred yards. They certainly didn’t have a role in actually fighting.
Horses might not do mountains or swamps very well, but they do them a whole lot better than tanks do. Whether that’s enough to mean they still have a dedicated use I don’t know. I’d suggest something like donkeys or mules would be better for mountain logistics work, with the added benefit that they eat even less of what your soldiers eat.
I thought I remembered seeing reference to horses being used in the Cuban revolutionary war (1950s) and in the Afghan-Soviet war, but I guess I was wrong, i can’t track down the reference to Cuba and I think I might have been remembering Afghans using donkeys instead (which are, as noted below, going to be better than horses in mountain terrain).
I don’t think any commander in their right mind would order a charge, cavalry or infantry, without suppressing the enemy positions with artillery first.
Japanese suicide charges are different because they were “suicide”.
My understanding is that the Soviets were also able to at least occasionally get good results with horse cavalry raids on the Eastern Front when they could find or make a gap in the front line infantry positions to permit the cavalry to infiltrate or exfiltrate. The Soviets had at least some history of using their cavalry to tow crew-served heavy weapons (think tachankas) and some stretches of the Eastern Front were a bit more strung-out, so I can imagine that working if things went well.
Mechanized forces would of course be preferable, but as noted, mechanized forces impose a lot of logistical requirements and higher expectations on your technical personnel, and few WWII armies had as many mechanized units as they’d like.
This is very context-dependent for mountains: yes, vehicles all have elevation angles beyond which they simply cannot climb a hill, but when the conditions are this rough, you would in fact go for donkeys. (And in worst cases, nothing but your own soldiers: i.e. the main difference between a regular artillery gun and a mountain one is that the latter can be disassembled so that each piece is attached to a soldier’s pack) It is completely backwards for swamps. The ability to move on wet soil is dependent on ground pressure more than anything else – and the whole point of treads is to spread out the weight of the vehicle over as much of an area as possible. Checking Wikipedia will show that a horse has ground pressure that is two-thirds greater than an Abrams tank – and that appears to be an unladen horse – one which is actually used for military logistics will fare even worse. Plus, Abrams is obviously well on the upper end as far as that value goes, as you can see in the table below (Though not the absolute highest – Tiger I was slightly higher, and I believe the Elefant tank destroyer and the British Matilda II were worse – though still below horses.)
https://www.mathscinotes.com/2016/06/tank-track-ground-pressure-examples/
On the other end of the scale, sufficiently light “tanks” (and, more recently wheeled vehicles too) can be made outright amphibious – effectively meaning they no longer experience any problem in the swamps. (You can read some reporting on how tracked, amphibious APCs sold by Russia to South Sudan (and derived from the Ukrainian-built Soviet-era MT-LB) are extremely effective when used by its government in the swamps – too bad they are apparently often used against civilians hiding out.) It was already possible to do that in the 1930s, and in fact, the USSR had three models of an amphibious tank in service by 1941. However, it was another example where quantity took place over quality, as only the third one, T-40, was actually fairly good (reasonably fast, reliable, and with a heavy machine gun). Its two predecessors, T-37 and T-38 were basically tankettes – and yet, several thousand were built in order to outfit every division’s recon with them (never mind they were too small to even carry radios), even in the steppes of the Far East! Predictably, almost all were lost in regular battles, and they only got used for their intended water-crossing purpose on a handful of occasions.
It’s taken me some time to wade through the conflicting literature on the subject of what the top Generals and Marshals of the USSR did or did not say or write in those turbulent years. (I.e. an event like the notoriously cursory debriefing of T-26 commander Paul Arman and his experience in the Spanish Civil War by Voroshilov and all his top deputies has been spun in different ways by modern scholars depending on which figure they are sympathizing with the most.) The responses left by the others in the meantime make some valid points, but also often bring severe misconceptions.
In short, Budyonny absolutely loved horses – to the point that after the Civil War, he had restored an Imperial-era scientific journal devoted to the to specifics of horse breeding and good equine care, and by 1930 he spearheaded the creation of a research institute devoted to the same. Consequently, (and contrary to a comment below) it was impossible for him to not understand that horses cannot be expected to charge fortified defensive lines – and he complained about other commanders expecting him to do just that during both the Civil War and the Soviet-Polish War. (During the latter, Tukhachevsky, then the senior commander of the war, ordered him to turn back from the comparatively successful fighting over Lviv and march to relieve his own forces near Warsaw – expecting an almost Rings of Power-style, nearly overnight movement across a large territory, and blaming Budyonny when it had predictably taken a lot longer: long enough for the Polish to gather their own force between the two cities, which ultimately defeated the relieving army.)
Instead, his view of cavalry was that of a nimble force to be used for what we would now call maneuver warfare, one capable of exploiting gaps and cutting supply lines at short notice. Some even go as far as to describe him as one of the practical pioneers of maneuver warfare and “blietzkrieg”, though this view certainly requires moderation (i.e. though successful in the Civil War, he did lose to a Polish force which was also heavily composed of cavalry, to the point that Battle of Zamość Ring is now considered the last great cavalry battle. Even if he was forced to carry out an unreasonable order from Tukhachevsky, he still lost to a significantly smaller force.) However, since Budyonny again focused his interwar theoretical work on the specifics of horse management, it was Tukhachevsky who wrote out the “deep operations” doctrine, where he expected breakthroughs to be done with fully mechanized forces. (Probably reflecting his experience of fighting in Poland, with him assuming that the exact same redeployment would have succeeded if they had tanks and trucks.)
People generally credit Tukhachevsky for that, while typically ignoring his consistent, incredible underestimation of what it would have taken to achieve that doctrine in practice. That is, his understanding of logistics didn’t go much further than the idea that if a factory can produce thousands of vehicles in peacetime, it is reasonable for it to output a similar number of military vehicles with dual-use frames and components during the wartime. Though the retooling of civilian factories did take place by all sides in WWII (the Soviet train yards producing T-34s and the British car/motorcycle Morris factories being converted to make Crusader tanks, for starters), his early-1930s plans went well beyond that – he called for fielding tens of thousands of light armour vehicles whose chassis was undifferentiated, but the purpose was very specialized – he literally wanted one type of vehicle to fight infantry specifically, another one to defeat machine gun emplacements, another one to break through and another one to fight other tanks – rather than actually building a somewhat heavier tank capable of doing all of that once, because then it would be too heavy to use (an early-1930s) civilian chassis and so couldn’t be produced in such numbers!
Fortunately for the USSR, Stalin and Voroshilov did not do this, as Budyonny (and others, like Shaposhnikov) quite reasonably pointed out that supplying and maintaining all of that would be insanity (although back in 1932, only a fairly minor General, Zhigur, foresaw the most important issue – that no matter how cheap a tank(ette) or an armoured car based on a civilian car or truck might be, it’ll not be cheaper than an anti-tank gun, and an entrenched infantry formation with a sufficient number of those can defeat almost any number of barely-armoured vehicles), and so in his view, horse divisions would have to be the basis of the Soviet maneuver warfare until the engines become much better. Unfortunately for the USSR, Voroshilov ended up compromising between the two factions and so up until 1940, USSR armoured vehicle production still prioritized output over armour, and by 1941 it fielded what was technically by far the largest tank force in the world of ~20k units – at least a quarter of which were largely inoperable by then, and many of the others were either largely useless (i.e. the >3,000 T-27 tankettes Tukhachevksy demanded in the early 1930s) or just lost fairly quickly, often to mere anti-tank guns without getting to engage the actual Panzers.
Now, a couple of people wrote that horse regiments are logistically easier to manage than the motorized/mechanized ones, and let’s just say this view is…incomplete.
The problem is that horses do not just require food, but also need grooms, veterinaries and even blacksmiths (to replace horseshoes). Around 1940, every Soviet regiment (~3,200 people altogether) had to devote a dozen veterinaries to horse care – and a division had a ~40 people doing the same. (And training a veterinary could well be more difficult than a mechanic.) Not to mention that a stable needs to be, well, livable, in a way a truck garage does not have to be. Some of Rings of Power posts on here already mention just how demanding horse logistics are, and the below covers it in even more detail.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_in_World_War_II
And then, of course, there is the fact that a good truck does not “just” move much faster than a horse (and does so as soon as it can start, without needing to stop to eat/drink/rest in the same manner) but that it can simply carry the kind of load that’ll require a much greater number of horse carriages – all with their own horse drivers. While engines and other parts of the truck clearly need maintenance, carriages do as well. However, for the USSR (and most other nations fighting in WWII), the question was complicated by the early-1930s trucks not being especially good.* This is especially problematic when you consider that the fuel for other trucks (let alone tanks, etc.) had to be moved on these same chassis. Even with the semi-mechanized army of 1939, Budyonny complained that some fuel had to be air-delivered in order to keep up the offensive momentum during the “Liberation Campaign” in Poland. (Ironically, a major reason why this happened was because a mid-1930s attempt to create a better truck engine was delayed when the production plant working on it instead got reallocated to boost fighter aircraft production – which it didn’t meaningfully contribute to either, the initiative mostly wasting valuable months on retooling.)
*The most common Soviet truck, GAZ-AA, was adopted from the American ~1930 Ford-AA (to the point the Romanians found its parts interchangeable with their own licensed copies of it), and it had a carrying capacity of just 1.5 tons (most German and American-British trucks were on 3 tons by then, with a number of 4.5/5 ton trucks as well: the USSR did have the comparable ZIS-5, but in lower quantities, and its only 5-ton truck, YaG-6/10, was rare used the same engine as weaker models leaving it badly underpowered.)
the biggest reason for the purge is the suspect of pro-German sentiment within Soviet military due to the collaboration between them. Tukhachevsky was the chief suspect.
Quick question: How does a general staff, for the army atleast, work. As in how the organizations of units like field armies and battle groups lead by generals translate into administrative control by the army general staff. Writing a setting and want to know how a modern military is organized from the top down.
This might be something to get to in its own post, to be honest.
For a quick summary much inferior to what Dr. Devereaux might provide, but which I hope is largely accurate:
The general staff typically handles logistics, administration, procurement, the infrastructure of communications and so forth, and the big-picture operational planning. The general staff is responsible for working out whose units should be “driven” where, how to get supplies to them, how to coordinate with allied forces at the operational level, and so on.
Meanwhile, field command of armies and divisions and so forth is assigned to officers whose headquarters are in the field and whose sole responsibility is to “drive” that specific formation and carry out its specific mission.
Ideally, as I understand it, there is considerable cross-pollination between the commanding officers in the field, the personal staff of the generals commanding large units in the field (because they need their own supply officers, training officers, signals officers, and so on in order to ‘drive’ their own formation), and the general staff back at the capital.
The recent deployments of troops to back ICE are disconcerting. Working in DoD there are quite a few former military / reserves in the work force. It is interesting to see their takes on what is happening.
Even with the current politicization of the military, the only way I could see a coup is if Trump tried to serve for a 3rd term or cancelled elections. Even then I expect Congress to be given a chance to act first.
