Lawfare Archive: Civil Military Relations in the Trump Administration

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All that await you in the new Staffel. Also, streamed now the new Staffel House of the Dragons and all the series of Game of Thrones, Nur, on HBO Max. I'm Samuel Lerich, and turn out Lothar with an episode from the Lothar Archive for July 4th, 2020 sets. This point of July, the Trump administration has planned a massive celebration for the 250th anniversary of the U.S. founding. The celebrations are set to include performances by military bands, a military flyover, and the U.S. Navy's 7th International Fleet review.

“Previously, the administration hosted an army parade on June 14th, the 250th birthday of the U.S. Army, which coincided with the president's own birthday.”

For today's Archive, I chose an episode from July 2nd, 2025, in which Daniel Byman sat down with Lindsey Con, a associate professor at the Naval Work College and Columbia University.

To discuss the current state of civil military relations and Trump's second term, they talked about military parades in addition to their removal of senior officials,

the stationing of the military at the U.S.-Betsacle border and border. It's the Lothar podcast. I'm Daniel Byman, the foreign policy editor of Lothar with Lindsey Con, an associate professor at the U.S. Naval Work College and a visiting associate professor at Columbia University. Dr. Con is an expert on civil military relations, and the author of the very suit to be published, order authority and modern civil military relations, which is coming out in a month or so, with Bloom's very academic press.

Dr. Con's views are her own, and they do not represent the U.S. Naval Work College, or the U.S. government. The U.S. public, if they believe they are facing a security threat, becomes more accepting of militarized responses. So I worry about that. Today we're talking about the Trump administration's use of the military within the United States. 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 seek you, 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. Yeah, 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 removed from a three or a four-stop 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 are lots of ways in which these were pretty unprecedented.

Well, no one has ever fired a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the middle office 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 Lemnetza and Peter Pace with a 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.

Equity and inclusion, DEI efforts in the military, and those efforts are 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 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 were things that they were directed to do.

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 loyally implementing the policy of a previous administration is extremely troubling.”

Then you had the firings of the so-called T-jags, 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 on me and Air Force, because Navy had already retired and was filled already by an acting person, and she is still there on that's Leah Reynolds. 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.

The desire to ensure that the administration would not get pushed back 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 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 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.

There were a couple of other firings that were sort of less problematic from a big picture point of view, but sort of petty, right. So the firing of Admiral Shishana chatfield from her position as the military representative to NATO was she was known for advocating DEI initiatives and specifically the women piece and security initiative at the Naval War College when she was president there. Again, that's a statutory requirement. She was not doing that just to do it and then to lead a crossland 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.

“She was a black woman in charge of an agency and so, you know, it just, there are now, I checked, there are now no female four stars anymore.”

And none of these sort of pending nominations of female. I checked the three stars, there are about 17 or 18 three stars who are women and one pending nomination, who is a woman. So this, you know, it was fairly blatant. Is the assumption implicit assumption, I should say, that if you were promoted to your four star, if you were holding a senior position, 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 reasonable way of reading these firings?”

Well, so what I would say is, Secretary Hegseff 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. So I think 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 General Brown and say, look, we're here, we're next to each other.

But again, 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.

So in an article you wrote in February for law fair, you talk about coup-proofing. And I'm someone who does a lot 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 military infighting rather than trying to overthrow you.

“Why is this concept relevant to a very professional force like the US Army or other US services?”

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 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 in governance.

And so one of those is simply paying them sufficiently, right? And 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 they have a specific role to fill in 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 a fairly good example 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, um, who ever is 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, uh, General Kane, who is now in there, and General Jennifer Short's position of senior military aid 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, 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, 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 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 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 going to be political relations. So that's what I was seeing was that this kind of action is not the kind of action that you would normally expect 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, now they have to worry about, well, what do I do with this top layer?

The likelihood of a coup in the United States was extremely low. It's just a term of art that we used 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 got in his first administration.”

I think he saw that he didn't like it. He got to this administration. It was like, I'm going to make sure that doesn't happen this time.

Let me ask a little more on this, whether it's called coup-proofing or the broader concept of ensuring loyalty, how do these measures affect military effectiveness? 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 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 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 going to get out. I'm going to 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 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 personal 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 of this is the end of the world none of this is total breakdown, but it can be corrosive to military effectiveness.

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Continuously, powered by AI embedded directly into your workflows. So instead of maintaining yesterday's model, you're building tomorrow's advantage. PWC's managed services, we run your operations with tech and talent so you can run faster, scale smarter, lead stronger. I'd like to switch gears bitterly, switch issues and talk about using the military in domestic situations, others might say emergencies. And the administration has deployed forces on the U.S. exporter, sent Marines to Los Angeles. The others have been a military parade that was on the Army's Aberthney, but also the President's birthday.

