Lawfare Daily: Civil Military Relations in the Trump Administration

[Intro]

Lindsay Cohn: Not accepting bad news and not accepting pushback is generally not good for the strategic planning element of military advising and military planning in general.

Daniel Byman: It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Daniel Byman, the foreign policy editor of Lawfare with Lindsey Cohn, an associate professor at the U.S. Naval War College and a visiting associate professor at Columbia University.

Dr. Cohn is an expert on civil military relations and the author of the, very soon to be published, “Order, Authority, and Modern Civil-Military Relations,” which is coming out in a month or so with Bloomsbury Academic Press. Dr. Cohn’s views are her own, and they do not represent the U.S. Naval War College or the U.S. government.

Lindsay Cohn: The U.S. public, if they believe they are facing a security threat, becomes more accepting of militarized responses. So I worry about that.

Daniel Byman: Today we're talking about the Trump administration's use of the military within the United States.

[Main Podcast]

Let's discuss what I hope are a fairly wide range of issues related to the interaction between the Trump administration and the U.S. military.

And what I'd like to do is start out with the firing of senior military leaders. Trump officials came in and made several high-profile firings. Slightly into the administration, they added CQ Brown, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the list. Are these firings different in some way than other administrations, which of course, from time to time fire, military officials or otherwise make their own decisions about who's going to lead the U.S. services?

Lindsay Cohn: This is a great question because of course, the president has the authority to fire every single one of the offices that he fired. None of that was illegal in any sense. He has the authority to remove, well, what he did technically was remove them from their position, and most of them then chose to retire instead of revert to a lower rank, which is what would happen if you were removed from a three or a four star position, you're not automatically cashiered from the military. So he removed them from those positions, which he has the right and the authority to do.

These were very different from previous examples of this though. There, there are lots of ways in which these were pretty unprecedented. First of all, no one has ever fired a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the middle of his term.

Only two chairman have ever sort of been removed in some sense, and they were both removed at the ends of their terms and they were not removed as the result of a change in administration. That was Lyman Lemnitzer and Peter Pace were the two who have been removed. But none has ever been removed in the middle of a term, and none has ever been removed as the result of a change in administration that is utterly unprecedented and I would say a very worrying civil military relations sign.

Then you have the removals of Admiral Linda Fagan, of Admiral Lisa Franchetti, of General Jim Slife. These were the commandant of the coast guard, the chief of naval operations, and the vice chief of the Air Force. And these were all removed pretty explicitly because they, and, and CQ Brown, was also included in this list, pretty explicitly because of their focus on DEI, which is of course diversity, equity, and inclusion, DEI efforts in the military.

And those efforts were wide ranging. We can talk about what that means in the military, but they were not fired for performance issues. They were not fired for even, even for specific sort of operational or strategic differences with the administration? They were fired for essentially following the orders of previous administrations, which is where they had gotten this program of diversity, equity, and inclusion, which the military did not come up with on its own.

These, these were things that they were directed to do. I mean, they certainly came up with the analysis that they needed to do something about recruiting issues, and we can come back to that as well. But these were essentially programs that the military had been implementing because previous administrations had told them to.

And so to be fired for loyalty, implementing the policy of a previous administration is extremely troubling. Then you had the firings of the so-called TJAGs and that's the top, the judge advocates general of each of the services. Now in this case, the only ones who were actually fired were Army and Air Force because Navy had already retired and was filled already by an acting person and she is still there. That's Lia Reynolds.

The other two were fired again, not for any performance, not for any interaction that the administration had had with them. But simply out of what the administration (and specifically the secretary of defense said) was a desire to remove roadblocks, a desire to ensure that the administration would not get pushback on their–and the secretary of defense framed it–as their lawful orders or their legal orders, but of course, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to, to worry that judge advocates general are going to push back on legal or lawful orders.

Military judge advocates are not generally known as fainting violets. You know, they don't tend to go around pushing back on things that, that are in fact lawful so. This, again, was a pretty clear message that the Trump administration did not want resistance of any kind, even resistance of the kind that you sort of expect from experts to an administration that is just coming in and needs advice on things.