A collection of typing pedantry:
earliy → early
Newbough → Newburgh
the Imperial Germany → Imperial Germany
simply an ‘clean-Wehrmacht’ apologia → simply a ‘clean-Wehrmacht’ apologia
even among the allies → even among the Allies
Joseph E. Johston → Joseph E. Johnston
firece → fierce
discipline and moral → discipline and morale
for quite a decades → for quite a few decades
a operational → an operational
gotten use to → gotten used to
George Marshal → George Marshall
‘Mission Accomplished‘ → ‘Mission Accomplished’
that of those high profile firings → that those high profile firings
mankind—”had → mankind—“had
Fixed!
I was honestly a bit short of time on this one, so thanks for the catches.
I don’t see any evidence of the AVF developing a politically charged military. If anything it seems the reverse; the military has remained so passive and receptive to civilian control that it will meekly accept any sort of abuse from its civilian controllers. The Trump examples seem to show this; the military has remained pretty much entirely neutral relative to him despite his constant messing with it.
Based on a conversation I had over drinks with a servicemember once, which I realize is the epitome of anecdote, I’m inclined to wonder if not so much professionalization as seeing it as “just a job” is the thing that preserves political neutrality of the military. If being a soldier is just a job, then there’s no reason to privilege their desires over, say, plumbers, or to pick another government job, postal workers.
Of course, if the other side of the bargain breaks down and they have to actually start worrying about illegal orders, then they’ve been thrust into the position of being a political interest group despite any such desires.
That arguably is what professionalization means.
I’d argue against that. Whether your job is a full-time profession and whether it becomes part of your political identity are separate steps. There are many examples throughout history of civilian professions forming a unified political bloc, from trade guilds to unions.
That the US-American military hasn’t done so fits in how very few other sections of US-American workers have formed political constituencies. Which is arguably a feature of both the culture (lionizing individualism) and policy (strongly opposing unions that could create such a political identification).
I’ll grant that that might be what Huntington meant by professionalization, but to me it’s somewhat the opposite: The person I remember talking to, and I’ve seen this sentiment expressed elsewhere as well, was genuinely uncomfortable with “support our troops” style veneration, because he didn’t think the job was anything special. Now, admittedly, I was talking to an enlisted person that time. It’s possible that officers think about it differently because they have planned for a career, starting with higher education, similar to other professionals like doctors or engineers. But the thing is, when you start building an identity in relation to a profession, things can go weirdly sideways.
The Trumpist movement tends to be very firmly convinced that all ‘real’ soldiers are on their side (see beliefs about the Fremen mirage and ‘warrior ethos’). In practice, Trump has clearly taken steps to purge the senior officer corps of individuals who don’t match his idea of who should be running ‘his’ military… But has not really laid groundwork to be truly confident of the loyalty of the military rank and file.
One of the ways in which Trumpism deviates from many of the movements it would historically be compared to has to do with its relationship to the media. Trumpism relies very heavily on the support of a corporate media infrastructure its political leadership does not own (with the notable exception of Truth Social). It uses this infrastructure to generate reliable consent and support from Trumpism’s popular base, by being the sole major source of information that this base actually listens to. This method is very reliable for continuing to hold power in a democracy no matter how many scandals and embarrassments may arise to weaken the Leader, because it means that the people who voted for the Leader are almost certain to continue voting for him no matter what he does, and will think his enemies are practically demonic forces to be opposed at all costs.
…
However, doing things this way comes at a price. First, it means that the leadership is itself consuming this corporate media, which is de facto propaganda for its own side. Thus, the leadership is especially vulnerable to self-reinforcing beliefs such as “all soldiers are patriots, all patriots love us, we are manly virile heroes, soldiers are manly virile heroes, all soldiers love us just for being us.”
Second, it means that moves which work very reliably among the political support base (which has been carefully cultivated via decades of propaganda to respond favorably to certain cues) may not land well among either the general public or the military, since the military as a whole [i]doesn’t[/i] rely solely on Trumpism’s preferred sources to tell it what to think or believe about the world, even if some of its individual members do.
When I see people online mentioning a military coup, I usually see it in the context of Trump (or his successor) becoming a dictator. For example, rigging the elections and allowing multiple terms (or for life), similar to what is seen in other countries.
If this happens, it would mean that all civilian institutions have failed the United States. What do we do if both Congress and the Supreme Court cannot or will not prevent a president from becoming a dictator?
I mean given the way demographics are set up right now, it might look more like Mexico in the 1930s (or Hungary today): voting is rigged both using legal tools (eg gerrymandering) and illegal ones with a veneer of legality (eg every 4 years, Phoenix, Charlotte, Dallas etc receive a visit from the National Guard that make voting extremely difficult). The security forces (both Army and FBI/DHS) supports the status quo in exchange for a share of the spoils. They’re not asked to do anything too egregious, and the little discontent created by the barely legal orders is compensated handsomely. They are also allowed to pursue their own political agenda to the extent it does interfere too much with the ruling party: if you wanna bomb Iran or entrap some more autistic terminally online kids, go for it. The opposition is allowed to exist but the regulatory state and the courts are used to make sure it never becomes larger than a bunch of blogs and no outspoken activist ever accrues much money and power. Lawfare is used sparingly and creates enough of a chilling effect to do the job. It can be surprisingly stable, unfortunately.
Thank you for this. Coming from Australia, it was particularly enlightening about a feature of US culture that I have always found jarring: the endless and endlessly repeated “thank you for your service” to be found in public spaces everywhere, from announcements in airports to the openings of football games.
I had always interpreted this combat-boot-licking (yes, the tone of it all comes across as fawning to a foreigner) as an expression of American imperialism. Your essay makes it clear that it has deeper historical roots than that – and thinking back over Twain and Dickens, the same piece of the bargain, i.e. public trust of the military **expressed as fulsome praise**, is there to be seen[1].
Now a question for you, perhaps a prompt for the next 4th of July:
Picking up on what your UK commenter had to say, other countries manage to engender public trust in the military as part of similar bargains to the one you describe for the US. The Australian example involves the military being **much less visible in public** except on a specific occasion (Anzac Day) that honours a military failure.
What I think might be going on here is that “the public trusts the military” can and should be broken down into at least three parts: (1) “we trust that you won’t coup us”, (2) “we trust you to defend us” and (3) “we trust your capacity to project force onto others”. In Australia, public trust in the military is understood very much in terms of (1) and (2), with (3) limited to peacekeeping activities. This particular “shape” to the public-military bargain then drives its public expressions.
So my questions are these: what do you think the shape, or the predicates, of American public trust in the military look like? Have they evolved alongside the American project, or has there been a large component of (3) from the beginning? Might (3) obscure (1) in the public mind?
One last, related comment. Of course you have an imperial presidency: you are an imperial nation[2].
[1] Alert: pedantic use of “fulsome”
[2] yes, the definitions of “imperial” are sliding past one another.That’s what I’m hoping to hear from you about
I’ll echo your point about the incessant ‘thankyou for your service’ comments. I place it alongside other American touchstones like the pledge of allegiance in classrooms and the enormous weight placed upon the star spangled banner (or even the whole ‘America F yeah’ stuff) as things that, to a Brit, come across as more than a little bit…unsettling.
I suspect it’s simply something of a culture shock, but it feels like something that a stable and self-assured country shouldn’t need to be doing. Interesting to see the history and reasoning behind some of it.
Of course, I’m not so high on European exceptionalism to believe we’re all that much better. Not only do we have our own movements here trying to ape that sort of blind nationalism, but I also suspect we have our own iterations that we’re simply blind to due to proximity (or due to them being more subtly ingrained, perhaps).
The whole thing makes me consider that the expression of ‘trust in the military’ is likely to be extremely culturally specific. Overweening deference to the military in the UK would likely come across as disingenuous at best, or sarcastic at worst. I’m struggling to conceptualise what ‘trust in the military’ would even look like from a British perspective, but that’s probably not being able to see the wood for the trees on my behalf. Perhaps it’s as simple as being left alone to do their job, with an assumption that they’re doing it well without needing outside interference. I don’t know.
” I’m struggling to conceptualise what ‘trust in the military’ would even look like from a British perspective, but that’s probably not being able to see the wood for the trees on my behalf. ”
This may help answer your question. Peter Hennessey, in “Defence of the Realm”, reports an exchange in the Defence Select Committee between a member of parliament and the First Sea Lord (basically the UK equivalent of the CNO) at some point in the 1960s, just after the first British Polaris boats launched. From memory it went something like this:
MP: First Sea Lord, I have a question. I understand that the US has some sort of mechanism on its atomic weapons to prevent an unauthorised launch.
1SL: Yes, quite right. The Permissive Action Link system.
MP: Well, do we have that on ours?
1SL: No, we do not. It was not considered necessary.
MP: But isn’t there a danger, in that case, of someone launching an atomic weapon from one of our submarines without authorisation?
1SL (after a shocked pause): No, there is not, because these weapons are under the control of officers of the Royal Navy.
Interesting how closely that fits to my initial guess of ‘being left alone to do their job, with an assumption that they’re doing it well without needing outside interference’.
It would be interesting to know if the MP backed down after that exchange.
I think that’s where Hennessy ended the quote, so I don’t know exactly what happened next, but he notes that British nuclear weapons still do not have any sort of PAL equivalent. I can’t find my copy of “The Secret State” (not “The Defence of the Realm” which is a history of the security service) right now, which I think is the Hennessy book it appeared in.
Interesting. I suppose that does say something about implicit trust as well.
I should be clear as well that it’s not just that in the UK. There are various things put in place to ensure that people in the armed forces get better treatment than the general population from things like other government services. For instance, there’s the Armed Forces Covenant that government services are legally bound by. In the NHS, where I have the most experience, that manifests as prioritisation for services and workarounds for difficulties with itinerant populations that don’t particularly exist for other itinerant populations. So it’s not all an unspoken gentlemanly agreement thing, there are tangibles behind it as well.
It’s interesting that that’s your perception from being actually inside the NHS, because serving armed forces personnel not only don’t get priority care from the NHS, they don’t get routine care from the NHS at all – they get it from Defence Medical Services. And the Armed Forces Covenant explicitly does not say “service personnel get better care” – it says “service personnel should not be disadvantaged” which is a bit different.
What I think you may be thinking of is priority treatment for veterans, not serving soldiers, which is only for conditions associated with their service – to quote NHS England “veterans should receive priority treatment where it relates to a condition that results from their service in the Armed Forces, subject to clinical need.” But veterans by definition aren’t in the armed forces any more, and they don’t get priority for non-service related conditions.
@ajay Yeah it’s interesting how policy that seems clear and simple actually translates to real-world practice.
For instance, the area that I work is around support for neurodivergent children and young people. One of the things we’ve done recently, in response to massive increases in demand for assessment, is implement some clinical prioritisation criteria (so rather than first-come, first-served, children with higher need get assessed sooner and everyone else waits longer).
About half of our criteria are assessed need outside of any legal or statutory duties (i.e. a child who is at risk of admission to an inpatient mental health facility). However, the other half are prioritised due to legal and statutory requirements (or, rather, our local interpretation of them). One of those is ‘children of people in the armed forces’, as per the Armed Forces Covenant.
So, what actually happens in practice is that in order to not disadvantage the families of service personnel, we bump their children up the list (regardless of whether they have a strong clinical need for assessment). So, those children are *advantaged* over the general population, who would not necessarily be prioritised with similar levels of need (in many cases at least).
