Politicizing The Pentagon

On July 3rd, C.Q. Brown, the Air Force general Trump fired as chairman of the Joint Chiefs in February 2025, published an essay in Foreign Affairs with Duke political scientist Peter Feaver, warning what happens when a country asks too much of its military. He never names Trump or Hegseth. He doesn't have to. In the sixteen months since Brown's dismissal, Pete Hegseth has fired or forced out more than a dozen general and flag officers, most recently Chris Donahue, the commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa, in June.The American civil-military canon is built on a different kind of crisis. Truman and MacArthur, Lincoln and McClellan, Obama and McChrystal. Those were fights over strategy, with generals straining against civilian control. What's happening now is a different and potentially more serious problem. Nobody disputes that the Secretary of War has the authority to fire whomever he wants. The question is what it means when the firings are about composition rather than competence, and when the officers being removed keep turning out to share certain demographic characteristics.Hegseth has been explicit that his priority is getting wokeness out of the military. But the deeper worry has less to do with him than with three conditions stacking up at once. First, a force that fewer than one percent of Americans serve in; second, a hyperpolarized country that has lost faith in nearly every other institution; and third, a formerly ironclad norm that the military should be apolitical that the civilian side keeps bending. The military is the last American institution both parties still respect. That is precisely what makes it worth capturing.We discuss Hegseth’s 2025 Quantico spectacle and the silence that met it, why Huntington's clean separation of soldier and state was always something of a fiction, and why the thing to fear isn't a man on horseback but a citizenry that invites him in. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit globaltantrum.substack.com