A Military Coups in America: Revolution or Regime Change

Most people assume it couldn't happen in the States: troops in the streets, martial law, political executions on a massive scale. It's a subject that has been treated in the past. This essay, Origins of the American Military Coups of 2012 by Lieutenant Colonel Dunlap at the Army War College, is particularly worth reading. Still, it seems unlikely at first. The American military has been under the perfect control of the civilian government ever since the founding of the country. It's composed of patriotic American citizens sworn to defend their country, men drawn from every walk of life and every part of the nation, who would never take up arms en mass against the population. Coups d'etats are a problem faced by other countries, basket-cases with corrupt governments and restive populations split by a mix of mutually repulsive, vehement ideologies or simple ethnic division.

Actually, put that way it doesn't seem so foreign, does it...?

A coups in the US is a probably a certainty in the near-to-mid term. Probability theory alone suggests that, at least once in US history, there will be a military coups. After all, no state ever lasts forever, and military intervention is the most common type of sharply discontinuous political event that leads to the death of one state and the birth of another (climate change, historically, is a distant second.) Military intervention can either be external - successful invasion by another country - or internal, ie, a military coups. When you're talking about the towering giants of history, military revolts generally precede outside conquest.

Now, you could apply Copernican probability theory - the assumption that there is nothing inherently special about the place or time from which we observe - to the question of how long the current constitutional order will survive. It's been around since 1787, so there's a 5 percent chance that the union is in it's final 11 years of existence, and a 5 percent chance that it will last for another for and a half millenia. And, of course, a 90% chance that it's remaining span is somewhere in between the two.

Copernican theory is a clumsy tool, however, for use only when no other data points exist. Data about the US abounds.

If you're talking about a coups, politics is one of the areas that deserves close attention. Part of the agreement the military, in effect, has with the political class is that they trust the politicians to make the call when it comes to going, or not going, to war. This requires that the military believes the political class to have the best interests of the country at heart and, beyond that, to know the best way of realizing that interest. The contract has held for almost two and a half centuries, and has largely worked out for the best. But there's nothing to say it couldn't sour in the future (and in fact, there's plenty of evidence it's souring right now.) If the common perception amongst the population that politicians were nothing more than venal, corrupt criminals were to spread to the troops as well, the military might well decide at some point that enough is enough, and simply remove the government from office.

Here's one scenario: Washington in general, and Congress specifically, finally puts an end to the Iraq war. The US military is withdrawn as fast as it can, and the country collapses into bloodshed along sectarian, political, and ethnic lines. The consequences of that little collapse lead to a larger one; a discredited US finds itself increasingly pressed everywhere around the world. The economic fallout of that loss of credibility is grim: possibly a sharp drop in the value of the dollar, maybe even just a long-term period of slow growth while the rest of the world rockets ahead (one or two percent in the US, but a decade of twenty percent in China, India, and Brazil....) Precisely what the consequences would be is hard to tell, but one lesson of history is that no war has ever been lost without some sizable fraction of wealth being taken afterwards from the loser.

Meanwhile, the military seethes. They know they could have won the war, but were betrayed from the top, sold out for cheap and ephemeral political gain. It becomes a bitter narrative, endlessly muttered by by soldiers, by former soldiers, and by their supporters. Their numbers grow; as the economy struggles, more people are willing to believe the tale of betrayal and treason at the top, especially with corruption and scandal becoming more apparent by the day. Finally things boil over. Congress is dissolved (ie imprisoned or executed), the president is replaced with a five-star general, and the American people wake up the next day to find themselves living in a military dictatorship.

This is perhaps the uglier scenario, driven as it would be by vengeful bitterness. It could be made uglier still: the successful nuking of an American city, for instance, would in this scenario turn Americans against their government with even greater malice. Media and academia, too, insofar as they're seen as supporters of that government, would come in for rough treatment. This is the kind of scenario where the streets might run red with blood, where hundreds of thousands might 'disappear' in detention centers and secret executions.

The second scenario is not necessarily so grim. The premise is the opposite to that of the first: America doesn't lose Iraq. In fact it succeeds, and proceeds to perform regime change on a regular basis, once or twice per decade taking out an odious government and inviting in a massive global network of NGOs and corporations to rebuild the country afterwards, establishing the conditions for a democracy and then protecting whatever starts to grow. This is essentially Thomas Barnett's view, and it is a strategy that bears thinking about. Executed correctly, it would benefit the entire world, from the country being invaded (which in exchange for some short-term instability is presented with both freedom from repression and economic opportunity), to the global community (who would gain in both a newly opened economy, and a reduced security threat from a basket-case regime.)

The danger comes in the downstream risk to America's own political order. Once again, were the general perception that the civilian government is deeply corrupt, counter-productive or even injurious to the country's interests to deepen, what would there be to stop the military from executing regime change at home? Indeed nothing would be easier. There wouldn't even be a military to oppose them.

Rome's transition from republic to empire bears comparison. For centuries, Rome made a habit of sending its army out, conquering foreign lands, and establishing Roman governance. Practice made them good at it, until Caeser was able to roll up the whole of Gaul within just a decade ... after which he made the logical connection that if a city could be conquered and her lands taken away, well, Rome was just another city and the same principle applied.

Caeser, of course, sought personal gain, though he justified his actions by pointing to the corruption of the Senate, claiming that it acted not on the side of the people but for the wealthy minority. His stated intentions were not to win a throne but to restore the old republic; almost certainly, these statements were mere public relations. But would a modern general be so cynical? One can well imagine some Caeser ordering the dissolution of Congress, all the while stressing that his motivation was merely to clean the slate and go back to a better day ... and actually meaning it. As an example, the gerrymandering of congressional districts is widely seen as a gross perversion of the democratic system; the coups leader could declare that elections based on such a system fail the test of free and fair elections, and all leaders so elected thus utterly illegitimate. First he would occupy Washington, banishing Congress from the city. Next, he would plead for cooperation and patience from the American people; the military government would last only so long as it would take new elections to be held, and that - given the American peoples' boundless experience in conducting elections - would likely be a very short time, almost certainly less than a year. In fact, there's no reason not to let all or most of the sitting congress run for their seats; competing in a fair arena (ie, congressional districts modeled more like third-grade shapes and less like regions of the Mandelbrot set) most of those congressmen would likely lose anyways, and if they were allowed to run it would do a lot to increase the perception of fairness.

Of course, there's no reason the people would have to passively allow their government to be dismantled, but it's worth keeping in mind that general confidence in presidential and congressional competence (19% and 14% respectively) are dwarfed by confidence in the military (64%.) The scenario presented above requires only that this massive divide continue long enough for some old warrior to decide to use that political capital to affect change back home.

There's also no overwhelming reason that the coups leader would have to be true to his word. He could, like Caeser, use reform as merely a pretext to the seizure of power. Even if he didn't, the possibility of another military coups would be eternally at the back of everyone's mind. Nevertheless, this second scenario is quite a bit more user-friendly than than the first; America, rather than becoming a nightmare of repressive government, would in all likelihood remain a livable country, as the transition from old republic to new republic, or republic to whatever comes next, would be managed in a much less destructive fashion. If a military coups is indeed in the long run inevitable, I for one would prefer it to follow the second rather than the first scenario.

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