The alternative to this would be some logistical-communication nightmare of communicating to whichever local services exist in wherever they’re moving to and getting them to ‘match’ their waiting time and level of prioritisation, each and every time they moved (meanwhile, a number of areas in the UK don’t even have children’s ND assessment services, and many of them do not have agreed prioritisation criteria).
I don’t personally know how widespread this is across the health system, but it holds true for the areas that I have contact with. The legislation states that we must not disadvantage them or their families, but in implementing that the only practical way to achieve it is to advantage them over the general population.
To be clear, I’m a-ok with that (and I wish we had such arrangements in place for other itinerant populations, like the GRT community). So much of our architecture is designed for sedentary populations, and it’s a hell of an admin burden for folks who move around to sort the registration with each local branch of the NHS whenever they move.
At least you still have annual military parades on Anzac day. Many countries don’t even have that.
One thing to note about American empire’s relation to its military’s prestige is that “thank you for your service” makes a lot more sense when the military is in constant active service than when its service involves just being ready. Nevermind the somewhat belabored-stretching-on-barmy logic that is necessary for conceiving of this service tens of thousands of miles away as “defensive,” it is very different from an only-in-potential service, like you have in more peaceful countries. I wonder how important being constantly at war somewhere (as was the case to a degree even before global empire, and as was true of the British military before) is to this public trust and prestige, foreign adventurism being key to barring domestic adventurism.
Of course, then you have the largely apolitical militaries of other rich countries over the last 50 years, most of which haven’t been used abroad in the same way or to the same extent, though I’d argue that in those cases a very high level of foreign paranoia, persisting after the end of the cold war, makes for easier acceptance of readiness as akin to active service. In this case you could contrast how technical and operational association with the US made their militaries more professional (in the ideological sense) even as a less direct association with the US (and a more vague, ideological paranoia where there were no lines on maps to defend) served to make third-world militaries mostly vectors of ideological coups.
If true, this conjecture is also very bad news for those countries (much of the world) where actively political militaries are a problem. Not that anybody thought solving that problem was easy…
I think the steady weakening of Congress is always interesting, like, in theory Congress, when acting as a whole, is *very* strong, arguably the most powerful organ of the US government. But Congress has, in the last century or so, steadily had that power eroded. Sometimes by court decisions (but even then a lot of them feels like they’re more “Congress didn’t make a law about this, so I guess its up to the president”) but mostly just by… inertia?
To some extent I feel the problem is that Congress lacks…. institutional loyalty? Like both parties have been willing to sacrifice the prerogatives of Congress as an institution in favour of getting policies they want enacted (via the presiedency/courts, other institutions) I feel like there’s been relatively few times in modern history where congress has acted in a bipartisan way to champion *their institution as such*.
Every President wants to increase the powers of the Presidency he controls. Not every Congressman wants to increase the power of Congress – the other side might have more power in Congress, or his side might have more control over the Presidency than over Congress.
A large part of this is the ossification of the Senate. When Congress has its hands tied by (self imposed, almost sleepwalked into) supermajority rules, other branches have to misappropriate power if the system is going to function.
Eh, the transfer of power to the other branches started well before the filibuster got normalized; it was possible under the rules from pretty early (by accident) but it wasn’t until relatively recently that people actually filibustered every bill proposed. I’d actually suggest that the transfer of power enabled the ossification of the Senate, both in the persistence of the filibuster (it can be deleted by a simple majority vote) and in the fact that they can’t get a 60-vote majority on anything meaningful. Notably, they’ve exempted the stuff that Congress actually has to get done, namely budgets and approving nominations, from the filibuster. And they passed two AUMFs under Bush with large majorities.
What exact transferral do you refer to here?
It’s more a general pattern than a specific incident, though I’m vague on the specifics as it was well-established by the time I was born. I’m mostly referring to the regulatory state and to war powers. Congress explicitly granted a lot of rulemaking authority to federal agencies such as the FDA and EPA. Such agencies basically have lawmaking power and did not exist at the time of the founding. I am admittedly not clear on the timeline of their acquisition of their current power, but it’s de facto given the President control over substantial legislative power.
Also, I’m pretty sure the founders would have recognized the Korean War as a war, and it was not declared by Congress. Possibly likewise with the Vietnam War.
Congress’ grants of rulemaking authority to independent agencies were not intended to make the presidency much stronger, because the agencies were intended to run largely independent of the president, carrying out broad-strokes Congressional directives.
The problem is that it’s relatively easy for a legislature to pass a law saying “nobody is allowed to release excessive amounts of poisonous chemicals into the water, air, food, or other things used by the public and by wildlife,” in more or less those exact words.
It’s functionally impossible for a legislature to do a good job crafting precise regulations on, say, how much dioxin is too much dioxin and what you can do about your factory’s dioxin byproducts to safely get rid of the problem. That’s the kind of thing you hire designated civil servants to spend years working on, and the legislature has very little direct function in such a process other than to nod and go “yes mhm sure fine.”
So far as I know, most representative democracies have regulatory agencies that have some ability to codify rules pursuant to broad directives set by the legislature. I could be wrong about that, but it sounds exhausting and impractical to expect the legislature to micromanage every detail of everything.
Another thing is just sheer size: Congress could in theory legislate directly everything its agencies do, but then each Congressman would need a 72hrs day and a couple PhDs and some experience about the gritty details they simply lack. That’s why the non-delegation doctrine is seen (imho correctly) as libertarians imposing through the courts what they would never get at the ballot box: the practical result of ending EPA is not Congress directly legislating on emission standards, it’s the end of emission standards. All the rhetoric about bringing power back to the elective representative of the People is rather rich when it’s used to advance a state of affair the People would reject 80/20 if asked.
A potential remedy would be to just expand Congress (and congressional staff) to the point each Commission can realistically act like an agency, but for some mysterious reason (see above) that’s never the proposed solution
This is from the POV of a foreigner, but I think the ossification of the Senate has to do with election of Senators.
When the Senate was selected by the state legislature, they could be removed pretty frequently. They also were somewhat limited in their political legitimacy by being appointed.
With direct election, a candidate needs name recognition and a lot of money to overcome the incumbent advantages. This happens more often for Presidential candidates because the prize is so large. Being one Senator among many (and a junior one at that, no powerful committee appointments for you) limits the upside, and the struggle to get that prize is probably about the same.
The incumbent advantage is particularly strong in primaries, and in a number of states the electorate is significantly slanted towards one party, so the primary pretty much decides who wins.
But the problem asazernik is describing is the fact that Congress gets almost nothing done, not that some Senators hold office for a long time. That’s down to the filibuster. Basically, by default the Senate does not vote until debate on a bill is complete, and there is no limit on debate. It is thus possible to delay a bill indefinitely by taking the floor and talking; so long as you keep talking (about literally anything) the bill cannot proceed. If there’s a small group of Senators who trade off the floor, they can keep this up literally forever. During WWI, it was decided to introduce a mechanism for limiting debate with a special motion and vote, which was eventually set at requiring 60 Senators. Then later it became standard to just not advance a bill that someone threatened to filibuster, which greatly eased both the physical strain and potential embarrassment of standing on the floor for 24 hours reading from children’s books or whatever. So these days basically anything that can be filibustered requires 60 votes to pass.
It’s worth noting that there’s a special process for the budget called reconciliation, where so long as the bill obeys certain rules (mostly limiting non-budgetary terms) debate is limited so it can’t be filibustered. Approving presidential appointments also can’t be filibustered. So the stuff that has to get done every year can’t be blocked by a minority.
Also, the filibuster is entirely a creation of Senate rules, and ultimately can be eliminated with a simple majority vote. However, both parties have at least a couple members concerned about what will happen when control of the Senate flips away from them.
Congress last acted vigorously in its own role vs the Executive during the Nixon crisis of 1973-74. Congress acquitted itself pretty well on that occasion.
Which was 50 years ago. So while it is an example from the timeframe that Arilou specified, I wouldn’t call it a *counter*example to their point. A lot of the ills that now are coming to the boil were visibly developing over the last twenty years. Most notably is of course that the important constituency (that they have to listen to to get elected) of house members has fundamentally shifted after Citizens United vs. FEC in 2010.
Another aspect is that the support base of one of the two major political parties now gets almost all its news from media institutions that were specifically designed by people who looked at the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s downfall, and said “we never want that to happen to us again.” And their idea of how to ensure that was to ensure that if you were a Republican voter, you would never hear a single word spoken against any Republican politician from a credible news source, nor a single good word about anything done or advocated by any Democrat.
After a quarter century of this, we have a lot of voters who, mentally speaking, live in a world where Democratic politicians are all baby-blood-drinking adrenochrome junkies out to trans your kids for their own ineffable purposes, where the Great Replacement is considered to be if not simple fact then “what we all suspect is happening,” and where Donald Trump is a healthy heroic robust courageous individual whose word is his bond and who has the interests of the common man firmly in mind.
The existence of this kind of mindset among roughly a quarter to a third of the electorate makes it very hard to run a democracy, even one better and more robustly designed than America’s.
Regarding Congress’s apparent disinclination to assert itself: As I read the Constitution, it’s written and the checks and balances in it are constructed as though political parties are nonexistent or at least negligible. The Constitution assumes that Congress will naturally want to preserve its power against an expansionist Executive; it doesn’t anticipate the party-first allegiance we see today. Thus, we see politicians in Congress working both for and against their *branch*’s authority depending on whether it maximizes the short term gains for their *party*.
Can you expand on the implications you hint at for the transition to an All-Volunteer Force? Is the idea that because people have to affirmatively sign up, they are more likely to think of being in the military as a core part of their identity and act accordingly? Not sure on the statistics, but is it also possible that the military is becoming more of a hereditary profession due to the change (you go into the military because you grew up around military bases all your life and your family has warmer feelings than a draftee family would)? In a way, a sort of return to the aristocratic tradition? I have often heard people justify a reintroduction of the draft or a draft-like program to build national solidarity, but I’ve never considered it from the angle of civil-military relations.
The divide cuts both ways. One sees the other as soft and pampered / dirty and stupid.
There is also the issue if you have no family or friends in the Army, do you really care about how much blood forgien entanglements cost?
In my town, you see a huge divide between military and non-military families about the wisdom of joining the war in Europe.
> There is also the issue if you have no family or friends in the Army, do you really care about how much blood forgien entanglements cost?
The force sent into foreign adventures is usually too small to make a WW2-style draft necessary.
But more importantly, ordinary people have too little influence over the decision to go to war in any Western country I am familiar with for this to matter. Democracy does a poor job of stopping a leader like Rasmussen who wants to send more Danes into Iraq or Africa for his career progression or some other reason. He would consider it beneath him to follow the wishes of the general population instead. Whoever he chooses to follow, opinion-makers arguing for a particular geo-strategy or other social elites he likes to associate with are neither directly elected nor representative of ordinary people. Wars are not declared by referendum, and once started, they remain very unlikely to be aborted.
your family has warmer feelings than a draftee family would)?
Sorry, that makes no sense to me
“(you go into the military because you grew up around military bases all your life and your family has warmer feelings than a draftee family would)”
I was just talking about this last night. The military families I’ve known bounce around the country quite regularly–regularly enough that their kids can’t form permanent attachments to the folks they go to school with or do hobbies with. They make friends, sure, but they’ll see the friend for a year, maybe two, then probably never see them again. It makes it much more likely that the child will join the military because that’s all they’ve really known, that’s what’s normal to them. And it makes it less likely that non-military families will join, because the kids see the military as ripping their friends from them.
