{"id":4880,"date":"2026-05-24T21:23:53","date_gmt":"2026-05-24T21:23:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/firearmupgrades.com\/?p=4880"},"modified":"2026-05-24T21:23:53","modified_gmt":"2026-05-24T21:23:53","slug":"the-book-about-the-u-s-military-that-everyone-should-be-reading-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/firearmupgrades.com\/?p=4880","title":{"rendered":"The Book About the U.S. Military That Everyone Should Be Reading Now"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/p>\n

\n

On the last day of September 2025, hundreds of generals and admirals from across the world were summoned to the military base in Quantico, Virginia, where they sat on folding chairs and listened to the president and the secretary of defense deliver what turned out to be a pair of campaign-style speeches<\/a>. Flying the senior leadership of the United States military in created considerable expense and operational disruption, but the brass showed up because their civilian superiors had ordered them to. They sat stoically silent through the political program, as they had been trained to. Then they flew back to their posts.<\/p>\n

The exercise demonstrated nothing about strategy or readiness, and a great deal about the military chain of command\u2014chiefly, that it would hold under almost any indignity.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

On the last day of September 2025, hundreds of generals and admirals from across the world were summoned to the military base in Quantico, Virginia, where they sat on folding chairs and listened to the president and the secretary of defense deliver what turned out to be a pair of campaign-style speeches<\/a>. Flying the senior leadership of the United States military in created considerable expense and operational disruption, but the brass showed up because their civilian superiors had ordered them to. They sat stoically silent through the political program, as they had been trained to. Then they flew back to their posts.<\/p>\n


\n
\n <\/span>
A book cover featuring a gray background with the title text “THE STATE AND THE SOLDIER” in bold orange font on the left. On the right, the author’s name “KORI SCHAKE” is in orange, above the subtitle “A HISTORY OF CIVIL-MILITARY RELATIONS IN THE UNITED STATES” in a dark gray font. Below the text is a black-and-white photograph of three men in military uniform and civilian clothing riding in an open-top military jeep; one man in a suit sits in the front passenger seat holding a hat, while the others salute.<\/figcaption><\/a><\/p>\n

The State and the Soldier: A History of Civil-Military Relations in the United States<\/strong><\/em><\/a>, Kori Schake, Polity, 272 pp., $29.95, October 2025<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The exercise demonstrated nothing about strategy or readiness, and a great deal about the military chain of command\u2014chiefly, that it would hold under almost any indignity.<\/p>\n

That stoic silence displayed in that hall is the central subject of Kori Schake\u2019s new book, The State and the Soldier: A History of Civil-Military Relations in the United States<\/em><\/a>. It is the most important book on U.S. civil-military relations to appear in a generation and, at this moment, it deserves the broadest possible readership. Schake argues that this silence is both the success of the U.S. system and the source of the current danger. The military will hold. The question her book forces readers to confront is what, exactly, will happen while<\/em> the military holds.<\/p>\n

Schake is not a kneejerk-liberal critic of the Trump administration. She was a director in George W. Bush\u2019s National Security Council<\/a>, a senior policy advisor on the McCain-Palin campaign, and a Hoover fellow. She is the former deputy director-general of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, and the current Kissinger chair<\/a> at the Library of Congress. She co-edited a book on civil-military relations with Jim Mattis<\/a> in 2016 and worked for<\/a> Colin Powell on the Joint Staff in the early 1990s. She has paid actual professional costs, on the Republican side, for her principles; Hegseth fired her from the Defense Policy Board in April 2025. As a result, her position cannot be dismissed as partisan, because it is conservative and institutionalist all the way down.<\/p>\n

The book\u2019s diagnostic frame is simpler than its 250-year empirical sweep suggests. Schake boils civilian control down to two stress tests: Can a president freely dismiss senior officers, and will officers execute lawful policies they personally oppose?<\/p>\n

On those deliberately narrow metrics, she argues, the system still clears the bar. Trump has fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the chief of naval operations, and the vice chief of staff of the Air Force. The military has saluted and complied. It deployed to U.S. cities over the objections of governors and mayors when ordered to. It carried out boat strikes in the Caribbean<\/a> after a classified Justice Department memo reportedly indemnified the participants against prosecution.<\/p>\n

None of this represents a crisis of civilian control. To the contrary, civilian control is working precisely as designed. For Schake, this is the crux of the matter. The United States\u2019 crisis is real, but it\u2019s political, and Americans should not expect the military to save them from it.<\/p>\n

