The Friday Night Massacre: Firing the Joint Chiefs
On February 21, 2025, the administration fired the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs (first ever), the Chief of Naval Operations (first female CNO), and the Coast Guard Commandant (first woman to lead any military branch)—all in one night. This article examines what five former Defense Secretaries meant when they issued an unprecedented joint condemnation, and what the purge reveals about coup-proofing dynamics.
Analytical Frame: Huntington, Nordlinger, and “Coup-Proofing by Stacking”
Civil-military relations scholarship gives a precise vocabulary for what “purges” do in institutional terms.
Samuel Huntington’s classic distinction between objective civilian control and subjective civilian control is the cleanest starting point. Under objective control, civilians govern by protecting military professionalism—maintaining apolitical promotion norms, preserving the officer corps as a technical institution, and relying on law and professional ethics to keep force aligned with constitutional ends. Under subjective control, civilians govern by politicizing the military—shaping appointments and careers so that loyalty to an ideological project (or leader) becomes the pathway to advancement.
Eric Nordlinger’s work on coups complements Huntington by emphasizing how legitimacy and perceived permissibility shape coercive institutions. In Nordlinger’s logic, when a regime fears “legitimacy deflation” or anticipates conflict over contested orders, it has incentives to reshape the coercive apparatus so that potential veto players inside the security sector are neutralized.
The modern comparative literature calls one common mechanism stacking: replacing or bypassing professional promotion criteria to install loyalists, thereby reducing the probability of resistance to questionable orders. Lindsay Cohn’s analysis in this tradition highlights a paradox: stacking can reduce coup risk against the executive while increasing the risk that the military becomes usable for domestic political aims—and less effective for national defense.
The Night Of
On a single Friday night—February 21, 2025—the administration executed the most sweeping purge of senior military leadership in American history:
General Charles Q. Brown Jr., Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was fired. Brown was the second Black chairman in history (after Colin Powell) and had been confirmed by the Senate 98-0 just 16 months earlier. He had developed the strategy that defeated ISIS. No Chairman of the Joint Chiefs had ever been fired before.
Admiral Lisa Franchetti, Chief of Naval Operations, was fired. Franchetti was the first woman to serve as CNO and the first woman to sit on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Defense Department refused to provide any justification for her removal.
Admiral Linda Fagan, Coast Guard Commandant, had been fired within hours of the inauguration in January—while waiting to have her photo taken with the new president at the Commander-in-Chief Ball. She was the first woman to lead any branch of the U.S. military.
The Judge Advocates General of the Army and Air Force—the top military lawyers—were also removed. Lieutenant General Charles L. Plummer (Air Force TJAG since 2022) and Lieutenant General Joseph B. Berger III (Army) were dismissed without replacement.
By the end of the night, no female four-star officers remained in the United States military.
The Stated Rationale
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was explicit about the justification. In his words: "Any general, admiral, whatever, that was involved in any of the DEI woke s--t has got to go."
General Brown's firing was specifically linked to a 2020 video he recorded after George Floyd's murder, in which he discussed his experiences with racial discrimination in the military. A video where a decorated combat veteran reflected on racism he had personally experienced was characterized as disqualifying for command.
Admiral Franchetti's firing was justified with claims she was "unqualified" and had been selected for "optics" rather than merit—despite her 38-year career, command of carrier strike groups, and unanimous professional endorsements.
The pattern was clear: the criterion for removal was not incompetence but perceived ideological deviation. Officers who had acknowledged the existence of racism or supported diversity initiatives were targeted regardless of their combat records or professional achievements.
The Lawyers
The firing of the Judge Advocates General requires separate analysis because it reveals something beyond ideological purging.
JAGs are the military's internal legal authority. They advise commanders on the lawfulness of orders, ensure compliance with the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and serve as the institutional check that prevents illegal commands from being executed.
Defense Secretary Hegseth explained why they had to go: he didn't want lawyers who would be "roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief."
In Huntington’s terms, this is a direct strike on the institutional infrastructure that makes objective control viable: professionalism depends not only on training and promotion norms but on internal systems that encode legal restraint and responsibility. Removing senior legal officers is a way of reducing the probability that unlawful commands are slowed, documented, or refused.
Coup-Proofing Has Costs
Coup-proofing has costs. Caitlin Talmadge's research documents how these practices degrade military effectiveness: promotion patterns shift from merit to loyalty, training focuses on regime protection over combat readiness, command structures fragment to prevent coordination, and information restrictions prevent officers from gaining situational awareness.
The February purges demonstrated these dynamics in real time.