I will grant that these are not incredibly strong forces–it’s not the impenetrable wall that, say, the Medieval caste system was. But it certainly exists and is worth considering when discussing civilian-military relations.
The context it came up in speaks to ike’s point: we were discussing the impacts of jobs like mine (environmental geologist, but also civil engineers and certain types of construction work) on family stability. Those same forces come into play in my career quite regularly, and it removes a lot of people from these careers. It’s also amusing to see military people who think civilians are “soft and pampered” come onto a jobsite. They get their eyes opened rather quickly. They’re good workers–I love working with Marines–but they have some assumptions about how civilian life works that do not hold up. (I’m humble enough to acknowledge that were I to work at a forward-operating base, a thing that happens in my industry, the same would happen to me.)
You mentioned that only two ‘biggies’ went to the South in the Civil War. One of my favorite shows about that is Ken Burn’s Civil War. In it, they tell how Robert E. Lee was offered command of the Union Army right at the start of the war. He was a career officer in the United States Army before the Confederate Army. He agonized about it, he really did. In the end he felt he couldn’t end up shooting at his own neighbors and family, so he went to the Confederates.
I have wondered if the war would have been shorter if he had chosen the Union.
I am not trying to be contentious, but have to suggest that the US Civil War was not so much a “civil war” as a rebellion. The sometimes mooted alternate names of War Between the States or Southern War of Independence (which failed) or even Southern Rebellion seem to me to be more apropos. A civil war implies a struggle over who controls a central government. The CSA established in 1861 sought independence from the USA, it did not seek to take over the USA and rule everywhere from Washington, DC. This conflict was nothing like the English Civil War, or Spanish Civil war, for examples.
This reminds me, one thing I find interesting about this kind of conflict is that, when some of the political leaders in a place go to war in an attempt to become independent from the larger political entity that rules the place, the general convention seems to be that the rest of the world waits and sees how the war ends before deciding whether it retroactively calls the war an international war or a civil war. So the US War of Independence is usually seen as an international war, while the US Civil War and the Biafran War are usually seen as civil wars.
To be fair, its probably at least part because the US War of Independence was also a pretty big general war, including the dutch, french and spanish.
The only people who promote this position are the same people who tell me the Civil War was not about slavery. Hard pass.
Stop making such passive-aggressive weasel statements. According to you, Kevin says “the Civil War was not about slavery” – this is, in fact, directly what you claim. Go ahead and prove it then – present all the direct evidence you have for it. Links, more questionably screenshots, etc, of Kevin saying exactly that.
Eh. I’m firmly convinced that the Civil War was initiated by the southern states over their elites’ desire to continue to dominate a large hereditary slave caste… And yet you could plausibly talk me around to the idea that the war we call the ‘American Civil War’ was actually not a ‘proper’ civil war, but rather a regional secessionist movement.
It’s not as if it’s inherently moral to secede (even when your goal is to continue to hold slaves in chains for person profit or out of sheer racial animus) but inherently immoral to fight a civil war, or anything like that.
Fears over slavery were why the South succeeded. But that mess also saw a regional identity rapidly develop into what could fairly be called a national identity. Only to end up broken at horrendous cost.
Incidentally a lot of the North leaves a bad taste to me too. They generally, especially early on, considered preserving the Union a priority over the slavery issue. Except if you aren’t justifying it based on the horror of slavery, you are just roleplaying an abusive boyfriend, killing literally hundreds of thousands of southerners to keep them part of the United States against their will.
They generally, especially early on, considered preserving the Union a priority over the slavery issue. Except if you aren’t justifying it based on the horror of slavery, you are just roleplaying an abusive boyfriend, killing literally hundreds of thousands of southerners to keep them part of the United States against their will.
Sorry, but I think that’s a very weak argument. States (and individuals) usually do what they do for complex mixtures of reason. Some of these might be amoral reasons of state, while others can be moral or ideological. As long as slavery was *one* factor among others, and I assume you’re not going to seriously argue that it wasn’t, it was a big issue even if it wasn’t the biggest, then I think it’s very reasonable for your view of American slavery to affect how your should think about the Civil War.
I don’t think the slavery and secession issues were that separable in practice either. I think it was more likely that slavery would persist in an independent CSA state, than in a counterfactual United States of America where the civil war never happened (though it might have persisted in both cases), and I think both sides recognized that.
Then let me be the first to buck the trend: The Civil War was a separatist struggle between the US government and the slaveholding Southern states that sought to preserve slavery by seceding from the Union.
(It’s worth noting that outside the US, the US Civil War is also widely known as the War of (Southern) Secession, a much more accurate portrayal of what actually happened, considering that several pro-Union states were also slave holding regions that just happened to be fine with Lincoln’s Republicans winning the Presidency.)
Which makes me feel the North were not exactly good guys either. Because for most the clear offense was the succeeding and slavery was secondary. But if your problem is the succeeding part, not the slavery part, personally I think killing hundreds of thousands of southerners and destroying their economy in the name of forcing them to stay against their will is an atrocity. I don’t think there is much reason to doubt that a majority of southern whites supported succession.
I’m not sure why the Confederacy gets so much flack for Fort Sumter either. It clearly is unacceptable have a fort held by an existential threat outside a major port.
Adam Smith — Drink!!
Haha– where’s Trump’s stupid vanity Space Force in the chart shown above? Isn’t that it’s own special boondoggle now?
So first it was established with Bipartisan support. Second it was based on preexisting Air Force Space command. Third many militaries operate things in space. I understand the distate for the invidual, but keep to facts please.
Putting aside Kevin’s inflammatory way of phrasing it — the chart is indeed out of date. The US Space Force is part of the Department of the Air Force. Much like the USMC within the Department of the Navy, the Chief of Space Operations and the Chief of Staff of the Air Force both fall under the Secretary of the Air Force.
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/app/uploads/2024/06/Almanac2024_Department-of-the-Air-Force-Structure.pdf
i think there’s plenty of reason to be critical of the Space Force- and of the size, scope and commitments of the US military in general- regardless of which president initiated it. Lots of ideas that I consider to be morally wrong, outrageous or ill-considered- especially in the realm of foreign policy, maybe more than anything else- get bipartisan support all the time. Democratic presidents have made lots of foreign policy decisions I disagree with, this just happens to be a decision I object to made by a Republican.
If American civilian-military relations are as contingent as all that, we might expect them to be very different in other, similar countries. Evidence would seem to be mixed: I don’t suppose anyone thinks Britain or its other former settlement colonies are more likely to suffer a military coup than the United States. This is reassuring.
OTOH, the other Presidential Republics in the Americas – the countries from Mexico to Tierra del Fuego – do seem to be more likely to suffer a military coup than the United States. This is less reassuring.
Looking at the executive branch more broadly, I am reminded of Joseph Heath’s The Machinery of Government, and his discussion of Civil Service neutrality. His point was that if a new minister fires his underlings and appoints new ones beholden to him, he gets subordinates who have more reason to be loyal to him, but less idea how to do whatever he wants them to do. And it is harder for him to escape blame if his appointees make a mess of things. So he has reason to keep the old people on, so long as he thinks they will be loyal to him.
So anyone who wants to reach the top of a government agency and stay there has reason to make it obvious they will be loyal to whoever the latest elected leader is. It is in the interests of the agency and its people that they do so.
Note that this system assumes a frequent turnover of political leaders. If the executive is the executive for life, his subordinates are stuck with him for their whole careers, and it would then be in their interests to put loyalty to him before loyalty to anyone else.
In Imperial Germany, for example, the Emperor controlled the Army and held his position for life, so it was sensible for people with careers within the army to be loyal to him rather than the Reichstag, which didn’t control the army, and the members of which constantly changed.
The army was not “disloyal to the civilian government”. It was loyal to the branch of the government which it served. The Army was not disloyal to the Reichstag because it had a General Staff. It was disloyal to the Reichstag because it was not meant to be loyal to them. It was meant to be loyal to the Commander-in-Chief, the Emperor. Which it was.
I think in this case the civilian government in question would not be in the Reichstag, but in the fact that the general staff assumed authority over nationwide policy and decision making without regards to either Kaiser or chancellor. They didn’t outright overthrow Wilhelm, but his authority became pretty nominal (and really the sort of thing where one is able to validate the act of becoming a de facto military dictatorship by asserting that doing so is an act of loyalty).
What does that mean, exactly? Did they fight WW1 against his will?
Neither Nicholas II or Wilhelm II were particularly smart. They were hidebound conservatives, naturally, but neither was in charge of their military planning nor acquainted with the details of the mobilisation plans. During the crisis of August 1914, both were quite surprised that there was only a single mobilisation plan and that the plan allowed them no possibility for fine-tuning nor for avoiding measures that would mean war: the Russian army could not be mobilised against Austria-Hungary alone, and the German army could not be mobilised without attacking Belgium. The plans were made by much smarter men who actually preferred war and probably wanted to prevent the possibility of a crisis going to waste.
Both emperors could have called the mobilisation off competely, but the political cost might have cost them their thrones, as they would have angered their support base even if they had avoided a war. They both decided to have war, but the starkness of the choice was forced upon them by the military planners.
During the First World War, the German empire was run by the German military general staff, and the possibilities of the emperor to use power were rather humble, so Isator’s point is sensible. The situation is not very different from Russia, where Nicholas II was definitely not able to run the bureaucracy that controlled the first modern police state.
“Neither Nicholas II or Wilhelm II were particularly smart.”
That rather suggests that they should have left running the war to their subordinates. If the General Staff made it easier to do so it was a good thing for them.
That is not the same thing as the Army overthrowing the Emperor.
In a way you could say that both Emperors were overthrown by the army, in 1917 and 1918, but by the mutiny of the rank and file, not the General Staff or the officer corps.
The generals (Ludendorff and Hindenburg) took charge of Germany from 1916, sidelining both the Kaiser and the civilian chancellor. Of course the military had long been a key political bloc in both Prussia and Russia.
“This is not the same thing as the army overthrowing the emperor”.
That’s true, but it leaves out nuances of what it means to assume control over a polity while leaving the head of state intact as a figurehead.
This is pretty prominently featured in the history of Japan. The line of Japanese emperors credibly stretches back over a thousand years, and yet actual control in the country has been non-existent for most of that. Even before shoguns were military commanders who assumed all functional authority, one had a system of regencies that assigned all relevant decision making to the family of the emperor’s consorts.
To reply to some of the comments above: The importance of the American military also went up during the World Wars and the Civil War. Does it follow that the army had overthrown the civilian government?
The army was the branch of the German state most directly controlled by the Emperor. Increasing its importance did not decrease his.
At any time during the American Civil War, did the Union Army assume direct authority over civilian government in Union territories?
Having looked into that question on my own terms, I do find that the answer is something other than “no”, but still think it has distinguishing qualifiers re: in cases where the military assumed authority over civilian government, it was still explicitly subject to the command and oversight of the president, Congress, and sometimes state governments.
It exactly means that they assumed authority over national policy and decision making. I don’t think an elaborate explanation is required for why that is an atypical thing for those kinds of military officers.
