Against All Enemies Foreign And Domestic

Regular readers will recall that I like to refer to DC as The Imperial City on the Potomac. They will also recall that I have often referred to the months long “military occupation” of said city following the 2020 coup against Trump. I put those words in quote to highlight my specific words, which were intended in a very literal sense. The coup was intended to rid the Imperial City of an unwanted presence, the presence of one whose ideas on policy and on how the US government should operate did not jibe with those of the actual Ruling Class.

In 2016 Trump won—against all odds. In their hubris, the Ruling Class didn’t believe he could pull it off. In 2020 he was removed like a cancerous growth, using the rawest forms of fraud. In 2024 he staged the most unlikely comeback in US history, rewinning the presidency—again, against all odds. Including two assassination attempts. You do remember those assassination attempts, don’t you? The Deep State wants to gaslight you about some absurd claims of an Iranian conspiracy, so you’ll forget the actual assassination attempts that have seemingly been swept under the carpet.

Exactly why Trump was allowed to win is a complicated story, part of which is explained by his own efforts to beat the cheat by making his win too big to rig. I have theorized that another aspect of this may have been that the Deep State screwup over the past four years—both politically and militarily—has been so momentous that the Ruling Class may have concluded that—in the face of the failed assassinations, their own screwups, Trump’s true the vote efforts—they no longer had the credibility to pull off a second steal. YMMV.

Since we still have nearly two and a half months to go before inauguration, this lengthy post by Armchair Warlord seems timely and relevant. In a sense—against all odds—Trump has accomplished the easy part—winning the election. Next comes the tricky part—actually governing. For the time being the Ruling Class appears to be too stunned by the breadth of Trump’s victory to mount an effective resistance, although there are signs of that forming in the Senate.

Armchair Warlord @ArmchairW

It's totally normal in healthy republics for the armed forces to start discussing political interventions after elections. Honest.

(this is sarcasm)

For better or worse, however, the United States military has actually been subject to a remarkable amount of "coup-proofing."

So what is "coup-proofing," exactly? Well, it's the measures that civilian governments fearful of their own soldiers take to ensure those soldiers don't decide to take Mao's maxim about power to heart when they catch wind of budget cuts. If political power truly comes out of the barrel of a gun, well, the army has a lot of guns. Do the math.

A coup d'etat in its rawest form is a forceful military seizure of power from a "civilian" government. Generally some ambitious general or colonel will form a network of well-placed conspirators within the military who will then activate a select group of troops to march on and seize the national capital and arrest or kill the old regime before declaring a new one with him at its head.

There are three main means to ensure this doesn't happen.

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

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

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

What if I told you the United States has done all three of these?

As much as the US military preaches unity of command, it does not follow it at the strategic scale. The top level of the US military's organizational chart is a tangled swamp of competing services, combatant commands, and Pentagon departments. Command of the armed forces only unifies at the level of the - civilian - Secretary of Defense. Let's just walk through this.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff are an advisory body. They have no command authority. Ditto for the service chiefs - the US Army hasn't had a Commanding General since 1903, but rather a Chief of Staff with no command authority as its senior officer. US Army Forces Command - which most Army units ultimately answer to in garrison - is a force generation pump with no operational authority.

There are of course unified combatant commands that can task out US combat troops, once they have been assigned by the "force providers" in the homeland - all eleven of them, six geographic and five functional. They fight each other endlessly over resources. And far and away the weakest, by the way, is NORTHCOM - the one actually tasked with actually defending North America. NORTHCOM never has significant ground combat forces assigned to it.

Ergo, a would-be American putschist would not only face great difficulty subverting a sufficiently large or well-positioned bloc of the US military to actually execute a coup, but any rebel force that could be assembled would likely be "incomplete" and lacking the joint enablers necessary for success in modern war.

Coming to my second point, there is, however, an exception to this rule. That exception is the United States Marine Corps.

The USMC not only has a Commandant rather than a Chief of Staff, but has such an insular organizational culture that they could be expected to follow the Commandant's orders regardless of his position or lack thereof in their formal chain of command. They are the only service that owns an entire joint warfighting apparatus - air, sea, and land. They have a garrison with combat troops in the heart of Washington, DC, and a major base - Camp Lejeune - a day's march from the capital. They stand guard at the White House, they transport the President, they secure the embassies, and they have troops stationed on all major USN warships.

The Marines consider themselves to be elite troops with unique capabilities and competencies. This is largely nonsense (there weren't a lot of them on Omaha Beach, lol), but they certainly are institutionally privileged. Bluntly, they have every quality of a regime protection force - and they have grown rapidly and in parallel with the growth of a large, standing US Army in the 20th century, persisting as a large, separate, all-arms service despite there being no publicly articulable need for such a thing.

Coming around to my last point, the US military does not select for brilliance and ambition at the high end. It by and large selects careerists who can say the right thing and look the right way and run really, really fast. It's a well-known truism that being a free thinker in uniform, let alone a dissident, is a one-way street to civilian life. Our corps of general officers has accordingly distinguished themselves only in the quantity of stone-cold takes they've generated on contemporary conflicts. And while the brain trust at the Pentagon is clearly not up to the task of figuring out how to kick the Russians out of Ukraine, they have enthusiastically implemented every last order and directive emanating from the Biden Administration.

This last bit would seem to be somewhat contradictory, as there are certain to be plenty of paraliberal hacks in uniform dead-set on opposing President-elect Trump, but it's really not. The point of purging and indoctrinating the officer corps is to ensure loyalty to the Regime, and Trump is not part of the entrenched political establishment that functionally serves as a regime in this country. He is an outsider. Ergo, he will face - and has faced - a level of institutional resistance from the armed forces that no President with Establishment credentials, Republican or Democrat, ever would. This is in and of itself part of the coup-proofing mechanism - the military behaving in an insubordinate manner to a President the political establishment (read: the Regime) found objectionable.

I submit that all of this is wasteful, paranoid, and - most troublingly - undemocratic, given the clear existence of a political elite that feels entitled to a perpetual lease on power in this country, and which has worked to both secure themselves from the US military and to bend that very same force against their own political foes.

I'll leave you with a quote. "Against all enemies, foreign and domestic."

10:54 PM · Nov 9, 2024

Btw, for those with time on their hands, the comments to Warlord’s post are extensive and lively.