Then there were a couple of other firings that, that were sort of less problematic from a, from a big picture point of view, but sort of petty, right? So the firing of Admiral Shoshana Chatfield from her position as the military representative to NATO was, she was known for advocating DEI initiatives and specifically the Women Peace and Security Initiative at the Naval War College when she was president there. But again, that's a statutory requirement. She was not doing that just to do it.

And then Telita Crosland was the head of the Defense Health Agency. And she was not outright fired, but her retirement was extremely abruptly announced, even though she had engagements scheduled for the following week. And she was a black woman in charge of an agency.

And so, you know, it just, there are now, I, I checked, there are now no female four stars anymore, and none of the sort of pending nominations are, are female. I checked the three stars. There are about 17 or 18 three stars who are women and one pending nomination, who's a woman. So this, you know, it was fairly blatant.

Daniel Byman: Is the assumption, implicit assumption I should say, that if you were promoted to three or four star, if you were holding a senior position in general and you were a person of color or you were a woman, you probably got there because of DEI rather than merit. Is that kind of a, a reasonable way of reading these firings?

Lindsay Cohn: Well, so what I would say is Secretary Hegseth stated that view openly, I believe, before he was confirmed. It's in his book. And he stated it openly before he was nominated and before he was confirmed. And so I think the, the idea that that view is floating around within the administration is totally reasonable.

Once he was confirmed, he, of course, did stand next to, to General Brown and say, look, we're here, we're next to each other. I look forward to working with him. He seems like a competent guy kind of thing. And, and some of us got the impression that maybe Hegseth had, you know, met CQ Brown, realized that he was in fact, extremely competent and maybe was backing off.

But again we, we know that certainly some people in the administration hold that view and the optics of the firings did nothing to reassure anyone that that was not the view.

Daniel Byman: So in an article you wrote in February for Lawfare, you talk about coup proofing. And I'm someone who does a lot of research on the Middle East, and I think of coup proofing as you know, the king putting his brother in charge of military forces, or deliberately creating two rival forces that hate each other to make sure that they'll spend their time in, you know, military infighting rather than trying to overthrow you.

Why is this concept relevant to a very professional force like the U.S. Army or other U.S. services?

Lindsay Cohn: Yeah, so coup proofing, broadly speaking, can be thought of as any measure that a government takes to try to reduce the likelihood of the military intervening in politics or undermining the, the governing structure, right? Authoritarians have a larger basket of tools than democratic regimes do. But all regimes engage in some actions to try and reduce the threat of military interference and governance.

And so one of those is, is simply paying them sufficiently, right? And that's, that's one of the ones that democracies rely on. Another is professionalizing them, right? Trying to make them focus on their task and their competency, and making them believe that, that they have a specific role to fill and that they shouldn't go outside that role. That's another one that many democracies use. Autocracies can use that as well. Egypt for example, is, is a fairly good example of, of a military that's highly professionalized.

But there are other ways, you mentioned two of them, sort of. One is called stacking and the other is counterbalancing. Now most democracies don't engage in those two. But what I argued in that article is that you can see the way that this removal of, you know, large swaths of the top ranks, acts kind of like a stacking mechanism in that it is appearing to apply a loyalty test, a political loyalty test to whoever's going to be appointed.

And I should point out the only role of those firings, the only roles that have been filled since those firings are the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Caine, who is now in there, and General Jennifer Short's position of senior military aide to the secretary of defense. All of the others are still vacant and filled with acting.

So no one has been reappointed to those yet, which again, in and, and the fact that they fired all of these people with no announcement of their replacement, this speaks of a desire to do a sort of very wide, number one, it indicates a massive lack of respect for, and a lack of trust in the top ranks of the military. Number two, it indicates a desire to do a very broad search for exactly the people who will be the right people for them.