If I didn’t know any better, I’d think that the question of “did they fight the war against their leader’s will” was a means of framing to create an implication that the only effective way for a military to fight a total war is if it actually did have total independent control of society.
While Germany’s supply situation wouldn’t have been great in any event, I propose that they might have been exacerbated by any decisions that the military authorities might have made about allocation in their own interests.
“It exactly means that they assumed authority over national policy and decision making.”
Against the Emperors will? It’s not insubordination if your boss wants you to do it.
On what basis do you assume that Wilhelm wanted the military high command to assume control of civilian society?
“Oh, Wilhelm wanted them to be doing what they were doing.” How would they know if they weren’t reporting to him and requiring his assent, if not his actual directive?
Like, the idea that the country effectively became a military dictatorship with kaiser as figurehead and chancellor as non-entity is well documented. What is you basis for disputing it?
There is no evidence of the Kaiser having anything against the German military. If anything the military was more guaranteed to keep the Kaiser on his throne than the civil government was.
The core of the Prussian/German officer class were the Junkers – the poor nobility of eastern Germany whose prestige and income largely derived from military service. Their loyalty to the king was conditional on his maintenance of their position. As in 1848, when their leaders informed the king that they would depose him if he accepted proposals from liberal Frankfurt. Or in 1812, when Yrock signed the Convention of Tauroggen. The officer corps was loyal to itself, as a consciously political body.
The Americans had the “spoils system” (incoming minister fires the existing subordinates and staffs with his followers) for a long time. It was 1883 with the US Civil Service Act where they changed that.
No coups.
It might make things easier, but it’s not a requirement.
The pre-1883 United States had a very weak federal government that relied heavily on its legitimacy and support from the state governments to get things done. For instance, Lincoln relied heavily on state governors to help him set up recruitment infrastructure during the Civil War. The civilian federal government was far, far smaller than we usually imagine today, with only a relative handful of agencies actually having ubiquitous nationwide presence (such as the Post Office).
So the ‘spoils system’ did not create opportunities for coups. If your patron politician lost an election, then yes, you as a civil servant were likely to lose your job as part of the incoming administration’s “spoils.” But it would be worse than useless to try to contest this by, say, somehow forcing the legislature to proclaim that your patron was actually still in charge. Because he would have no legitimacy and you’d end up in jail or being run out of town by an angry mob or something like that.
I feel like any assessment of the stability of republics in the Americas (or, indeed, anywhere the USA has significant vested interest) needs to at the very least account for the influence of the USA in protecting those interests, which often took the place of encouraging and supporting military coups against governments deemed to be unfavourable. Meanwhile the USA, by dint of being a superpower, is more resilient to the machinations of foreign governments in its own internal affairs.
Europe, of course, is one of those areas that the USA has a vested interest, but broadly its politics have played ball moreso than, say, Latin America of the Middle East.
Bringing this back into the blog’s pop-media-analogies space: I found Fort Salem a very illuminating glimpse into American popular conceptions of the AVF. (Alt-history modern fantasy show where the US military is built around a civ-mil bargain – ending witch persecution in exchange for witches forming the main fighting force.) Didn’t watch past the first few episodes, it wasn’t all that good, but it was a very interesting and alien cultural experience to me – they were clearly going for a look at rank-and-file “military families” in the US.
I’m much more exposed to the Israeli system, where there’s a fuzzy shading off from conscription-term-and-that’s-it (going home to the parents on weekends to do laundry) to signed-a-few-extra-years (junior officers or specialists, who spend more time training so they can get a nice line on their CV) to full-on career soldiers. Very different civ-mil bargains for each step on that spectrum.
“For almost 200 years, the United States military had been an essentially civilian force which relied on conscription.”
Errr…what? Between 1776 and 1945, the draft was regarded purely as a wartime measure, only employed at the national level in the ACW (by both sides, with the Confederates starting in 1862 and the Union in 1863, and even then the bulk of the armies were made up of volunteers), WWI, and the run-up to WWII. The post-1945 decision to maintain conscription outside of wartime was a new thing, and the decision to go back to an all-volunteer force rather than a conscripted one in the 1970s was a return to the norm rather than some kind of aberration.
These aren’t mutually exclusive: The US army was designed as a pretty small standing force to be filled up by conscription in wartime. You’re correct that this is different from the peacetime draft army AND the AVF.
Sort of, but when you phrase it that way it kind of sounds like how most of the European countries were organized before WWI, and it really wasn’t. For example, in 1860, the US Army had an authorized strength of about 18,000 men, the vast majority of which were stationed west of the Mississippi River, and every regiment was a fully-up-to-strength combat-ready unit, with no skeleton units awaiting a mobilization order to receive recruits.
And, also, volunteers were the preferred option even in wartime, and it usually worked–the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American War were all fought entirely by volunteers and most of the men who fought in the ACW were volunteers as well, though I suppose you could count a “call for volunteers” as indirect conscription. The first war the US had where the majority of soldiers were drafted was actually WWI, due to a massive lack of volunteers for it.
I had a similar reaction to yours though I think you’re drastically underestimating the impact of conscription on the Civil War. Yes, the majority of Union soldiers were volunteers but if you look at the details of the draft, it becomes obvious that the threat of the draft drove much “volunteering” post 1863. This is overly simplistic,, but given the choice between volunteering and receiving a large enlistment bonus versus being drafted without the bonus isn’t a tough decision, but also one that you likely wouldn’t have made without the threat of the draft. The people who were likely to volunteer mostly had by 1863. We needed a combination of carrots and sticks to man the Army.
That said, 32 years of conscription between 1940 and 1972, plus 2 years in WWI and 3 in the Civil War adds up to 37 years out of 249 or 236 if you want to start with the Constitution.
However, there’s another way to count. The US never had a significantly sized standing army during peacetime before WWII. So the existence of a highly capable all volunteer force outside of wartime is new, though it has existed as a volunteer force longer than it did as a peacetime conscription force.
I’d like to note, though, that the idea of “skeleton units waiting for new recruits” is not how you do mobilisation. The classic 19th century way of doing this is the concept of peace and war establishment: for example, the regimental has, say, two battalions in the peace-time and in mobilisation, the strength is increased by two more battalions. The reservists discharged during the past four years (assuming 24 month service term typical of the late 19th century) are called back to service and man the reserve battalions. The “skeleton” units exist only on paper: for example, it might be that the peace-time battalions’ XOs become battalion commanders of the reserve battalions and the oldest lieutenants of the active companies, company commanders of the reserve units, while most platoon commanders would be reserve officers.
In a more complicated scheme, your system may be territorial, like the Finnish system of 1934: the country is divided in military regions, each of which has a small staff doing planning and conscription work. At mobilisation, each regional staff becomes a regimental staff, the reservists of that region form a regiment, and the peace-time regiments send most of their officer corps to the mobilised units. (Naturally, this is done by placement lists so that every reservist and active soldier has a billet pre-assigned to them.) The platoon, and to large extent, company commander posts are filled with reservists because there are not enough active officers to fill them. In such a scheme, every officer typically gets a war-time posting at least one niveau higher than their peace-time billet. This system allows you to increase your strength easily by six to twenty fold compared to peace-time establishment. Somewhat interestingly, it also means that there is plenty of demand for life-time career officers and NCOs: while the lower officer billets are filled by reservists, there are lot of positions where it is really useful to have an elderly senior NCO or major – and a never-ending administrative work burden to maintain personnel and materiel lists, operations plans, training the reserve units etc. There is no need for “up or out”.
In both schemes, you don’t get “new recruits” but people who are already trained. Depending on the training level of reservists, your units may be combat ready in anything from hours to a few weeks. Israeli Army in Yom Kippur war is an extreme example: mobilised reserve units started fighting in 12 hours after mobilisation order but that was not quite an ideal situation. I think that even they would have preferred a day or two more time before sending the mobilised units to active operations.
Thank you for the clarification, I appreciate it. Neither system, however, is quite how the US did it for most of its history, though in some ways the development of the National Guard in the early 1900s probably puts it closer to the Finnish system than it was beforehand.
@60guilders,
The mobilisation system you mention as “Finnish” was how we did it before the WWII. The current system is different, because the pure regional system used back then is best suited for an agricultural society much different from our current one.
“Sir William Robertson, Chief of the [British] Imperial General Staff from 1916 to 1918 had terrible relations with David Lloyd George, but was politically impossible to remove and in turn made it impossible for Lloyd George to sack Sir Douglas Haig, who he also thought little of.”
I don’t understand this sentence, at least not in context. To say it is politically impossible to do something usually means that it cannot be done without the orders, or at least the consent, of an elected official, and that official will not agree out of fear of antagonising other elected officials or the electorate itself. So this sounds like a complaint that Lloyd George could not sack Robertson without antagonising other elected officials.
But why should he be able to? Lloyd George was not on the Army Council, and did not run the War Ministry – the Minister for War was and did. If anyone had the right to fire a general at will it would be the War Minister. But more generally – a President is the sole elected official in the Executive Branch and Commander in Chief of the Army. It is natural that he be able to run it without interference from other elected officials, unless he comes into conflict with the law. A Prime Minister gains his position entirely through the support of the elected officials in Parliament. It is absolutely right that he needs their support to do things, for it is their support that keeps him Prime Minister in the first place.
In particular, what would give him the right to fire someone under the War Minister without the agreement of the War Minister? Presumably the Cabinet could – but the Prime Ministers word is not a Cabinet decision. (By the convention of Cabinet collective responsibility, the Minister would be bound to publicly support a Cabinet decision, or resign.)
The UK government cabinet does not act as a body based on consensus, and never has. The Prime Minister is the primary decision maker, and the one with the highest authority of appointments.
That might technically be subject to parliamentary review, but since the Prime Minister is also part of parliament and usually ascends on the back of a parliamentary majority, between that and the long-standing powerful whip system, the Prime Minister has usually been remarkably powerful.
I presume it would have been politically difficult to remove an officer from a combination of being something that actually would cause rebellion in his own party and something that would bring the ire of the public as a whole. So not impossible in a literal sense, just something that would have fallout incompatible with his larger objectives.
“Cabinet collective responsibility, also known as collective ministerial responsibility, is a constitutional convention in parliamentary systems and a cornerstone of the Westminster system of government, that members of the cabinet must publicly support all governmental decisions made in Cabinet, even if they do not privately agree with them. ”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabinet_collective_responsibility
So if the Cabinet voted to fire a general, the War Minister would have to fire him. Otherwise he would be publicly disagreeing with the decision. The only alternative is resignation.
Conversely, if the PM ordered the minister to fire someone and the minister said no, one or the other of them is probably going to be forced out. But in the meantime, the Minister is responsible for his department, which means his decision is going to stick, at least until he is gone.
Well my experience of having lived in the UK, currently living in the one country that borders the UK, and having learned about its history since I was a child says to me that the conclusions that you’re drawing from this Wikipedia article are lacking in certain nuances.
Even if a convention that private disagreements are not expressed publicly is followed, private disagreements can still be ruinous, and there’s more to the governance of the UK than what goes on in private between the Cabinet.
Even within some specific confines, I think you’re drawing the wrong conclusion as to what Cabinet collective responsibility means. Given the de facto authority of the Prime Minister, it practically tends to mean that other ministers won’t openly disagree with carrying out their decisions and implementing their policies. That’s still not the Cabinet functioning as a collective council with mutual authority, or requires them to function by consensus. It’s effectively the convention on which is based the high authority of the PM.
