On the last day of September 2025, hundreds of generals and admirals from around the world were summoned to a military base in Quantico, Virginia, where they sat in folding chairs and listened to the president and the secretary of defense deliver what appeared to be a pair. campaign style speeches. The management of the top leadership of the US military created high costs and operational inconveniences, but the brass appeared because their civilian superiors had ordered them. They sat quietly through the political program, as they were trained. Then they flew back to their posts.
The exercise showed nothing of strategy or readiness, and much of the chain of military command—in fact, that it would hold almost any weakness.
On the last day of September 2025, hundreds of generals and admirals from around the world were summoned to a military base in Quantico, Virginia, where they sat in folding chairs and listened to the president and the secretary of defense deliver what appeared to be a pair. campaign style speeches. The management of the top leadership of the US military created high costs and operational inconveniences, but the brass appeared because their civilian superiors had ordered them. They sat quietly through the political program, as they were trained. Then they flew back to their posts.
The State and the Soldier: A History of Civil-Military Relations in the United StatesKori Schake, Polity, 272 pp., $29.95, October 2025
The exercise showed nothing of strategy or readiness, and much of the chain of military command—in fact, that it would hold almost any weakness.
That silence reflected in that hall is the central theme of Kori Schake’s new book, The State and the Soldier: A History of Civil-Military Relations in the United States. It is the most important book on American military-civilian relations to appear in a generation and, at this time, deserves the widest possible reading. Schake says that this silence is the success of the American system and the source of the current danger. The army will hold. The question that his book forces readers to face is what will actually happen time the army holds.
Schake is not a knee-jerk critic of the Trump administration. He was a director in George W. Bush National Security Councila senior policy adviser to the McCain-Palin campaign, and Hoover’s colleague. He is the former and current deputy director general of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London Kissinger the chairman at the Library of Congress. He co-edited a book on civil-military relations by Jim Mattis in 2016 and work for Colin Powell on the Joint Staff in the early 1990s. He has paid a real professional cost, on the Republican side, for his principles; Hegseth fired him from the Defense Policy Board in April 2025. Therefore, his position cannot be dismissed as a member, because it is conservative and institutional to the bottom.
The book’s investigative framework is simpler than its 250-year sweep suggests. Schake reduces citizen control to two stressors: Can the president freely fire top officials, and will officials implement legitimate policies they personally oppose?
On those intentionally narrow tests, he says, 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 army saluted and executed. It was sent to American cities over the objections of governors and mayors when it was ordered. It happened boat strike in the Caribbean after a classified Justice Department memo reportedly indemnified participants against prosecution.
None of this represents a crisis of citizen control. In contrast, citizen control is working exactly as planned. For Schake, this is the crux of the matter. America’s crisis is real, but it is political, and Americans should not expect the military to save them from it.
Drawing on Eliot Cohen’s Great Commandment: Soldiers, Soldiers, and Wartime Leaders and Peter D. Feaver’s principle of citizenship “the right to be wrong,” he provides an example in which citizens remain supreme and the military’s job is to obey legal orders, advise honestly, and resign when conscience calls for it—but never replace its judgment with a civilian decision, even in defense of democracy.
That last clause is what makes the book a truly new entry into a crowded field. It separates him from the so-called crisis of civil control school, which is witnessing 30 years of erosion, and from HR McMaster’s. Lack of Responsibilitywhich Schake has made a point it relies on “innocence about politics at the highest levels” and considers defying the president in public as a standard of military duty—a standard, he warns, that a disloyal officer can apply as easily as an honest man.
So, for Schake, the problem isn’t just Trump and Hegseth at Quantico. It is also Joe Biden, as a candidate in 2020, with the belief that the military will “escort him (Trump) from the White House with a big message” if he refuses to leave; campaign contracts that cast veterans as stage characters; Democratically Senator Mark Warner to suggest that “a uniformed army can save us from this president”; video in which Democratic members of Congress reminded service members of their duty to refuse illegal orders, which, as Schake observed in March essay in Atlanticit made compliance with the law itself “seem like a political act.”
The assumption that the military will reject Trump’s orders and therefore save the republic is not only wrong, it is a category mistake. Feaver and Heidi Urben put the action on display case against him in Foreign Affairs in September 2024: Any official who tries to defy the order will face conflicting legal guidance, replacement, and personal damages, and a determined president can shut down the chain until he gets compliance. Lindsay P. Cohn of the Naval War College to put it more strictly in Law Tax in February 2025: The removal of Hegseth reduces the possibility of a military coup and increases the possibility of obeying bad military orders.
Schake’s version of the point, in a Payment of the law piece Last June, it should have settled the matter: “The military cannot save us from the political leaders elected by the American people. And we shouldn’t want them.” The book takes that a step further: “Not only can our military not save America’s democracy, it can’t even save itself from democracy.”
None of this means that Schake sees the military as obligated to obey any order. The law is clear that officials must refuse illegal orders. The extreme scenario — Trump, impeached and removed by the Senate, directing the Army to shoot at the Capitol — is clearly on the rejected side of the line. The problem is that the public expects their military to reject immoral orders, not just illegal ones.
For Schake, many of the cases being discussed — threatening to use the Sedition Act against political opponents, targeting drug boats on the high seas, and including moving the National Guard into cities that governors oppose — “are legitimate but wrong.” He believes that the military will largely, and should, enforce this.
In it Payment of the law Schake says that a system that relies on individual flag officers to draw the line for cases “invites two negative outcomes: disobedience and ineffectiveness.” By the time the hypothetical Capitol-shelling is played out, every other check — Congress, the courts, the voters — has already broken down. The army, then, would still be the last line of defense. Schake insists that letting it come to that is a failure, not a litmus test.
Finally, Schake fears that every act of civilian politics that the military keeps quiet, as the generals did at Quantico, makes it easier for the next one to question it. Over time, the costs are compounded. What follows, Schake warns, is an “increasingly one-sided military”—not a disobedient people, but one recruited and developed under conditions where its two attempts at civilian control cannot be achieved, and therefore ultimately a different institution than the one on which those attempts were built.
The challenge is that the nature of civilian control means that the military cannot push back these political efforts. That is why, ultimately, it is the citizens more than the women and men in uniform who need to read The State and the Soldiers.
