If the leader of the coup was someone with military legitimacy — the secretary of defence, say, or the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff — it would not be impossible to arrange this.
Any successful coup would also need to physically secure the president. Unlike some of his predecessors, Trump actually makes this relatively straightforward: his Mar-a-Lago retreat in Florida is on a peninsula, making it very easy to cut off from the mainland.
All the plotters would have to do is create a roadblock and secure a helipad. This in turn means the ideal time to mount a coup would be over a public holiday. Not only would Trump would almost certainly be ensconced in his Florida getaway, but most ordinary people would be away from their homes and government departments would be minimally staffed.
This article is just a sketch, and has obviously left out a great deal of the detailed planning that would actually be required for a real-life coup to happen. How would the coup leaders deal with Congress?
How would any armed resistance be dealt with? Portsmouth Climate Festival — Portsmouth, Portsmouth. Edition: Available editions United Kingdom. Why does civilian technology grow ever cheaper and more reliable while military technology does the opposite? An animated explainer narrated by James Fallows. But it is not.
When Dwight D. Eisenhower, as a five-star general and the supreme commander, led what may have in fact been the finest fighting force in the history of the world, he did not describe it in that puffed-up way. Through the decade after World War II, when so many American families had at least one member in uniform, political and journalistic references were admiring but not awestruck.
Most Americans were familiar enough with the military to respect it while being sharply aware of its shortcomings, as they were with the school system, their religion, and other important and fallible institutions. Now the American military is exotic territory to most of the American public. As a comparison: A handful of Americans live on farms, but there are many more of them than serve in all branches of the military.
The U. So too with the military. Many more young Americans will study abroad this year than will enlist in the military—nearly , students overseas, versus well under , new recruits. As a country, America has been at war nonstop for the past 13 years. As a public, it has not. A total of about 2. The difference between the earlier America that knew its military and the modern America that gazes admiringly at its heroes shows up sharply in changes in popular and media culture.
From Mister Roberts to South Pacific to Catch , from The Caine Mutiny to The Naked and the Dead to From Here to Eternity , American popular and high culture treated our last mass-mobilization war as an effort deserving deep respect and pride, but not above criticism and lampooning. The collective achievement of the military was heroic, but its members and leaders were still real people, with all the foibles of real life.
A decade after that war ended, the most popular military-themed TV program was The Phil Silvers Show , about a con man in uniform named Sgt. American culture was sufficiently at ease with the military to make fun of it, a stance now hard to imagine outside the military itself.
As I point out whenever discussing this topic, I was eligible for the draft at the time, was one of those protesting the war, and at age 20 legally but intentionally failed my draft medical exam. What we think of as the classic run of Vietnam films did not begin until the end of the s, with The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now. Bilko model, again suggesting a culture close enough to its military to put up with, and enjoy, jokes about it.
The pop-culture references to the people fighting our ongoing wars emphasize their suffering and stoicism, or the long-term personal damage they may endure. Some emphasize high-stakes action, from the fictionalized 24 to the meant-to-be-true Zero Dark Thirty. Often they portray military and intelligence officials as brave and daring. Last year, the writer Rebecca Frankel published War Dogs , a study of the dog-and-handler teams that had played a large part in the U.
Part of the reason she chose the topic, she told me, was that dogs were one of the few common points of reference between the military and the larger public.
But … dogs! For two decades after World War II, the standing force remained so large, and the Depression-era birth cohorts were so small, that most Americans had a direct military connection.
Among older Baby Boomers, those born before , at least three-quarters have had an immediate family member—sibling, parent, spouse, child—who served in uniform. Of Americans born since , the Millennials, about one in three is closely related to anyone with military experience. Interactive graphic: The first map above in green shows per-capita military enlistments from to , grouped by 3-digit zip code. The second in red shows the home towns of deceased soldiers from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Enlistment rates vary widely—in , only 0. Virgin Islands prefix had an enlistment rate of 0. When it comes to lives lost, U. Map design and development: Frankie Dintino. If I were writing such a history now, I would call it Chickenhawk Nation , based on the derisive term for those eager to go to war, as long as someone else is going.
It would be the story of a country willing to do anything for its military except take it seriously. As a result, what happens to all institutions that escape serious external scrutiny and engagement has happened to our military. Outsiders treat it both too reverently and too cavalierly, as if regarding its members as heroes makes up for committing them to unending, unwinnable missions and denying them anything like the political mindshare we give to other major public undertakings, from medical care to public education to environmental rules.