So if Lloyd George had had the support, it would have been his ultimate decision to make.
As a fellow Brit, agreed. For anyone interested, we can see this playing out in real time right this minute as our current Prime Minister and his cabinet are attempting to force through reforms that are broadly opposed by a significant majority of their own party’s MPs around welfare cuts.
Fellow to the subject matter, perhaps. I am actually Irish (although I have English family).
Now if that isn’t a faux pas I don’t know what is 😉
English with Irish family, for my part.
“So if Lloyd George had had the support, it would have been his ultimate decision to make.”
The phrase “politically impossible” would rather suggest he didn’t. And therefore it wasn’t. Which is why I pushed back on the initial claim that the army was being insubordinate in not obeying an order that he never gave.
The PM’s cabinet colleagues are not his equal, but they are not as inferior as a Presidents cabinet secretaries. A PM can be forced out by his fellow elected officials. It is probably the most common way to leave Number 10. We are not going to see Donald Trump forced out like that. His position is much less assailable.
The point of all this is that the President has, in practice, and also in constitutional theory, a much freer hand to fire people.
How does subordination to civilian leadership interact with objecting to or disobeying illegal orders? It seems like there might be some tension there, since what is or is not an illegal order is somewhat of a judgement call. Could repeated conflict over questionable orders from civilian leadership inadvertently cause the politicization of the military into an interest group bloc?
They already are an interest group bloc. All government agencies are. But they mostly stay out of partisan politics because no one wants to risk making themselves an enemy of the people who may run the next government. All government agencies do.
The real problem is that if you force the army to pick a side in partisan politics… you force the army to pick a side in partisan politics. That’s not going to end well.
Regarding your first question, that’s a dilemma that no one has been able to resolve. A lot of civ-mil literature starts with an unspoken assumption that the civilian government is ‘good’, or, even if it isn’t, that the responsibility of the courts and other civilian groups to hold it to account.
The duty to refuse illegal orders is drawn from international law, and thus it’s really only interested in questions of individual culpability. How that operates at an institutional level remains largely unexplored.
The view I have most commonly seen expressed is something like: “Soldiers should obey orders I would agree with, and disobey orders I would not agree with, and overthrow governments I think are illegitimate.”
Unfortunately, the soldiers seem to make decisions based on what they think is right instead.
I think you tend here to be a bit simplistic, attributing straw men arguments to people. The concept of obviously illegal order is pretty non-controversial. I remember a joke on it: In recruit training, the company commander is lecturing about military law and the duty to refuse an obviously illegal order. He gives an example: “Assume I give you 60 cartridges and tell you to take your assault rifle and rob the nearest bank. What do you answer? – Recruit Töyhönen!” “Sir, how shall we share the loot?”
Naturally, the gist of the joke is that the stupid and criminally minded recruit has understood that by giving an illegal order the captain would set himself outside the chain of command and military discipline, allowing the discussion about sharing of the loot.
I think you could fairly accuse me of being unkind. But a law is basically a standing order written by the legislature. It overrules an order given by your immediate superior because the legislative process outranks him.
But what happens if they say that the Will of the Fuhrer is the Highest Law, and it is his will that Group X be killed off? Does it become illegal to save a member of Group X?
It’s quite hard to convincingly argue that Count von Stauffenberg was not committing a crime when he plotted to betray and murder his country’s internationally recognised leader and seize power. Past a point you find yourself saying: “Well, that crime is OK”.
US armed forces certainly consider killing unarmed children as part of a military raid is not illegal.
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/25/magazine/one-awful-night-in-thanh-phong.html
You’re telling me that American military historians are disappointed by efforts to make the American military more centralized and politically independent?
I’m shocked. What’s next? Are they gonna downplay the USSR’s role in defeating the Nazis?
It’s not obvious that making the military more centralised makes it more politically independent.
I might add that it is a rare Air Force general or Navy admiral that launches a coup. Making the *military* more centralised might make the *army* less dangerous.
I’d say the real danger in America is that control of the whole of the executive by a single elected official means that official faces the temptation to turn its power on his political opponents – either his opponents for the Presidency or his opponents in Congress. And I do not see how any amount of fiddling with the institutional design of the General Staff or Joint Chiefs can alter that.
Jerry Rawlings in Ghana (who led two socialist-leaning coups) was an Air Force man, although not a super high ranking one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Rawlings
On the opposite side of the political spectrum, the Argentinian coup in 1976 was led by a triumvirate of guys drawn from the Army, Air Force and Navy.
Also Didier Ratsiraka in Madagascar, one of the examples of “communist adacent revolutions made by the military in poor countries” that I mentioned above. He was a Naval officer too, he was called the Red Admiral.
Oh interesting, I was wrong about Ratsiraka. He was a naval officer, and led a revolution, but he didn’t actually get in power thru a coup (nor does it look like Madagascar has had coup d’etats in the strict sense). The president in 1972 resigned amidst major popular protests, and the military took advantage of the power vacuum to install and remove series of officers as leader, culminating with Admiral Ratsiraka. So not quite a coup, but the military was still definitely operating from behind the scenes.
Interestingly enough, something fairly similar happened in 2007, although this time the military chose someone from outside their ranks to run the country (a charismatic radio DJ, of all things).
2009, not 2007, rather.
I said rare, not nonexistant!
understood- i’m not disagreeing with you, just providing some context/examples that most Americans might not be aware of!
Ah, if only I had been able to use a grinning emoticon…
Most military forces are army-dominated. The US is atypical in how small the Army is relative to the Armed Forces overall – it’s actually the least funded of the three departments, which is unheard of even in naval powers like the UK; the Navy and Air Force have almost as many personnel as the Army each and more when combined, which is again not at all like the UK, let alone any other peer.
Then poorer countries tend to be even more army-dominated, because army costs are dominated by labor costs and navy and air force costs are dominated by capital (shipbuilding and R&D). You can see this in the current US military budget, PDF-p. 10 – procurement and R&D are 22% of the Army budget, 39% of the Navy and Marines budget (likely more Navy, less Marines), and 48% of the Air Force budget. And if you’re a middle-income country like Egypt, you’re paying your soldiers in local salaries but buying ships and planes from developed countries so your ability to afford them is based on your exchange-rate GDP and not your PPP GDP.
So the real reason most coups are started by the army is that most military forces in the sort of countries that have coups are army-dominated. Asking whether a more naval-dominated country would have a coup boils down to doing a case study of the Royal Navy and finding ways to excuse the IJN; asking whether an air force-dominated country would have a coup is literally just one case study, that of post-WW2 America.
IIRC, about half of military spending in WW2 was on the air force in most combatant countries. In that sense, they were all Air Force dominated. But the Air Force doesn’t usually lead a coup because the point of a coup is to seize control of the government, not bomb it.
A coup requires you to seize control of people and installations on the ground, and the ground is what armies are built to control.
Flight-lieutenant Jerry Rawlings, an Air Force officer who did lead a coup, didn’t do it by winning an air battle. He needed to control people on the ground. That is why it is so much easier and more common for an army officer to launch a coup.
To be fair, air forces often *do* have armed men on the ground, either parchutists or just security forces, etc. Generally not up to an actual fight but most coups *don’t* involve actual wars after all. And a bunch of security guards with submachine guns can seize the presidential palace just as easily as anyone else.
Arilou, I imagine that is how Jerry Rawlings did it. But in general, the army is better placed to seize points on the ground.
I assume this is coming from The Wages of Destruction? Because it doesn’t actually say that – it says half the spending was on the air force and navy. In Germany this worked out to about 40% of spending going to the Luftwaffe, because the Kriegsmarine was a submarine force and not a peer of the Royal Navy, but the Heer still was the largest branch by spending.
Alon, it is a long time since I read that book, and I don’t have a copy, or any other source, to hand. I can only take your word for it.
But if coup-plotting were proportional to budget, that statistic would suggest that 40% of coup plotters in Nazi Germany should have been in the air force, and that’s not the impression I get.
Nor would I expect to: seizing the Reich Chancellery and the Wolf’s Lair requires boots on the ground, not planes in the air.
As another data point, Hugo Chavez was an air force lieutenant (IIRC) when he attempted his first (failed) coup against the elected government of Venezuela.
I’ll add to the other earlier mentioned examples the fact that Hafez al-Assad was himself a military pilot, and was a key participant in the 1963 coup while holding the rank of an Air Force captain. After that, he was promoted to commanding the entire Air Force – and from that position, he then seized ultimate power three years later.
In fact, this also left an institutional legacy of a kind: the Syrian Air Force not only had its own intelligence service, but it was also by far the most powerful one, notoriously serving as the country’s secret police.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Force_Intelligence_Directorate
Coups tend not to be launched by generals or admirals, at least not in a country that hasn’t already suffered a recent one.
They tend to be launched by colonels and equivalents, possibly slightly lower.
Generals are usually selected for loyalty. And they’re often pretty senior.
You need someone relatively young (and therefore active) and also relatively popular with the troops (so they will follow him). They also need enough troops who’ve served under them to be able to spread the word.
Now, once there’s been a coup, a (new) general may launch another one. Or one of the (old) generals may launch a counter-coup. But those are different situations.
As often in politics, there are always exceptions, corner cases, etc. In 1974 in Portugal, a military coup established the democracy (the civilian government was a dictatorship).
“the military agrees not to insert itself into (internal) politics broadly construed and in exchange the civilian authorities agree not to use the military in internal politics and finally in turn the military occupies an elevated place of trust in the citizenry.”
I’m not convinced that third clause is either necessary or sufficient. For a start, the American military famously did not occupy an elevated place of trust in the citizenry in the 1970s or 1980s, yet no one seemed to fear the generals. OTOH, I gather that in Latin America the Army is generally one of the most trusted elements of the state – and that has not stopped military coups. Indeed, we might suspect that the more respected a group of people are, the more likely it is they can get away with such a thing.
The middle point strikes me as the essential one. As long as the authorities are united and seen as legitimate by the army leadership it will be hard to successfully conspire against them. Conversely, it will be easy for outraged loyalists to coordinate against the conspirators. But if they are not seen as legitimate, it will be easy to conspire against them. The army will be saving the country from a tyrant!
And if the authorities are divided – well, if the army has to pick sides, it has to pick sides.
I would also list Imperial Japan from ~1900[1]-1945 as a rebuttal of Huntington’s point. If the military (or at least the junior officers thereof) is regularly *assassinating* civilian leaders, and the senior leadership of the military doesn’t care about disciplining them for this, and the civilian leadership is too intimidated to try, then civilian control doesn’t exist.
[1] I choose this year very specifically as the one when the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy successfully obtained passage of a law requiring the Japanese War and Navy ministers to be active duty generals and admirals, who as a clique then abused that legal requirement for forming a complete government (this is a parliamentary system, if you don’t have someone to appoint to lead a ministry, you don’t have a government, or administration in Americanspeak) to sink governments they didn’t like, by directing all generals and admirals on the active list to refuse appointment. This stunningly bad example aside, this also 1) undermined parliamentary government by requiring at least two ministers to not be elected officials and 2) inculcated Japanese general and flag officers with the idea that they were political players, not just servants of the current government, since they could be appointed to political offices.
