Trump’s Military Purge Spells Trouble for Democracy and Defense

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On the evening of Friday, Feb. 21, President Trump posted on Truth Social, thanking Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. CQ Brown Jr. for decades of service and announcing that he was nominating retired Lt. Gen. (John) Dan “Razin’” Caine of the U.S. Air Force as the new chairman. Within an hour, the AP reported that Brown—nominated by President Biden—had been fired. Caine, a retired three-star general, met Trump in Iraq during the president’s first term, where he reportedly made an impression.

The position of chairman is a fixed term and is deliberately designed to overlap presidential election cycles, as military officers are nonpartisan and serve the state—not any particular leader. Although chairmen have occasionally been denied a traditional second term (John F. Kennedy removed Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer and George W. Bush did not reappoint Gen. Peter Pace), none has ever been fired, and previous removals did not happen as a consequence of a change in administration. While the president has the legal authority to remove the chairman, this action (along with others) should be seen as highly unusual and cause for concern.

If Trump proceeds with the nomination of Caine (who is by all accounts a fine officer), it would violate Title 10 requirements regarding who can serve as chairman—namely, someone who has served as vice chair, as a service chief, or as a combatant commander. Trump would have to waive those requirements by claiming that national security interests require it. He can easily do that, but such a move would convey a sweeping lack of faith and confidence in the top leadership of all military branches.

But this was not the only news on Friday evening. The president also fired Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti, Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force Gen. Jim Slife, and the judge advocates general (the top lawyers) of the Army, Navy, and Air Force. This came only days after NBC News reported that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had circulated a memo to Republican members of Congress with the names of several general and flag rank officers he intended to fire. According to NBC’s sources, “Most of those on the list have been closely associated with former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin[,] … have worked on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, or have voiced opinions that Trump’s allies viewed as politically out of line with his agenda.” Hegseth said the services’ top lawyers were removed because he did not want them to act as “roadblocks” to the president’s orders and felt they were not “well-suited” to give appropriate legal advice, but gave no specifics as to why they might obstruct lawful orders. Since then, Lt. Gen. Jennifer Short has also been relieved. Reporting indicates that more top officers are on the chopping block.

All evidence suggests that the new administration is removing top military officers for reasons other than competence or performance, aiming to replace them with people they see as more loyal to this specific administration.

The president does have the authority to remove these officers; three- and four-star officers hold that rank only while they possess the position of importance and responsibility to which they have been specifically nominated by the president, and they serve at the pleasure of the president. But just because something is legal does not make it wise.

Removing top military leaders either for faithfully implementing the policies of previous administrations or for their identity—rather than for incompetence or failing to perform their duties—is a move designed to consolidate and retain regime power. Removing the top uniformed lawyers simultaneously and without justification presages an intent to act in ways that truly independent lawyers might advise against. Together, these measures constitute a crisis.

These actions are immediately recognizable to scholars of civil-military relations in non-democracies. They are known in the scholarship as “coup-proofing.” Coup-proofing consolidates regime power and reduces the possibility of either popular or elite resistance to the regime’s policies. Coup-proofing does this by significantly reducing the likelihood that the military itself will resist or remove the regime and by significantly increasing the likelihood that the military will obey regime orders to suppress domestic protest or civil resistance. An almost inevitable side effect is that the military’s effectiveness for other missions, such as near-peer or peer combat abroad, is severely diminished.

What Is Coup-Proofing?

Coup-proofing consists of measures taken by a regime to reduce the military’s will and/or ability to resist the regime. One of the most effective and most widely used methods is called “stacking,” in which the leader ensures via personnel actions that the military leadership is loyal specifically to the regime and its policies. This involves purging those officers seen as most likely to resist orders or question certain policies and selecting their replacements on the basis not of merit or competence, but of personal loyalty or political identification with the regime.