Other administration's staff, 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?”

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 potentially problematic. In the past, we've 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.

“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 services birthday. The Army was planning to do something for its birthday. It was planning a celebratory event for its birthday, and 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 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 hot-wed, right? It's somewhat unusual for a military parade in the United States to have vehicles, like, tracked vehicles, armoured 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 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 doesn't tend to be a show of force in that sense.

That was kind of odd. And then, you know, just 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 DC on that weekend. And so, the fact that it was almost certain to be fairly spossly attended was also, you know, just kind of awkward. In the event, you know, I'll say this, in the event, the army clearly took very seriously the idea that this was a celebration of 250 years at 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 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.

And, you know, 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 weird territory. The border, I'll go to the border next. So we have had military personnel both national god 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 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 an active duty US Marine patrolling the border, who shot a young goat herd, who was not armed, 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 god 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 counternautotic 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 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 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 raise a 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.

And finally we have LA. 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 the 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 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.

Asking them to do that was putting them basically in between protesters and law enforcement officers, which it almost inevitably was going to get them involved even if that was not technically their mission.

If the mission was not technically crowd control, but they were almost certainly going to get involved in crowd control.

“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.”

And the fact that the Marines detained someone just kind of adds to that detention is a great 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 going to say anything about the Marines yet because they haven't done anything yet, but the things I would be looking for 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. Yeah, I'm not entirely clear on the legal status of detaining people. Yeah, I'm not a lawyer, so I don't have to know, but that one really threw me for a loop, and I don't know how judges will view it.

“Let me ask the same question. I asked earlier about the virings of senior leaders, how does this affect the force in general, if at all?”

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 god, 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.

Even the national god don't relish the policing role. They are very happy to step in in disaster response. They consider that a primary mission. The 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. Let me go a bit, perhaps more conspiratorial David from wrote an article in the Atlantic, where he said, this sort of point of the military is a dress rehearsal for espresso elections. This is someone who historically was on the conservative side of the political system, and making a very dramatic claim. How should we think about that? 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, in not the last election, the election before that, the 2020 election, we certainly did see some call.

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 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.

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 they consider that a fully acceptable option.”

Let me ask you on that last point, let's assume something akin to the Black Lives Matter protests we occur again.

And my take at least on those protests were the vast majority were peaceful, but somewhere 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? I mean, it's possible, certainly, again, as we've seen with the ICE protests or the anti ICE protests, I guess you would call them, not a ton of violence, some property destruction, and there it was determined that they could send in military personnel. I wouldn't be surprised 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 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 president has a large number of tools that his disposal and it kind of depends on what else the military is being used for at the time.

And he asked by 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 simple military relations that might be happening. And then what's wrong with what other people worry about. So a lot of talk on this issue and whether it's the Trump's article or others, other may people are speculating or like 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?

Well, I mean, I don't like the idea of telling people that they're wrong to worry about something, but 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-IS 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 US public, if they believe they are facing a security threat, becomes more accepting of militarized responses.

So I worry about that. 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 I really think is a big problem, in the strictly civil sense, I do worry about a military that is weakened by mixed messages about its primary role and mission.

But on the other hand, we've got this significant focus on domestic security, border security, internal security, and to most people in this US 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, etc.

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?”

Excellent focused missions, regardless of how sort of far-fetched they are, you can get people to be like, yes, we defend the country from the outsideers and their 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 something I worry about. I also worry about a self-appetuating 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. That, in turn, causing the military to become less representative and more and more homogenous. And that's from my perspective as a civil person, that's bad for two reasons.

“One, the representative dysfunction is super important in a democratic society because again, going back to this idea that democracy means, in theory, you know, as Adam Pervorsky 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 belong to the Assad family, right, and the allowies. So, that's a bad, that's a bad thing in terms of less representativeness, more homogenousity. But the other bad thing is that we know from all kinds of research on group decision making, that homogenousity 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 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 going to be a skill that we want our military to have.”

In the larger 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 recognize this, like this seems familiar to me and not in a good way.

Well, I'm going to end by saying I hope that your 229 law fair piece is about potential crises being inverted rather than looking back at additional problems. Lindsay Cohen, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you so much, Dan. I really appreciate your having. The law fair podcast is produced in cooperation with the working's institution. You can get add free versions of this and other law fair podcast by becoming a law fair material supporter at our website law fairmedia.org/support. You'll also get access to special events and other content available only to our supporters. Please break review us wherever you get your podcast.

Look out for other podcasts including rational security, allies, the aftermath, and escalation. Our latest law fair presents podcast series about the war in Ukraine. Check out our written work as well at law fairmedia.org. The podcast is edited by Jen Pacha and our audio engineer, this episode was Kara Shillin, of Go Glodio.

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