Of course if it was not obvious, the culture of gekokujō was cultivated by generals (usually generals but sometimes admirals) with cult followings among the wider officership and oftentimes very bizarre mysticist ideological agendas and personal axes to grind.
“George W. Bush landed a jet on the USS Abraham Lincoln”
Maybe being bit pedantic here, but he didn’t land that jet on the carrier. He sat in the copilot’s seat as the plane landed. He had no carrier aviation training, and just stepping in to land on a carrier isn’t something you do. Bush was not so brash as that.
Hey, this blog is called ‘a collection of unmitigated pedantry’. Engaging in counter-pedantry is a high honor.
“For my own part, all cards on the table, while I greatly value the service of the United States’ military personnel (there’s that third part of the bargain!) and think they serve honorably”
I find this statement hard to reconcile with the actions of the US Military within… well, my entire life, on two separate levels.
On one level, the things this military has been ordered to do have been largely heinous and immoral. We’ve been involved in active wars in the Middle East for as long as I can remember, and in all cases, we were the active aggressor, invading a sovereign nation on shaky ground and killing a lot of people for bad reasons. We have not been the “good guys” in any conflict in my adult life other than Ukraine, and past a certain point, the soldiers serving have to know this, right? Like, how do you go through Afghanistan and Iraq and still think, “Yeah, we’re doing good things here”? I don’t know how you serve honorably in a war like that.
On another level… I dunno, I was a young teenager the first time I watched “Collateral Murder”. And then I watched as the army spent their efforts going after the whistleblower responsible. I saw Bradley Cooper play a famous war hero in a movie, then learned that this “famous war hero” was, in fact, basically a serial killer who enjoyed murder and actively dehumanized everyone around him. There are so many stories from the army in Iraq and Afghanistan that consistently tell the story of soldiers who treat anyone who isn’t US Military as less than human and probably a threat. I watched as the Obama administration bombed a Yemeni wedding and nobody was held responsible for the mass murder of civilians, and then it kept happening again and again. I’m not sure to what degree this utter lack of care for civilian life was active military doctrine at the time and to what degree it was simply the culture these people floated in, but it is hard for me to not see the US army as one of the most evil institutions in the world as a result of these things.
I guess I’m a little lost. What does it even mean to “serve honorably” within an institution like the US military?
On one level, the things this military has been ordered to do have been largely heinous and immoral. We’ve been involved in active wars in the Middle East for as long as I can remember, and in all cases, we were the active aggressor, invading a sovereign nation on shaky ground and killing a lot of people for bad reasons. We have not been the “good guys” in any conflict in my adult life other than Ukraine, and past a certain point, the soldiers serving have to know this, right? Like, how do you go through Afghanistan and Iraq and still think, “Yeah, we’re doing good things here”? I don’t know how you serve honorably in a war like that.
I have an extremely dim view of most US foreign policy, since about 1900 (and if you consider relations with the Native American nations to be foreign policy, then since about 1800), and I think most of George W. Bush’s “Freedom Agenda” was outrageously wrong, but I don’t really think the war in Afghanistan, specifically, was “largely heinous and immoral”.
“Killing a lot of people” isn’t really a convincing argument to me- people die in wars and revolutions all the time, and unless you’re going to be a pacifist, sometimes the wars are the best choice in spite of that. to assess that, you have to look at the reasons for which the war was fought, the context before and after the war, whether there were better alternatives, whether the good to be achieved was proportionate to the cost, etc.. I don’t think the US was unusually bad in terms of causing civilian deaths to deaths of active fighters, at least in Afghanistan. If this source is to be trusted, they were actually remarkably good on that front. (which stll doesn’t make me think that the US is a benevolent force in the world, i don’t think that: I just don’t think they’re unusually bad *in this particular area*).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_in_the_war_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80%932021)
In terms of ‘bad reasons’, first of all the US did at least have a plausible cause for the initial intervention in Afghanistan. In terms of why the US *stayed* in Afghanistan, while i don’t care about spreading liberal-democracy or capitalism or any of the other usual justifications for US foriegn policy (and nor do i care for the more recent interest in territorial expansion under the Trump regime), I do care about things like women’s ability to access education, have jobs, use contraception, etc.. The US military presence in Afghanistan was the only thing ensuring that women were able to do those things. Was it worth the staggering cost in money, and the 50k afghan civilian deaths? Maybe, maybe not, but I don’t think it’s obvious the answer is “no”.
One of your best. Thank you.
Would you please write a post on the late Imperial Roman military? After reading about the triple structure that operated by attrition, you’ve so deeply impressed me that now I’m wondering how it ever failed.
I’m not sure if you’ve come across the ‘Phalanx’s Twilight, Legion’s Triumph’ series, but that goes into some detail. About the earlier phases of the Roman army anyway, rather than the late ones. There was considerable debate in the comments about whether our hosts’ assertions were fair in regards to the Legions’ performance against Hellenistic armies (undoubtedly they had better depth of manpower which was ultimately telling, but the case for individual victory in each of the battles won by the legions was shakier). The thrust of the counter-argument was that the Hellenistic model of warfare (pin with phalanx, break with cavalry) *was* broadly as effective as Roman battle tactics, it’s just that Hellenistic states weren’t structured in a manner to keep producing army after army after army in the way that the Roman state was.
To be absolutely clear, Hellenistic armies *did* lose considerably more battles than they won against Roman armies. But they didn’t lose all of them, did win some, and came really quite close to winning some of the ones they lost. Not exactly a recipe for runaway success, but not exactly steamrollered either. In any given individual battle that is.
https://acoup.blog/2024/01/19/collections-phalanxs-twilight-legions-triumph-part-ia-heirs-of-alexander/
It also touches a little on some polities that *did* manage to go toe-to-toe with the Legions. Principally the celts and the iberians/celtiberians, who managed to match Roman mobilisations despite being much smaller polities through truly mass-mobilisation of their male populations. I’m less clear on how they fought against Roman armies tactically.
Either that or be the Parthians and give the Romans the runaround at the end of their logistical tether.
While I think the Romans were decidedly tactically superior on balance, even if they weren’t they would have steamrolled.
One way to think about is all three successor states were deriving the majority of their manpower (especially true for heavy infantry/cavalry component) from a population of a few hundred thousand. So a high-end estimate might be an adult male Greek/Macedonian population of about 100,000. So every time a successor state raised a moderately large army (admittedly some of the Greek portion would be mercenaries from Greece proper), they would have had a core population mobilization rate that would make Punic Wars Rome jealous. Rome of course has a manpower pool of 300,000 plus 450,000 socii…
So despite the Seleucid Empire having several times the population of Rome, losing 50,000 men at Magnesia might well have been worse from a manpower prospective than all of Hannibal’s glorious victories combined…
Rome and Carthage not only could field nearly as many men as all three successor states *combined*, they had far more ability to replaced that force. If you assume similar personnel turnover rates and disease attrition to well-run early modern states (Rome may well have had somewhat less disease issues, turnover, but don’t think it can be plausibly reduced enough to really change the picture), Rome suffered something like 400,000 dead out of roughly 1,000,000 men total mobilized in the 2nd Punic War. And won.
Incidentally Rome was able to mobilize more than the vast majority of early modern states who generally were in 1-2.5% of population under arms range. The only ones I can think of that might match Rome is Great Northern War Sweden and the Dutch against the Sun King. Both of those peaked at an army ~5% of population and maintained that level for many years. Prussia peaked at similar level, but had much less ability to reconstitute than Rome/Sweden/Dutch with army size rapidly collapsing in the second half of the 7 Years War.
I think there’s two separate but interrelated questions being asked.
1. How did anyone go toe-to-toe with the Romans on an operational level, to which the answer is broadly they didn’t due to Rome’s ability to leverage enormous amounts of manpower to just keep sending armies.
2. How did anyone go toe-to-toe with the Romans on a tactical level in any given battle, to which the answer is also that they broadly didn’t, but that the gulf wasn’t anywhere near as stark (as evidenced by the fact that there are still a fair number of Roman defeats in the field, even if they were costly).
The former combines with the latter to make the whole Roman way of war extremely successful, but they are ultimately different questions.
Bret did a very good job of explaining the first question, but the series didn’t particularly tackle the second as that wasn’t its aim. It touched on it in the descriptions of some of the battles with Hellenistic armies, so it gives a bit of a flavour for how it happened (or nearly happened) in some of the battles, so it’s still useful as an intro for how anyone managed to defeat the attritional wall of heavy infantry in the field.
That still leaves the question of how non-Hellenic armies managed to beat the Romans in the field. The Gauls managed it on multiple occasions (390BC, 295BC, 284BC, 225BC, and 109BC). I’m not sure when precisely it was that the well-honed Roman attritional army came into being, but my understanding is that the latter dates are well within that range. So it does appear to have been possible for Gallic armies to defeat Roman ones despite the disparities in heavy infantry and Roman sophistication of battle lines. The question is how I suppose, which I’m nowhere near qualified enough to answer!
There’s other instances as well, especially if we include indecisive engagements as well as losses. The battle of Muthul against the Numidians in 108BC. 88BC, 89BC and 82BC against Pontus. Some nebulous events in Rome’s Kushite wars of 25-22BC (there’s a lot of victories reported, but the Kushites earn a favourable peace which is unusual). 16BC by Germanic tribes. 15AD indecisive battle with Germanic tribes. Parthians in 62AD, Dacians in 87AD. Marcomanni in 170AD. Stalemate against the Parthians at Nisibis in 217. Several defeats against the Sassanians in the 200s. Losses to the Goths in 250 and 251. A handful of indecisive battles with the Sassanids in the 300s. Loss to the Alemanni in 356. Losses to Goths, Huns and Alans in 357, and the Thervingi in 358. And that’s not including the more famous defeats like Lake Trasimene, Teutoberg Forest or Carrhae, or getting into the fairly disastrous 400s.
It’s rare considering the scale of their military enterprises, and proportionally heavily weighted in the Romans’ favour, but it does happen.
One other advantage the various Persian states had is that, maybe unlike the Germanic polities or other opponents the Romans faced, they were also very large. Modern Iran is 4.6 times the size of modern Germany, and of course the Persian states at that time, and the greater Persian cultural sphere, included many areas outside of modern Iran (in Central Asia, the Caucasus, Afghanistan, the Arabian Peninsula). The sheer size might have helped with raising large amounts of military manpower.
>Huntington’s limited exoneration of the Wehrmacht’s officer class…is simply a ‘clean-Wehrmacht’ apologia that has not remotely survived the last 70-odd years of scholarship on the behavior of the German officer corps in the Second World War.
Is there a book you’d recommend that shows how the ‘clean-Wehrmacht’ myth has been disproven?
You could start with Omer Bartov’s The Eastern Front, 1941–1945: German Troops and the Barbarization of Warfare
“The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality” by Wolfram Wette, for example.
It’s odd to describe the Bargain as a “bargain” when the only thing the military really gets out of it (in your formulation at least) is the trust of the citizenry, which isn’t really within any actor’s power to deliver. I presume you understand that because you later fudge it with “politicians and civilians go out of their way to praise the military”, which is more of an actual action but doesn’t neatly match up to what the military is supposedly getting. I get that you want to emphasize its benefits, but in the end isn’t such an unstable “bargain” more naturally viewed as a norm that the citizenry benefits from holding the political and military authorities to, whether or not it benefits those authorities?