The tone and level of public debate on those issues is hardly encouraging. But for democracies, messy debates are less damaging in the long run than letting important functions run on autopilot, as our military essentially does now.
A chickenhawk nation is more likely to keep going to war, and to keep losing, than one that wrestles with long-term questions of effectiveness. Americans admire the military as they do no other institution. Through the past two decades, respect for the courts, the schools, the press, Congress, organized religion, Big Business, and virtually every other institution in modern life has plummeted. The one exception is the military.
About one-third had comparable confidence in the medical system, and only 7 percent in Congress. Moulton became a Marine Corps officer after graduating from Harvard in , believing as he told me that when many classmates were heading to Wall Street it was useful to set an example of public service.
He opposed the decision to invade Iraq but ended up serving four tours there out of a sense of duty to his comrades.
Moulton told me, as did many others with Iraq-era military experience, that if more members of Congress or the business and media elite had had children in uniform, the United States would probably not have gone to war in Iraq at all. Because he felt strongly enough about that failure of elite accountability, Moulton decided while in Iraq to get involved in politics after he left the military.
What Moulton described was desire for a kind of accountability. It is striking how rare accountability has been for our modern wars. Hillary Clinton paid a price for her vote to authorize the Iraq War, since that is what gave the barely known Barack Obama an opening to run against her in George W.
But those two are the exceptions. For our generals, our politicians, and most of our citizenry, there is almost no accountability or personal consequence for military failure. This is a dangerous development—and one whose dangers multiply the longer it persists.
O urs is the best-equipped fighting force in history, and it is incomparably the most expensive. Yet repeatedly this force has been defeated by less modern, worse-equipped, barely funded foes.
Or it has won skirmishes and battles only to lose or get bogged down in a larger war. Bilmes, of the Harvard Kennedy School, recently estimated that the total cost could be three to four times that much. Recall that while Congress was considering whether to authorize the Iraq War, the head of the White House economic council, Lawrence B.
Yet from a strategic perspective, to say nothing of the human cost, most of these dollars might as well have been burned. But they brought no lasting stability to, nor advance of U. When ISIS troops overran much of Iraq last year, the forces that laid down their weapons and fled before them were members of the same Iraqi national army that U.
The last war that ended up in circumstances remotely resembling what prewar planning would have considered a victory was the brief Gulf War of After the Vietnam War, the press and the public went too far in blaming the military for what was a top-to-bottom failure of strategy and execution.
But the military itself recognized its own failings, and a whole generation of reformers looked to understand and change the culture. In , a military-intelligence veteran named Richard A. Gabriel published, with Paul L.
Three years later, a broadside called Self-Destruction: The Disintegration and Decay of the United States Army During the Vietnam Era , by a military officer writing under the pen name Cincinnatus later revealed to be a lieutenant colonel serving in the reserves as a military chaplain, Cecil B. The Iraq invasion was one of the worst strategic blunders in the history of U.
In Iraq, civil war happened after the U. In Syria, civil war broke out in the absence of U. What all of this suggests is that attitudes toward the U. As a general proposition, many leftists, for example, seem to believe that there is something intrinsically wrong with the use of military force by the United States. In other words, when America does it, it is a bad thing, irrespective of the outcomes it produces, and therefore should be opposed outright.
But, for the use of American power abroad to be intrinsically wrong or immoral, all uses of military force would have to be either immoral or ineffective, or both. However, as a factual matter, this is simply not the case. There was no way to stop mass slaughter and genocide in Bosnia or Kosovo without U.
In those two cases, a U. In those cases where the international community did not act, genocide did, in fact, occur, as we witnessed in Rwanda. What became clear then—and what has become clear once again in Syria—is that a world where others than the U. While they may be less common, there are also cases where dictators will not only kill their own people but try to forcefully invade and conquer their neighbors.
As in the first Gulf War, the gobbling up of Kuwait could not have been prevented without a U. The list goes on. From a moral standpoint, no one should have to suffer under the indignities of ISIS rule.
From a strategic standpoint, having an extremist state the size of Indiana in the middle of the Middle East, needless to say, does not suggest the coming of a better, more secure world. While Obama was late to act against the organization and while the anti-ISIS campaign has been deeply flawed, the amount of territory that ISIS controls has been reduced significantly, due in large part to U.
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