Now, in principle, there's nothing wrong with fi-, with an administration looking for the right people for them. But if you are doing this in a public service, which the military is, it's a public service. And if you're doing that in a public service and it looks like a political loyalty test, that's much more problematic from a, from the point of view of democracy. And so this idea of stacking is the idea that you ensure the military will not intervene in governance by making sure that top military leadership identifies closely with whoever is in political power.

As you mentioned in, in many autocracies, especially in the Middle East, that involves using your family members, right? You put your cousins and your brothers-in-law in charge, although that can backfire. But you know, in this country it's not going to be kinship relations and it's not going to be necessarily religious relations. It's gonna be political relations.

So that's what I was saying was that this kind of action is not the kind of action that you would normally expect in a, in a democratic operating system, right? Because you don't want the top ranks of the military to have loyalty to a particular person or a particular party or even a particular political agenda. You want them to be available to serve loyally, whatever administration the people elect.

And once you start purging a group of people and putting in a set of new people who believe that their job security rests on keeping you happy then you've started a cycle. Because then if a different party comes to power, they have to worry about, well, what do I do with this top layer? I don't know who they're loyal to, right? So it, that's what I was talking about in terms of coup proofing.

I don't think we're gonna like, I don't think we were going to have a coup. I don't, the likelihood of a coup in the United States was extremely low. It's just a term of art that we use to talk about methods that governments can use to try and reduce the danger of military intervention.

And I think in this case, Mr. Trump was really hoping to reduce the likelihood of what he saw as a lot of pushback and foot dragging and slow rolling that he, that he got in his first administration. I think he saw that he didn't like it. He got to this administration and was like, I'm going to make sure that doesn't happen this time.

Daniel Byman: Let me ask a little more on this whether we call it coup proofing or the, the broader concept of ensuring loyalty. How do these measures affect military effectiveness?

Lindsay Cohn: So certain types of coup proofing tend to be detrimental to military effectiveness. Stacking is one of them, and it's for the reasons that you know are probably evident to your audience, but we'll just articulate them.

If there is a loyalty test involved, that begins to create a situation where some people will be elevated to positions despite maybe the fact that they are not the best qualified person. So you start having a breakdown in a meritocratic system, which of course, ironically is what the administration was charging DEI was doing.

Secondly, you get a situation where giving bad news to the superior is frowned upon and certainly pushing back or questioning is frowned upon. I have heard already, not from the military, but from members of the National Security Council staff, that they see their jobs entirely as taking the president's vision and implementing it. Not in any sense sort of helping him shape his policies via say, back and forth questioning, but simply, what is it you want? Let's go and get it done. That kind of thing can make for efficient implementation.

But it can make for very bad strategy and planning because if you have no one questioning your ideas, you can choose to do things that are maybe not good ideas. You can choose to try to do things that would cost more than they're worth, et cetera, et cetera. So not accepting bad news and not accepting pushback is generally not good for the strategic planning element of military advising and military planning in general.

There are also issues of morale. Obviously if you feel like you are in a, a situation where you have to believe certain things or have to act a certain way instead of just being there to do your job, that can be corrosive. I'm not necessarily saying that that's happening. I don't know that that's happening, but it can happen in these kinds of situations.

And then the last one I would say is you're going to, one thing that, that having this kind of purge at the top does is it signals to people if you don't want to be on this train, you need to get off, right? And so anyone who might have been thinking, you know, I love serving, I love my country. I don't agree with this administration, but you know, I'm here as a non-partisan servant of the public to those people, this could tip the scale for them to be like, you know what, actually I'm gonna, I'm gonna get out, I'm gonna retire, or, you know, resign my commission or whatever.

And if that happens, and again, I do not have data saying that that is happening on mass or anything like that, but if that happens, you are losing a significant amount of experience. You're also creating holes at unusual times of the year. And the military is on a, a fairly regular cycle in terms of when it moves people and how it moves them to different jobs and things like that, and so you just create some, some personnel churn that makes things more difficult, right?

