A Holistic Plan for an Authoritarian Military
Trump and Hegseth unveil a plan to make the military an authoritarian institution and adapt the notion of the battlefield and the enemy for domestic use.
I had to take a beat after the extremely disturbing speeches by President Donald Trump and Secretary of War to hundreds of American commanders assembled at the Quantico Marine Corps base on September 30. I followed the livestream and media summaries that day, and as I started to understand the magnitude of the changes that were being outlined, I realized with a sinking feeling why hundreds of leaders had been summoned from all over the world on short notice.
The Trump administration was presenting a holistic plan to shift the culture and conduct of the United States military to accommodate the lawless character of this nascent regime. Not only is this a plan to make the military an authoritarian institution on and off the battlefield, but to adapt the very notion of the battlefield, and the enemy, for domestic use.
Many commentators rightly focused on the security risks and financial costs of bringing so many leaders together physically rather than utilize the Department of War’s secure and private communications channels. Trump’s rambling remarks, and Hegseth’s comments about “gender delusions” and how “tiring” it was to see “fat troops,” made it easy to underplay the event as a “lecture on fitness and grooming standards” that aired “familiar partisan complaints,” to quote two New York Times headlines.
I write about authoritarian spectacles, and know that Trump never misses a chance to star in one, but I have also have learned that we should never underestimate authoritarians. And in fact, this was a momentous occasion staged for four distinct audiences: foreign powers, the United States military, United States civilian authorities, and the American people.
The assembly of military luminaries and the livestream were necessary because all of these audiences needed to see in real time the commander in chief letting those luminaries know that he considers them to be expendable and also see them being given their new mission statement: to fulfill the commander in chief’s desires to use the American military against American civilians who stand up for democratic freedoms.
Trump was clear on this point. “America is under invasion. We’re under invasion from within,” he declared, adding that the civilian enemy is, for him, “no different than a foreign enemy” other than their lack of uniforms. And so, the leaders who had come to Quantico were told that they would be cleaning up the “dangerous cities” governed by “radical left Democrats,” and “straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war, too. It’s a war from within.”
Trump talked about “liberating” American towns and cities from immigrant invasions during his electoral campaign, and always held out the possibility of using the military for this purpose. But since January, as he has begun to implement the authoritarian playbook of repressing the political opposition, he has focused on Democrat-run territories, treating them rhetorically as though they were foreign territories. In June, Los Angeles became the test case, complete with deployment of a Marines battalion that served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and rhetoric about regime change from Department of Homeland Security head Kristi Noem.
In light of these events, in June I forecast a domestic “forever war” that would bring counter-insurgency methods honed in the “Global War on Terrorism” home.
And in August I theorized a more general “War on America”:
To allow our enemies to expand and prosper in the world, the Trump administration is in addition seeking to use the military and state security and intelligence forces to target the domestic population and intimidate political opponents.
The purpose of the Quantico gathering was to officialize this –thus the direct communication to hundreds of top commanders—and to push the authoritarian agenda forward in ways that recall the dark days of military dictatorships.
The Quantico announcement that Democrat-run “inner cities” would be “training grounds” for the military builds on traditions of racialized policing in America, but also echoes Cold War junta practices in Latin America of sending inexperienced soldiers to do sweeps of very poor neighborhoods.
And the most chilling revelation has gotten little media attention: Trump has signed an executive order “to provide training for a quick reaction force that can help quell civil disturbances” by “the enemy from within.” He appears to be describing a kind of shock troops corps to be used against civilians in America, for example against those who protest. This “quick reaction force” would be separate from ICE and the National Guard, it seems, because the president told the military commanders that it will be “a big thing for the people in this room.” Every dictatorship has advanced special forces-style units to deal with “crowd control” in the autocratic manner.
When militaries transition to autocracy, there is always resistance within the ranks to using force against compatriots. But Hegseth and Trump hope to create a new kind of soldier over time. From allowing physical violence during training, to ending “politically correct rules of engagement,” they are setting the stage for the institution of the military to undergo the same processes of moral collapse and moral deregulation as are now unfolding in the civilian sphere.
Hegseth has been advocating such shifts in military culture for years, as important reporting by Mathieu Aikins for the New York Times documents. Now he is in a position to make policy. “We fight to win. We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy…We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country.”
What if that enemy is the American people who stand up for their rights? Dramatic times lie ahead for the United States military. The stage is set for a showdown between the administration and those principled commanders who sat stoically in Quantico and listened to ideas that could destroy the morale and integrity of the institution they have served for years.
Note: All quotes from Hegseth in this essay are taken from this Department of War transcript. All quotes from Trump are from this Roll Call transcript.
It shows he hates some groups of the citizenry, and he wants to use our blue cities for war games no matter the harm to ordinary civilians. This is like what Hafez el-Assad did when he gassed the citizens in a Kurdish city in Syria. His speech along with Hegseth’s ran counter to everything the military is trained to do. I have a sense the officers and NCOS were distinctly unimpressed, not to mention appalled at Trump’s desire to unconstitutionally make war on citizens.
The question is, just how far down the authoritarian rabbit hole could the U.S. military descend? I have a lot of faith in the seriousness in which the vast majority of Americans who join the military embrace their oath to defend the Constitution and not their commander in chief if he does not. But we've never been in this situation before. I've been shocked too many times to think otherwise.