To put a sharper point on this: the reaction against the Vietnam War included a lot of rhetoric, at least, that was anti-military in an extremely blanket sense, not related to any of the specific wrongs the military and politicians had committed. Assuming that this sentiment was widespread enough and unjustified enough, would it constitute a violation of the bargain?
I’m inclined to look at this the other way around: why would the army want to get involved in politics? To support one faction is to become an enemy of the other, so the act that brings promotion today brings a sacking tomorrow. From the viewpoint of a soldier who wants a successful career, there is a lot to be said for staying out of politics. In that way, the army is a lot like the civil service.
Unlike the civil service, the army could launch a coup, and install the coup plotters in power. But if they lose power, if they do not succeed in staying in power until they die, they risk imprisonment or execution afterward. And that is assuming the coup is successful; if it isn’t they could be imprisoned or killed tomorrow.
Probably, then, you should think of soldiers as reluctant to risk this, and likely to do this only if the existing leadership is split, illegitimate, or widely despised.
After all, anyone who launches a coup is asking people to fight for him against their own Commander-in-Chief, and perhaps betting his life on the answer. That is not something you should do casually.
You underestimate the amount of “nah, I’d win” and “built different” that goes through many people’s minds. We don’t act rationally nor have good risk assessment abilities when actually presented with said risk rather than observing others failing – not even those who claim that they do (see my first sentence).
Probably, then, you should think of soldiers as reluctant to risk this, and likely to do this only if the existing leadership is split, illegitimate, or widely despised.
That’s probably true, but on the flip side, there are a great many places and times where the existing leadership, and sometimes the political elites as a whole, are in fact “split, illegitimate or widely despised”. If there weren’t strong norms against military coup d’etats, today, enforced by things like US economic sanctions, you’d probably see a lot more of them.
That is why we do, in fact, often see a coup attempt against a government somewhere. The older a system, the greater the perceived legitimacy, and the less likely a coup.
> it also seems worth noting, particularly in the context of Hegseth’s open rejection of gender and racial inclusivity in the military, that those high profile firings removed every woman and person of color from the Joint Chiefs.
From the MAGA perspective, of course, this was de-politicization.
A big missing chunk of this otherwise excellent analysis is what it means to politicize a military through hiring and promotion policies, rather than demanding that they do a parade or stand behind you on TV or more surface-level stuff. After all, the practice of the left taking over institutions through awarding jobs to unqualified client groups is one of the biggest flash points in western politics at the moment. Just recently a black woman put on the Supreme Court by Biden got rapped by the other justices for her incompetent and very left wing legal analysis. If she were to be somehow fired would that be politicizing the Supreme Court, or undoing previous politicization?
As you say, the founding of America itself was very dependent on the specific personalities involved. It’s not just the military that’s meant to be apolitical, and yet many theoretically neutral branches of government became openly leftist in the past few decades. The civil-service-civil relationship has broken down to the extent that MAGA cheers on the destruction of USAID. So it’s not unreasonable for the Trump admin to view its primary job as purging the ranks of those who are likely to be disloyal … ESPECIALLY in the military!
I think it’s worth noting here that you’re assuming “taking over institutions through awarding jobs to unqualified client groups” is actually a thing that is widespread. The data I’ve seen doesn’t seem to support that; if anything, the “unqualified client group” would be white men because they tend to be hired and promoted over equally-qualified people of other demographic groupings. I remember seeing a study that sent the same resume to various hiring businesses with names associated with white and nonwhite people attached (to the resumes I mean, not the businesses) and those with white names got more callbacks than those with nonwhite names.
Ultimately though, a point worth noting is that both approaches you highlight politicize people based on things like race, gender, and social class, which they cannot choose. Similarly, things like research on climate change have been politicized and become ‘culture war’ talking points, and so my suspicion is that what you are recognizing as “many theoretically neutral branches of government [becoming] openly leftist” is what I would call those branches adapting to what the science suggests, but without specific examples I can’t make a judgement call.
(Side note on your specific example- if what you mentioned is Justice Barrett criticizing Justice Jackson on the Trump v CASA decision, my five minutes of research direct me to believing that the case was about the checks and balances the judicial branch is intended to have with the executive branch. I didn’t see a critique based on “incompetent and very left wing legal analysis,” but I did see a quote from Justice Barrett that Justice Jackson ‘preferred an imperial judicial branch to an imperial executive branch’ (paraphrased) which… is a very different matter.)
Got a link to the study? I have a hard time believing that all the big businesses declaring their commitment to diversity nowadays would do that, which means specific methodology is important.
Found one. https://doi. org/10.1257/0002828042002561
Here’s an article from NPR about other studies having similar findings: https://www.npr. org/2024/04/11/1243713272/resume-bias-study-
white-names-black-names
In my experience, a lot of that declaration of commitment to diversity is meaningless lip service to ideas that are growing more popular. Amazon has been giving me ads highlighting free training for other jobs, but I don’t know if they still have quotas so high that employees have to use bottles and bags for bathroom breaks, and if they do I rather suspect that the people who actually work there don’t generally have the time or energy to get that training regardless of monetary cost. If they talk about how they’re making mobility easier while at the same time making mobility harder in other ways, the net effect is significantly reduced, but they get the PR points for claiming a popular thing. Similarly, as people of color get wealth, it becomes more profitable for businesses to claim to cater to them. It’s marketing.
You have a hard time believing that businesses would make empty PR statements when it costs them nothing and would falter the minute a substantial amount of effort and money would be required, especially when there would be no clear criterion or incentive for them to follow up on their vapid promises?
Yet on the other hand, you readily believe in a vast leftist conspiracy to take over the US bureaucracy in an effort to push “radical leftist” agendas such as… *checks notes* diversity hiring, international development aid and measures to combat climate change?
“A big missing chunk of this otherwise excellent analysis is what it means to politicize a military through hiring and promotion policies…. After all, the practice of the left taking over institutions through awarding jobs to unqualified client groups is one of the biggest flash points in western politics at the moment.”
A statement that rather suggests you flatly cannot imagine that anyone who is not a white man could ever be qualified for high rank. And this is an assumption you ascribe (perhaps unfairly) to all of MAGA, and presumably every Trump supporter.
What conclusions would you expect to be drawn about you and MAGA from this revelation?
Given that the “revelation” in question is entirely based on your psychoanalysis that is obviously based in a desire to not engage with the actual argument made, the conclusion I would draw is that I would trust MAGA and Mr. Penbroke with power as much as I would trust you.
I’m not engaging in psychoanalysis. Everyone except members of group X has been fired from a position. If you declare that this is what meritocracy looks like it is reasonable to conclude that you think that only members of group X merit filling the position. This might or might not be true of the position, but it is a reasonable conclusion of your beliefs about the position.
If you say that everyone in MAGA thinks that no black people or women should be allowed to fill a position, I conclude that, according to you, MAGA think no black people or women are capable of filling the position. Otherwise they would not be so convinced that firing all the black people and women is meritocratic.
If someone refuses to believe that any black person could be promoted into a position for any reason but politics, he must believe that no black person is capable of it.
“I’m not engaging in psychoanalysis, I’m just drawing conclusions about someone’s thought processes” is making a distinction without a difference.
60guilders, to quote Psychology Today on the subect of psychoanalysis:
“Freud pioneered the idea that unconscious forces influence overt behavior and personality. He believed that childhood events and unconscious conflict, often pertaining to sexual urges and aggression, shape a person’s experience in adulthood.
Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis created the framework for psychoanalytic therapy, a deep, individualized form of talk therapy. Psychoanalytic therapy encompasses an open conversation that aims to uncover ideas and memories long buried in the unconscious mind.
Psychoanalysts employ specific techniques, such as spontaneous word association, dream analysis, and transference analysis. Identifying patterns in the client’s speech and reactions can help the individual better understand their thoughts, behaviors, and relationships as a prelude to changing what is dysfunctional.”
https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/basics/psychoanalysis
I’m not doing that. I’m just taking it for granted that people believe their own implicit assumptions.
So if they assume that a black person could not have reached a position without racial preferences, I conclude they believe no black person is capable of filling the role well. You can point to a flaw in my reasoning if you wish, but it is not psychoanalysis.
You could also claim that I should not have dramatized a point about the implicit assumptions someone was making in this way. That would be fair enough.
It’s not just the military that’s meant to be apolitical, and yet many theoretically neutral branches of government became openly leftist in the past few decades. The civil-service-civil relationship has broken down to the extent that MAGA cheers on the destruction of USAID.
The vast majority of what USAID did was non-political. And I say that as someone who has complained for years about some things that USAID and other US foreign-aid organizations did that were in fact ideologically loaded, and much of which I disagreed with. I would never say that stuff was the *core* of USAID though, the core was much closer to, e.g., “providing fertilizers to African farmers.”
As for affirmative action, clearly both “affirmative action is good” and “affirmative action is bad” are political positions. It’s not the case that getting rid of affirmative action is “depoliticized” or “neutral” or “objective”.
I won’t relitigate what others have already written, but I must say that one needs to only look at the current U.S. Administration’s approach to vaccines in order to utterly laugh out of the room any notion that its personnel decisions are motivated by anything like competence or merit.
https://www.science.org/content/article/members-rfk-jr-s-new-vaccine-committee-have-published-little-vaccines
Characterizing the move to the all-volunteer force through a political lens seems to miss the underlying technical changes which made it possible. Conscription was an administrative superweapon in a musket era. After the modern system of combined arms developed, it’s mostly limited to poor or small states which can’t generate the critical mass for a military otherwise.
I would like to throw a thought, on the point made about the switch to an AVF style of Army recruitment, into the ring. The USA is not Rome, although I do think that Trump is more Ceaser(lite)-esque than any historian would wish to admit. A switch to the AVF does not automatically endanger the CMP. The UK has had an all volunteer force for its armed forces for the past 500yrs (excluding WW1!) and so far has managed to avoid any entrance of the military into the public sphere. Perhaps it is due to the institutions being significantly older than the USA, so the weight of precedence is that much larger, but it is at least a modern example of where the CMP can work without conscription/draft.
Ed 🙂
> context of Hegseth’s open rejection of gender and racial inclusivity in the military
Of course you ignore that the hamfisted racial and sexuality pushes for the military were themselves already politicization attempts. Ads like these were just thinly veiled propaganda ads: https://youtu.be/C8-Yslv4PME
I thank you for not solely making this section a screed against Trump but you still don’t approach it in good faith.
In light of today’s news, should you perhaps submit this as a letter to the editor of the New York Times (or the major national publication(s) of your choice)?
Trump Orders National Guard to Washington and Takeover of Capital’s Police
“D.C.’s mayor acknowledged local officials could do little to block what was expected to be a 30-day takeover of the capital’s policing. President Trump suggested his action might be expanded to other cities.”
(Emphasis mine)
He’s already downplayed that move’s significance, for reasons stated below, so I doubt that will happen.
https://bsky.app/profile/bretdevereaux.bsky.social/post/3lw57jw435k2s
After reading this article three times, one thing I’m still not clear about is the reason for the third part of the tripartite bargain, tha part where “the military occupies an elevated place of trust in the citizenry”.
What is the purpose of that within the bargain? What does it DO?