If you've got a ton of people who are only acting in an acting position, they're probably trying to do two jobs at once. Or the person below them is doing two jobs at once. They don't have the authority to take certain decisions. And in most cases in this, for example, in the case of the JAGs they're a lower rank than the normal person filling that post would be. So they're, you know, major generals instead of lieutenant generals or, you know.

So none, none of this is the end of the world, none of this is total breakdown, but it, it can be corrosive to military effectiveness.

Daniel Byman: I'd like to switch gears a bit or really switch issues and talk about using the military in domestic, I'll say situations, others might say emergencies.

And the administration has deployed forces on the U.S.-Mexico border, sent Marines to Los Angeles. There's been a, a military parade that was on the Army's birthday, but also the president's birthday. Other administrations have of course, used the military domestically at different times in the past. Again, how should we think about whether this is different, if this is different and really what it means?

Lindsay Cohn: Yeah, so the easiest one is the parade. Yes, we have had military parades in the past. The difference between this one and previous parades is not huge, but you know, potentially, potentially problematic.

In the past we have had big military only parades in, you know, a major city like Washington, D.C only under a few circumstances. And that is sort of major victories, welcoming the dead home (so we have had parades going down main avenues in Washington D.C. towards Arlington Cemetery) and then boosting morale on the home front during a war. This was none of those.

And so it was somewhat odd in that sense. There is not normally a big parade on the service’s birthday. The Army was planning to do something for its birthday. It was planning a, a celebratory event for the, for its birthday. And the, the president basically said, I want you to make it bigger. I want it to be a parade and I want it to have more stuff in it.

So, but one, you know, it's an unusual event and the fact that it was on the president's birthday and that he kept on bringing that up even though he kept bringing it up in order to say, it has nothing to do with my birthday, but it happens to be my birthday. And you know, while, while he kept on claiming it had nothing to do with his birthday, the fact that that kept coming up certainly cemented in people's minds, oh yeah, this is happening on his birthday. So event occasion, somewhat odd.

Also, most of the time military parades in the United States focus on people, not hardware, right? It's somewhat unusual for a military parade in the United States to have vehicles like tracked vehicles, armored vehicles rolling down the street. We tend to have parades that focus on the human beings in the service that say, you know, we're, we're happy, we're happy you won, or we're sorry for your comrades who have lost their lives, or, we are, you know, behind you all the way. It, it doesn't tend to be a show of force in that sense. So that was kind of odd.

And then, you know, just the, the, the fact that it was on such an unusual day, like it was Flag Day, so there was a holiday. But, you know, it wasn't an occasion where people would normally be flocking to Washington D.C. on that weekend, and so the, the fact that it was almost certain to be fairly sparsely attended was also, you know, just kind of awkward.

In the event, you know, I'll say this, in the event the, the Army clearly took very seriously the idea that this was a celebration of 250 years of the Army and this was about them and they had the period costumes and like this is about all of the things the Army has done. And they seem to be having a good time. I saw a video, you know, people sitting on, on vehicles waving and smiling.

And so I hope that the, that the people in the parade felt that they were being celebrated for the dedication to service that they have shown. I think that for the people who were excited about the idea of a parade, they were probably happy and enjoyed it. Or were slightly disappointed, you know, that it wasn't more exciting.

For the people who were worried about the parade, for the people who were worried that this was kind of a dictate, a show of strength sort of thing, I think they were mostly relieved because it just wasn't, it wasn't menacing at all. And, you know, the, the Army clearly did not plan to menace anyone. I don't know if that was the president's intent, if it was it didn't happen.

So the other things you mentioned though, that's where we get into a little bit weirder territory. The border, I'll go to the border next. So we have had military personnel, both National Guard and reserve, at the border pretty much consistently since the 1990s. Interestingly enough before then, we didn't have much of a military presence at that border at all after World War I, right after the, the threat of Mexican invasion. Between those two periods, you had like almost no military activity at the border. It was just all Border Patrol, Customs Border Protection, things like that.