Drawing on Eliot Cohen\u2019s Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leaders in Wartime<\/em> and Peter D. Feaver\u2019s principle of the civilian \u201cright to be wrong<\/a>,\u201d she offers a model in which civilians retain primacy and the military\u2019s job is to obey legal orders, advise honestly, and resign when conscience requires\u2014but never to substitute its judgment for civilian judgment, even in defense of democracy.<\/p>\n

That last clause is what makes the book a genuinely fresh intervention in a crowded field. It separates her from the so-called crisis of civilian control school, which sees 30 years of quiet erosion, and from H.R. McMaster\u2019s Dereliction of Duty<\/em>, which Schake has argued<\/a> rests on \u201can innocence about politics at the highest levels\u201d and treats publicly defying the president as the standard of military duty\u2014a standard, she warns, that an unscrupulous officer can invoke as readily as a scrupulous one.<\/p>\n

Thus, for Schake, the problem is not only Trump and Hegseth at Quantico. It is also Joe Biden, as a candidate in 2020, confident that the military would \u201cescort [Trump] from the White House with great dispatch\u201d if he refused to leave; campaign conventions deploying veterans as stage props; Democratic Sen. Mark Warner<\/a> suggesting that \u201cthe uniformed military may help save us from this president\u201d; a video in which Democratic members of Congress reminded service members of their obligation to refuse unlawful orders, which, as Schake observed in a March essay in the Atlantic<\/em><\/a>, made compliance with the law itself \u201cseem like a political act.\u201d<\/p>\n

The fantasy that the military will refuse Trump\u2019s orders and thereby save the republic is not just wrong, it is a category error. Feaver and Heidi Urben laid out the practical case against it<\/a> in Foreign Affairs in September 2024: Any officer attempting to refuse an order would face contradictory legal guidance, replacement, and personal ruin, and a determined president can fire down the chain until he finds compliance. Lindsay P. Cohn of the Naval War College put it more sharply<\/a> in Lawfare in February 2025: The Hegseth purges actually reduce the likelihood of a military coup and increase the likelihood of military compliance with bad orders.<\/p>\n

Schake\u2019s own version of the point, in a Lawfare<\/em> piece<\/a> last June, is the one that should settle the matter: \u201cThe military cannot save us from the political leaders Americans elect. And we should not want them to.\u201d The book takes that point a step further: \u201cNot only can our military not save American democracy, it can\u2019t even save itself from democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n

None of this means that Schake regards the military as bound to obey any order whatsoever. The law is clear that officers must refuse illegal orders. The extreme hypothetical\u2014Trump, impeached and removed by the Senate, directing the Army to fire on the Capitol\u2014falls plainly on the refusable side of that line. The trouble is that the public expects their military to refuse immoral orders, not just illegal ones.<\/p>\n

For Schake, many of the cases under debate\u2014threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act against political opponents, striking drug boats on the high seas, and federalizing National Guard deployments in cities whose governors object\u2014are \u201clawful but awful.\u201d She believes that the military largely will, and should, carry these out.<\/p>\n

In her Lawfare<\/em> piece, Schake argues that a system that depends on individual flag officers drawing the line case by case \u201cinvites two bad outcomes: insubordination and ineffectualness.\u201d By the time the Capitol-shelling hypothetical is in play, every other check\u2014Congress, the courts, the electorate\u2014has already broken. The military, then, would still be the last line of defense. Schake insists that letting it come to that is the failure, not the litmus test.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, Schake fears that each act of civilian politicization that the military weathers in silence, as the generals did in the hall in Quantico, makes the next one easier to ask of it. In time, the costs compound. What comes next, Schake warns, is \u201can increasingly partisan military\u201d\u2014not insubordinate, but recruited and shaped under conditions her two tests of civilian control cannot catch, and therefore eventually a different institution than the one those tests were built for.<\/p>\n

The challenge is that the nature of civilian control means that the military cannot push back against these efforts at politicization. Which is why, ultimately, it is civilians more than the women and men in uniform who need to read The State and the Soldier<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n


\n
Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the last day of September 2025, hundreds of generals and admirals from across the world were summoned to the military base in Quantico, Virginia, where they sat on folding chairs and listened to the president and the secretary of defense deliver what turned out to be a pair of campaign-style speeches. Flying the senior […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4881,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-politcical-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/firearmupgrades.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/firearmupgrades.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/firearmupgrades.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firearmupgrades.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firearmupgrades.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4880"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/firearmupgrades.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4880\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firearmupgrades.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/firearmupgrades.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firearmupgrades.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firearmupgrades.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}