General Brown had developed the strategy that defeated ISIS. Admiral Franchetti had commanded carrier strike groups. Admiral Fagan had decades of operational experience. Their replacements were selected for loyalty rather than equivalent achievement.
The nomination of Lieutenant General Dan Caine to replace Brown as Chairman was particularly revealing. Caine, a three-star general, had never led a combatant command or served as a service chief—the traditional prerequisites for the Chairmanship. His appointment required a "national interest waiver" to bypass standard requirements. His qualification was not expertise but perceived loyalty.
This tradeoff—loyalty for competence—is characteristic of coup-proofed militaries. It makes them less effective at their nominal mission (national defense) while more useful for their actual purpose (regime protection).
The Warning from 2021
In December 2021, three retired generals—Paul D. Eaton, Antonio M. Taguba, and Steven M. Anderson—published an op-ed in the Washington Post warning about potential military involvement in a disputed 2024 election. They urged the Defense Department to conduct "war games" simulating scenarios where active-duty troops or veterans might support an insurrection.
Their fear was that partisan polarization had infected the military sufficiently that some personnel might follow political loyalty over constitutional obligation. They called for immediate action to reinforce constitutional norms within the chain of command.
Instead, the chain of command was purged to ensure loyalty over constitutional fidelity. The internal checks they hoped would prevent illegal orders—the senior officers, the JAGs, the professional culture—were systematically removed.
The Self-Coup Equation
Research on self-coups—where elected leaders seize extraordinary power that dismantles constitutional constraints—identifies the military's stance as the decisive variable. More than 80% of self-coup attempts by democratically elected leaders succeed. The key predictor of success is whether the armed forces back the undertaking.
This is why coup-proofing matters. A leader planning to operate outside constitutional limits needs confidence that security forces will comply with illegal orders. The traditional American military—with its professional ethos, legal oversight, and constitutional loyalty—might refuse. A purged military, stacked with loyalists and stripped of legal advisors, is less likely to resist.
The February massacre created a military leadership selected for compliance rather than constitutional fidelity. It removed the lawyers whose job was to say no. It signaled that future advancement requires political loyalty. It replaced professional officers with ones chosen for ideological alignment.
If the goal were simply to lead an effective military, none of this makes sense. If the goal is to ensure the military will follow orders regardless of legality, it makes perfect sense.
The Pattern Continues
The February 21 purge was not an isolated event. It was part of a systematic effort to reshape the entire national security apparatus.
The Inspector General purge (documented in the previous article) eliminated oversight of executive agencies. Court defiance demonstrated that judicial rulings would not constrain executive action. The military purge ensured that senior commanders would not resist unconstitutional orders.
Each piece reinforces the others. Oversight is eliminated. Legal constraints are removed. Loyal commanders are installed. The architecture of constraint—the institutional mechanisms designed to prevent exactly what is happening—is being dismantled systematically.
What Resistance Would Require
Military resistance to illegal orders depends on officers willing to refuse those orders—and institutional structures that support such refusal.
The JAGs provided that institutional structure. Their job was to advise commanders that orders were unlawful, giving officers legal grounds to refuse. With the JAGs removed, officers who question orders have no institutional backing. They face the choice alone: comply or resist without support.
The senior commanders provided models of professional integrity. Officers throughout the ranks looked to the Joint Chiefs to understand what military professionalism required. With leaders selected for loyalty rather than professional values, that modeling shifts. The message to junior officers is clear: your career depends on compliance, not principle.
Resistance becomes harder when the institutions that enable it have been destroyed.
Living Under Praetorian Conditions
The Latin term "praetorian" derives from the Praetorian Guard—the Roman emperor's personal military force. Political scientists use "praetorianism" to describe systems where military forces become political actors, deploying their coercive power for partisan purposes. Huntington’s warning about praetorian politics is not “the military wants power” so much as “civilian institutions lose the capacity to channel conflict”—and coercive institutions begin to arbitrate outcomes.
The United States military was designed to be the opposite: a professional force serving constitutional governance rather than any particular leader. The norms that sustained this model—merit-based promotion, apolitical service, legal oversight, loyalty to the constitution rather than the commander-in-chief personally—developed over generations.
Those norms are being dismantled. Not gradually, through erosion, but deliberately, through purge. The February 21 massacre was not an accident or an excess of zeal. It was a strategy for ensuring that the world's most powerful military will comply with orders regardless of constitutionality.
Whether those orders will be given remains to be seen. But the preconditions for compliance have been established.
This is the twelfth article in a series examining democratic decline. The next article documents ICE's transformation into a parallel security force—tripled budget, doubled personnel, compressed training, ideological recruitment—and what authoritarian scholarship reveals about counterbalancing dynamics.