So, but the war on drugs really ramped up in the 1980s. And in the 1990s you started having the Clinton administration pursue a policy of sort of actively going after drugs at the border, and that's when you started seeing more use of the military. There was a famous, tragic incident of a, an active duty U.S. Marine patrolling the border who shot a young goat herd who was not armed. And, and the Marine also appeared to lie about the situation afterwards, which made everything worse.

But so we have had military personnel, both active and National Guard at the border for decades at this point. However, you know, they're generally doing what's called defense support to civil authorities. They're in a support role. They're doing logistics support. They might be doing some surveillance support. They can help with counter-narcotics issues.

They have not been doing immigration policing, right. That's a different issue, and it's a, immigration is a purely law enforcement issue. It's not considered a homeland defense mission.

And so the most recent stuff that's been happening since the first Trump administration has been a ramping up in scope in terms of how many personnel are there, and also in terms of, of sort of what the mission conception is. The military personnel still are in a support role. They are still doing defense support to civil authorities, and so they are not technically policing anything themselves.

But the big deployments of the second Trump administration are really pretty unprecedented. And from what I understand though, they're not actually doing much. There isn't enough for all of those people to do at the border, is my understanding. And so though we may see those deployments draw down at some point, but probably pretty quietly.

The really interesting thing happened during the Biden administration when Governor Abbott of Texas tried to use his National Guard personnel to oppose federal law enforcement personnel and federalized National Guard. That actually ended up going all the way to, to the Supreme Court, and Biden actually won on that one. He, the Supreme Court ruled that he was allowed to have federal agents take down the razor wire that the Texas agents had been putting up, but it was still, you know, a very, very unusual sort of federal-state face off.

Then finally, we have L.A. I think most people know at this point, the news coverage has been pretty thorough in talking about the fact that these kinds of things of sending troops into cities has happened before. Even federalizing, the National Guard against the wishes of the governor has happened before. These are not, this is not the first time any of any of these individual things has happened.

What is unusual in this case is that it's unusual for all of these things to happen at once. It's unusual to send active duty personnel plus federalized National Guard, who are federalized against the wishes of the governor, without a request from the governor to do civil disturbance stuff, in a situation where there did not seem to be a really significant amount of violence and destruction and things like that. So it's unusual in that this is a lot of things together that don't normally happen together.

And furthermore, I think the, the really worrisome issue here is that the mission that these troops were given, both the National Guard and the Marines were the protection of federal property and federal personnel and the carrying out of federal functions. These are missions that the president can lawfully task federal military personnel to do without invoking the Insurrection Act.

But physically speaking, asking them to do that was putting them basically in between protesters and law enforcement officers, which almost inevitably was going to get them involved, even if that was not technically their mission. Right? If their mission was not technically crowd control, but they were almost certainly going to get involved in crowd control.

You know, and so it seemed, I think a lot of people read that as a sort of thinly disguised way of having them do law enforcement activities without actually saying you're having them do law enforcement activities. You know, and the fact that the Marines detained someone just kind of adds to that.

Detention is a gray area. I actually, this frustrated me for a long time because detention is one of those things where I was under the impression that federal agents could, like military agents, could detain people just not arrest or apprehend them.

But Judge Breyer in his opinion, that was then, you know, stopped by the appeals panel. Judge Breyer used the word detention when he said, I'm not gonna say anything about the Marines yet, 'cause they haven't done anything yet. But the things I would be looking for are, do they detain anybody? And so that confused me. I was like, hang on, I don't, well now I think detention is not okay.

I checked and what's interesting is that the wood detention doesn't show up in any of the DOD instructions or directions or regulations except for one, the Marine Corps. It says detention, but it's in a different context. So I, yeah, I'm not entirely clear on the, on the legal status of detaining people. I'm not a lawyer, so I, I don't have to know. But that one really threw me for a loop and, and I don't know how judges will view it.

Daniel Byman: Let me ask the same question I asked earlier about the firings of senior leaders. How does this affect the force in general, if at all?

