Tom Nichols: The Civil-Military Crisis Is Here

[Nevilledog]

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2025/10/civil-military-crisis-trump-hegseth/684486/

No paywall link
https://archive.li/4cIlY

To capture a democratic nation, authoritarians must control three sources of power: the intelligence agencies, the justice system, and the military. President Donald Trump and his circle of would-be autocrats have made rapid progress toward seizing these institutions and detaching them from the Constitution and rule of law. The intelligence community has effectively been muzzled, and the nation’s top lawyers and cops are being purged and replaced with loyalist hacks.

Only the military remains outside Trump’s grip. Despite the firing of several top officers—and Trump’s threat to fire more—the U.S. armed forces are still led by generals and admirals whose oath is to the Constitution, not the commander in chief. But for how long?

Trump and his valet at the Defense Department, Secretary of Physical Training Pete Hegseth, are now making a dedicated run at turning the men and women of the armed forces into Trump’s personal and partisan army. In his first term, Trump regularly violated the sacred American tradition of the military’s political neutrality, but people around him—including retired and active-duty generals such as James Mattis, John Kelly, and Mark Milley—restrained some of his worst impulses. Now no one is left to stop him: The president learned from his first-term struggles and this time has surrounded himself with a Cabinet of sycophants and ideologues rather than advisers, especially those at the Pentagon. He has declared war on Chicago; called Portland, Oregon, a “war zone”; and referred to his political opponents as “the enemy from within.” Trump clearly wants to use military power to exert more control over the American people, and soon, top U.S.-military commanders may have to decide whether they will refuse such orders from the commander in chief. The greatest crisis of American civil-military relations in modern history is now under way.

I write these words with great trepidation. When I was a professor at the Naval War College, I gave lectures to American military officers about the sturdiness of civil-military relations in the United States, a remarkable historical achievement that has allowed the most powerful military in the world to serve democracy without being a threat to it. I so revered this system that I went to Moscow just before the fall of the U.S.S.R. and told an audience of Soviet military officers that they should look to the American military as a model for how to disentangle themselves from the Communist Party and Kremlin politics. I regularly reminded both my military students and civilian audiences that they had good reason to have faith in American institutions and the constitutional loyalty of U.S. civilian and military leaders.

*snip*

[highplainsdem]

1. K&R! Tom posted about this with a gift link:

If you think I'm not alarmed, read this.

www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

— Tom Nichols (@radiofreetom.bsky.social) 2025-10-07T22:52:18.993Z

Key sentences here:

This is why America’s senior military officers, including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, must approach Trump now and make clear to him that they will not obey illegal orders to act against American citizens or disrupt the American political process. (They should not bother talking to Hegseth, who has no real political agency and would most likely do whatever he is told to do by the White House.) Congress, so far, has been useless in restraining Trump: The Democrats are too timid, and the Republicans are too compromised. Only by standing together can the senior military officials warn Trump away from leading America into a full-blown civil-military confrontation.

[PATRICK]

2. They can simply be fired

more easily than any other federal worker? What you are talking about is likely a coup- which is what it will be called. This is also what a minority rule GOP was always tending toward, but I bet they don't like a general taking over unless he is like those politicized thugs we have raised up in the past in smaller countries. They do this because the civilians have failed and can't be trusted? Judges are fighting back individually until you get to the corrupt SCOTUS. Some politicians are. Some GOP would like not to be just rubber stamps.
The officer corps standing together would be refreshing if it is by the hundreds. Or?