They've taken over the US military

Last night the US executive removed the US military leadership. This personal takeover of the military by the president (or vice versa) always happens when fascist dictatorships are established around the world but this has never happened in the US. The legacy press, in keeping with how they do things, uses words like dismissals, reorganization, and firings. So yea, but what all this means is a takeover to coerce personal loyalty from US military officers, most of whom voted Democratic. A massive system based on unbiased promotion is now being bludgeoned into becoming a loyalty cult. DefenseOne, the main independent military news website, called it a "Bloodbath", not a term they use casually.

My son was in the US Army; deployed in Afghanistan during the war. I learned a great deal about the military during the time he served. One of the things I learned is that most of the Americans I was raised with and am close to know almost nothing about the military and very few of them know anybody who has recently served. Along side increasing income and asset inequality in the US, since the draft (military conscription) ended in 1973, the US military has become disconnected from the most enfranchised parts of American society.

And yet the military has become the preeminent institution in the US by which those with less money and fewer powerful connections can leave where they are from and be a part of a huge institution with unusually objective measurement of skills and competence. At a minimum it will connect them to a bigger world and provide job training, stability, and community, maybe even security. At best the military allows them to flourish.

Americans, like everybody from democratic countries, are not used to thinking of the military as a political entity that makes decisions on its own; we are not used to worrying about what senior military leadership thinks about a particular set of orders, or a certain war, or policy matters, or a leader. Without thinking about it much, we have always assumed that the military will do what the president says and that the president will only use the military for what it was designed for, which is being ready for and fighting wars. There has been a great deal of disagreement about the wisdom of those wars, from the Philippine-American War over a hundred years ago, to Vietnam, to Iraq and many others. Some of those wars were declared (by Congress), some were not, but they were all matters of public discussion and, importantly, took place outside US borders. And the military obeyed the president who is the commander-in-chief.

But what happens when the president replaces those who will not demonstrate unquestioning loyalty? That's new territory for the US. And there have already been tests of loyalty under MAGA. The Senate approves all senior military nominations and appointments. This has always been a non-partisan activity, but Alabama Senator and MAGA loyalist Tommy Tuberville froze them all with the excuse of the military's policy on abortion. In fact he was just trying to clear out the senior officer ranks to allow space for the military takeover which is now upon us. On the second day of this second term, to see how it would be recieved, the president fired Commandant of the Coast Guard, Admiral Linda Fagan. She was evicted from her government house with three hours to vacate, having to leave behind most of her belongings. Barely a blip in the news. The pretext for her firing was associating her with Diversity Equity and Inclusion. This anti-DEI push or more accurately "resegregation" fits with a specific narrative that the media has consistently said was the reasons for the firings, but more immediately and importantly it is a simply a convenient blanket excuse to replace professionals with fawning loyalists, most of whom are incompetent racists by definition. A good example is Anthony J. Tata who once Tweeted that Obama was a "terrorist leader". He's back.

A similar more isolated situation was when Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bush wanted to invade Iraq. Their original excuse was that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The CIA knew that was not true. So the administration reached into the CIA to find less experienced more ambitious employees willing to pretend that there was some evidence. And a few obliged. Many of the most knowledgeable older employees left or were pushed out as facts where cherry picked and invented to justify the policy the White House wanted. All this BS was the basis for Colin Powell's 5 February 2003 presentation to the United Nations Security Council in which he was set up to lie, which he dutifully did, and it became the black mark of his career that permanently drowned his reputation.

The reason for this current swift takeover of the military leadership is because the leadership is breaking a very large number of laws right now and they plan to break more. There are checks on that; some of those checks are judicial and some of them federal. At some point that will come to a confrontation, and in cases like that, the leadership will want to have the military filled with fawning, incompetent loyalists who are are happy to disobey the law and allow the leadership to do the same. To illustrate his loyalty and to foreshadow where were are going, Vice President JD Vance said recently, “Judges are not allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” In a rare case of catching himself while he spoke, in a recent argument with the Governor of Maine, the president said, "I am...we are the federal law"

Just as dangerous as the firing of highly respected Joint Chiefs Admiral Lisa Franchetti who headed the Navy and General CQ Brown who headed the Army, is the decimation of the JAGs. Secretary of Defense Hegseth said Friday that he's requesting nominations for the Judge Advocates General for the Army, Navy and Air Force. JAGs were first put in place by George Washington in 1775 during the Revolution. They are the ones to tell those serving in the military which orders are legal and which are not. Extremely important for the leadership in this takeover to have the JAGs be unquestioningly loyal to the leader rather than to the law.

Where all of this is going relates to the establishment of complete and comprehensive control over all government officials of any type, from the top on down. When the law is broken, some judges will say that. Then it comes down to enforcement....and that can be complex. Different entities answer to different positions: US Marshals answer to federal judges, the National Guard answers to governors, the US Military answers to the president. As the federal executive breaks more laws and ignores more court orders these groups will at some point come into conflict. The most knowledgeable description of enforcement conflict scenarios I have seen is West Point History professor Terry Goggin via journalist Lucian Truscott, from eleven days ago, a more optimistic time.

And so we enter the era of who are the patriots and who are the traitors, of who will obey the leadership or who will obey the law, of admirals and colonels, commanders and generals in sun glasses and hats, taking long walks on the C&O Canal towpath, looking over their shoulders deciding if and how to safely communicate, of who might be with them, and who might not.

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