Lindsay Cohn: Well, I mean, the short answer is I don't know how it's affecting the force yet. We don't really have any data. I can tell you in general that the active component of the military–so in this case we're talking about the Marines–do not see this, certainly not law enforcement, but even defense support to civil authorities. They do not see this as a primary mission. This is not why any of them joined the military. This is not what they, you know, quote, signed up to do, and it makes them very uncomfortable. Many of them really dislike this mission. It makes them feel awkward.

For the National Guard, they are a slight step closer to thinking of this kind of thing as part of their repertoire, because in a state status or in a Title 32 status, they might be called in to do this sort of thing. But even the National Guard don't relish the policing role. They are very happy to step in in disaster response. They consider that a primary mission. They're very happy to go support the active component in combat operations overseas. They consider that a primary mission.

But none of these personnel are generally happy about this kind of mission. And so I would be willing to bet that many of them are hoping they don't have to get involved in anything awkward, and they're probably hoping that it's over as soon as possible. So the most likely effect is a morale effect.

Daniel Byman: Let me go a bit perhaps more conspiratorial. David Frum wrote an article in The Atlantic where he said this sort of calling out the military is a dress rehearsal for suppressing elections, right? And you know, so this is someone who historically was on the conservative side of the political spectrum and making a very dramatic claim. How should we think about that?

Lindsay Cohn: I mean, I do think that that is probably overdoing it a bit. But it's not outside the realm of possibility, in the sense that in the last election or in not the last election, the election before that, the 2020 election, we certainly did see some calls from Mr. Trump himself and from other people in his orbit for use of the military, for using the military to seize ballot boxes, for example, for invoking the Insurrection Act.

So it's not absurd to talk about this. But I, it's not entirely clear to me what using the military to interfere in the election would look like. It seems a little far-fetched to think that we would station military personnel near polling places to intimidate people, which is in fact illegal. Not, you know, I don't know.

It's hard, so my guess, here's, here's my guess. My guess is that the most likely scenario is if there are widespread demonstrations. That those might be suppressed in some way. So if there are protests, if there is activism around the election.

So I don't think it's likely to that we'll see the military deployed in large numbers to interfere with the election. But I do think it's potential that we will see the military deployed to suppress protests, demonstrations, things like that. And certainly if there is any political violence, I would not be surprised if the administration chose to use the military to respond. I think they've made it clear that, that they consider that a, a fully acceptable option.

Daniel Byman: Let me ask you on that last point. Let's assume something akin to the Black Lives Matter protests recur again, and my take at least on those protests were the vast majority were peaceful, but some were not, and there was significant property destruction in particular. Would that be the sort of thing where the military might be used if it were to occur?

Lindsay Cohn: I mean, it's possible. Certainly again, as we've seen with the with the ICE protests or the anti-ICE protests, I guess you would call them not a ton of violence, some property destruction, and, and there it was determined that, that they could send in military personnel. I wouldn't be surprised if, if that were the case.

I mean, there are plenty of other options. And again, the military doesn't like these missions, but this is kind of where this situation overlaps with the earlier discussion we had about the replacement of people at the top of the military with people who are more compliant and, and sort of aligned with this administration's political approach is that, you know, in the past.

What you saw was both the civilian and military leadership saying to the president, sir, you have other options you don't need to send in the military. I think what Mr. Trump is hoping is that this time that kind of pushback would not happen. So in that sense alone it's probably more likely that you would see the military used .But the, the president has a large number of tools at his disposal and it kind of depends on what else the military is being used for at the time.

Daniel Byman: Let me ask my final question, which is kind of cheating. It's really two questions which are overlapping. So what do you worry about when you think about changes in civil military relations that that might be happening?

And then, what's wrong with what other people worry about? There's a lot of talk on this issue and whether it's David Frum's article or others, other many people are speculating who are unlike you are not specialists in this area. So where do you think people are wrong? But on the other hand, what do you think deserves more attention?

Lindsay Cohn: Well, I mean, I, I don't like the idea of telling people that they're wrong to worry about something, but I, I would, the, the big one for me, and this has to do with some research that I've done with colleagues about public opinion, about the use of the domestic use of the military, and there is other research out there on this as well, and it's all somewhat concerning.