These high-level actions trickle down to all levels of the military, prompting lower-ranking personnel to reconsider their positions. Albert O. Hirschman introduced the concept of “exit, voice, and loyalty” as the three possible responses of members of organizations “in decline”; he argued that people can leave the organization, speak up about its problems, or put their heads down and go along. This sort of purge of military leaders is designed to demonstrate that voicing resistance will be met with punishment, encouraging a choice between exit and loyalty.

This results in a military that is clearly aligned with the particular party, group, or person in power, inoculating the regime against military resistance.

But what about popular resistance? A secondary effect of stacking is the creation of something called “social distance” between troops and the civilians who might mobilize against the regime. Social distance can be understood both in terms of a subjective perception of similarity to or difference from another person and in terms of frequency of interaction with another person. The less social distance between two people, the more they are likely to act in ways that maintain their social relationship (that is, conform to norms or avoid harming the other).

Stacking is normally used in multicultural societies in which one group holds or wants to hold power; it creates social distance by stacking the military leadership with members of one group and excluding members of other groups. If the stacking extends to lower ranks, it can mean that troops ordered to put down a protest may view the protesters as an entirely different social group and thus feel less moral and social pressure to avoid harming them. While the evidence is mixed on how important social distance is to the troops’ decision to repress protest, stacked militaries are more likely to be viewed by the public as threatening, and somewhat more likely to obey orders to repress.

Leaders who engage in stacking generally do so in order to negate potential resistance to their orders and to facilitate the domestic use of the military for policing and suppression of civil resistance. Engagement in policing and suppression of civil resistance is particularly troubling for a military not trained to conduct these operations and is legally very confusing for a military not used to operating under domestic law. Removing the judge advocates general sends a clear message that the administration expects military lawyers to toe the White House line on legal claims rather than make independent assessments.

Additionally, the administration’s initiative targeting diversity and inclusion may be a part of stacking; efforts to make a military more representative of the population are specifically designed to “unstack” a military, allowing for changes in power every few years as democracy demands. The more broadly representative a military is, the less it can align with one party or group, constituting a safeguard against government repression.

Decreased Military Efficacy

Beyond their intended consequences, coup-proofing in general and stacking in particular come with side effects. They almost inevitably make the military less capable and competent in peer or near-peer combat. This happens for a few reasons.

First, when officers are placed in authority not on the basis of merit and competency, but on the basis of loyalty, this results in degraded military and organizational competency. Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard or Joseph Stalin’s Red Army after the purges provide ample evidence of this. This is bad news for the efficacy of military leadership, planning, and training.

Second, and directly related to the competency issue, officers whose main evaluation factor is loyalty will not give the leader news he does not want to hear. They will be afraid to speak candidly. This is detrimental to both strategic planning and the conduct of operations. Saddam Hussein, for example, was unprepared for the swift U.S. advance in 2003, largely because none of his military leaders were willing to tell him what the situation on the ground really was.

Finally, an unpredictable and changing military structure negatively affects recruiting and retention. Historically, military promotions and job rotations happen on a predictable schedule. This is so that the military, as a massive organization, can manage all the logistics of moving people and changing their pay, and people in the military can manage family or personal commitments.

The military is a closed labor market. If you remove people from jobs, you have to take other people out of other jobs to replace them, or make people do two jobs, which is a recipe for burnout and errors. If you take some people and move them to new jobs, it cascades. That is a vulnerable organization.

These detrimental effects indicate that the administration cares less about a military that’s effective at international security than it does about a military that’s effective at domestic control.

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The classic problem of civil-military relations is civilian control: how to ensure that the military is obedient to the political leadership despite having the capability to overthrow it. In democratic theory, militaries ought to be subordinate to political leadership because that leadership holds the legitimate authority to determine policy for the country.

Normally, when we talk about civil-military relations crises in democratic societies, we are worried about a crisis of civilian control. These recent measures do not represent this classic crisis; they actually reduce the likelihood of a military coup and increase the likelihood of military compliance in cases of domestic use and questionable orders. The result is a crisis for both military effectiveness and democracy itself.