But the research that my colleagues and I have done indicates that the general public prefers non militarized responses to the extent that they think that they are not looking at a traditional security threat. And so what that means is the more the political elite talk about things as security threats, the more accepting the public is likely to become of militarized responses.

And so when you see the administration talking about immigration as an invasion and immigrants as dangerous criminals and anti-ICE protests as a rebellion, this is securitization language, right? This is language that is attempting to convince you that you are not facing a political problem or a law enforcement problem, but that you are facing a security threat.

And our research indicates to a certain extent, and there's other research on this as well, that the U.S. public, if they believe they are facing a security threat, becomes more accepting of militarized responses. So I worry about that.

And, and the thing that I don't think people should worry about is. I don't think immigration is a security threat. Immigration can pose problems, it can pose challenges, but it's fundamentally a management issue, not a defense issue, and I don't think it should be securitized in this way.

So what else do I worry about? Aside from the securitization, which, which I really think is a big problem. In the strictly civ-mil sense, I do worry about a military that is weakened by mixed messages about its primary role and mission. You know, on the one hand we have all this talk about war fighting and warriors and China and Iran and the threats out there. But on the other hand, we've got this significant focus on domestic security, border security, internal security.

And to most people in this U.S. military, those are two wildly different types of mission. And you know, it's not entirely clear to me or to some of my colleagues how the administration is going to reconcile in terms of budget, in terms of acquisitions, in terms of training and doctrine, et cetera, how it's going to reconcile saying, you know, we want you to do both of these things.

Part of the problem there is that when you have an externally focused mission. Externally focused missions tend to be much more unifying to a military organization than internally focused missions, right? Externally focused missions, regardless of how sort of farfetched they are, you can get people to be like, yes, we defend the country from the outsiders, and they're bad guys, and we fight bad guys.

When you have an internal mission that tends to be more divisive. And when you have something that's divisive and people disagree about the legitimacy of the mission, then you start having problems with cohesion. You start having problems with trust within the ranks. You start having people thinking, I don't know if I can talk to the person next to me about what I'm worried about. So that's a, that's something I worry about.

I also worry about a self-perpetuating cycle of some groups in society feeling like they are not welcome in the military. Like it's no longer a place that they can go and serve and, you know, get money for college and things like that. And that in turn causing the military to become less representative and more and more homogenous. And that's from my perspective as a civ-mil person, that's bad for two reasons.

One, the representativeness function is super important in a democratic society because again, going back to this idea that democracy means in theory, you know, as Adam Przeworski said, democracy is a system in which any party can lose an election. In theory, someone else should be able to come to power. And if someone else comes to power, what you want is a military that belongs to the whole society and not to a specific group in society the way that, you know, the Syrian military belonged to the Assad family, right, and the Alawites. So that's a bad, that's a bad thing in terms of less representativeness, more homogeneity.

But the other bad thing is that we know from all kinds of research on group decision making, that homogeneity may be good for sort of shallow social cohesion purposes, but it's really not good for producing sort of creative adaptive problem solving. It tends to lead to a lot of, of sort of blinder issues and lack of consideration of alternatives and lack of questioning of assumptions.

And in the future military future security context of this world, I think, you know, fast, adaptive, creative problem solving is gonna be a skill that we want our military to have. You know, in the largest sense, I worry that this is not an appropriate way to handle a military and a democracy. I worry that the things that we've been talking about do in fact look like how some authoritarian regimes attempt to maintain power and control, even if elections are allowed to continue.

And, you know, I don't know if I'm being overly pessimistic about that. But you know, as someone who reads about this stuff all the time, I can't help looking at our situation and going, I, I recognize this, like, this seems familiar to me, and not in a good way.

Daniel Byman: Well, I'm gonna end by saying I hope that your 2029 Lawfare piece is about potential crises being averted rather than looking back at, at additional problems. Lindsay Cohn, thank you very much for joining us.

Lindsay Cohn: Thank you so much, Dan. I really appreciate your having me.

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