https://cmarmitage.substack.com/p/coup-proofing-inside-the-pentagons
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On May 28, 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed a memo ordering every branch of the military to “prioritize and broadly advertise” Department of Homeland Security jobs to troops leaving the service. The memo told commanders to approve requests from departing troops to spend their final months interning with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection “to the maximum extent possible.” Michael Miller, who directs the Pentagon’s office for troops transitioning to civilian life, said the department typically does not recommend any specific career to separating service members. This time the department picked one.
That memo is the last step in a process called “coup proofing.” The first step is who the military is trying to recruit.
Hegseth told military recruiters in December 2025 that the rise in enlistments “is a reflection of the belief they have in civilian leadership.” The civilian leadership is Hegseth and Donald Trump. The Secretary of Defense says young people are enlisting because of the two of them, and his word is the only data the department has, because the Pentagon’s youth poll does not ask about politics. Three months earlier, NBC News had reported that Anthony Tata, the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, was leading planning for a recruiting campaign built around the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The slogan under discussion was “Charlie has awakened a generation of warriors,” and the plan would have turned Turning Point USA’s 1,200 high school chapters and 900 college chapters into recruitment centers. A Pentagon spokeswoman called the report “100 percent wrong.”
Three months after that denial, the Department of Homeland Security recruited at Turning Point under Kirk’s name. On Dec. 19, 2025, DHS parked a BearCat armored vehicle at Turning Point’s AmericaFest conference in Phoenix, set up recruiting tables for ICE and its other agencies, and posted: “We’re looking for American patriots willing to defend the homeland, and honor the vision of America Charlie Kirk fought for.” The conference drew about 30,000 attendees. The Pentagon disowned a Kirk campaign in September. DHS held one in December.
The Department of Defense’s current ad campaign debuted on June 14, 2026, during the UFC Freedom 250 fights on the White House South Lawn, where the Pentagon had recruited hundreds of troops to sit in the crowd in dress uniform, at their own expense, subject to height and weight requirements.
So what’s all this about?
James Quinlivan, a RAND Corporation analyst, described militaries built for loyalty in a 1999 study in the journal International Security. He called the practice “coup-proofing.” The regimes he studied chose their commanders by family, tribe, sect and ethnicity before competence. They also built a second armed force outside the regular military, recruited it for loyalty, funded it separately, and gave it the missions the army might refuse. Saddam Hussein built the Republican Guard. Hafez al-Assad gave his brother a private army. In the United States the regular military is bound by the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which bars it from civilian policing. ICE sits outside that law.
The regular army is being emptied of the officers who would refuse an unlawful order, and the removals have landed hardest on Black and female officers. On the night of Feb. 21, 2025, Trump fired Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Hegseth fired Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the chief of naval operations, the same night, along with the judge advocates general of three services, the uniformed lawyers who tell commanders whether an order is legal. Days later he called such lawyers “roadblocks to orders that are given” by a commander in chief. In August 2025 Hegseth fired Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, two months after Kruse’s analysts drafted an assessment that contradicted Trump’s claim that U.S. strikes had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear sites.
In April 2026 Hegseth fired Gen. Randy George, the Army chief of staff, after George and Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll refused to strike four names from a list of 33 officers recommended for promotion to one-star general. Two of the four are Black men and the other two are women. By September 2026, The New York Times counted more than 80 generals and admirals fired or blocked from promotion, more than half of them Black or female, and military officials told the Times that the purge “does not appear to be driven by job performance.”
Hegseth stated the standard for staying himself. On Sept. 30, 2025, he summoned hundreds of generals and admirals to Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia. “No more identity months, DEI offices or dudes in dresses,” he told them, and then: “If the words I’m speaking today are making your heart sink, then you should do the honorable thing and resign.” Every service member was ordered to watch or read the speech. One year later, from the same stage, he said, “we fired 10% of the generals and admirals” across the force, and he ordered every service to cut 20% of its generals’ and admirals’ positions by Jan. 1, 2027.
The Pentagon carried out the “dudes in dresses” line within the year. About 1,000 transgender troops took voluntary separation in 2025, and in September 2026 the department began searching medical records to identify the rest.
The filter that would have kept extremists out came down the same week as the first firings. At his confirmation hearing, Hegseth said the focus on extremism had “created a climate inside our ranks that feel political.” He had been pulled from his D.C. National Guard unit’s inauguration duty in January 2021 after a fellow Guard member flagged his Jerusalem Cross tattoo as an extremist symbol, and he has written that extremism in the military is “fake” and “manufactured.” Four days after the Feb. 21 firings, the Pentagon inspector general’s office cancelled its review of how the services train troops to spot extremists. A Pentagon-funded study at the University of Maryland had already found that the share of extremists with military backgrounds committing ideological crimes had doubled in recent years.
The budget law Trump signed on July 4, 2025, funded the second facet of the coup-proofing process. It gave ICE roughly $75 billion over four years. By January 2026 the agency had hired 12,000 new officers and agents, more than doubling its officer corps to 22,000.
ICE’s minimum hiring age dropped to 18, and training was cut from 22 weeks to as little as 42 days. For 2026 the agency budgeted $100 million for what its own planning document calls “wartime recruitment,” with ads aimed at people who have attended UFC fights or listened to “patriotic podcasts,” The Washington Post reported.
In January 2026, agents of the two agencies named in Hegseth’s memo shot and killed two residents of Minneapolis. An ICE agent shot Renée Good, a Minneapolis mother, in her car on Jan. 7; he has not been charged, and MAGA donors raised more than $1,000,000 for him. Border Patrol agents shot Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital, on Jan. 24.
Do they want a force that follows unlawful orders? On Sept. 2, 2025, a U.S. strike on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean left two survivors clinging to the wreckage, and a second strike killed them. The Washington Post reported that Hegseth had ordered “kill everybody.” Hegseth denies it, and Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley, who ordered the second strike, told lawmakers in a classified briefing in December 2025 that he was given no such order. The Pentagon’s own Law of War Manual uses firing on shipwrecked survivors as its example of a “clearly illegal” order.
Adm. Alvin Holsey, then commander of U.S. forces in Latin America, objected to the legality of the strikes in December 2025. Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, a retired Navy captain, told troops in a November 2025 video that they may refuse illegal orders. Hegseth censured Kelly on Jan. 5, 2026, and moved to cut his retired rank and pension until a federal judge blocked it.
Do they want to control what the troops hear? In October 2025, nearly every outlet in the Pentagon press corps, Fox News included, surrendered its credentials over new rules against gathering unapproved information. The Pentagon replaced them with more than 60 “new media” reporters, including Turning Point USA’s own outlet and far right activist Laura Loomer.
Do they want veterans with the extremism screen off? Maryland researchers found that about 85 percent of extremist offenders with military ties are veterans. Trump pardoned the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys convicted for Jan. 6. ICE’s 2026 plan pushes its ads to phones that pass through military bases, NASCAR races, college campuses and gun shows.
Do they want a force the courts cannot constrain? On Sept. 2, 2025, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer in San Francisco ruled that the Los Angeles troop deployment violated the Posse Comitatus Act and warned of a “national police force.” In December, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Trump v. Illinois that the administration had no authority to deploy the Guard in Chicago. Neither ruling touches ICE. A soldier who joins ICE keeps the training and leaves the legal limit behind.
So the process as outlined looks like this: recruit political zealots, remove the officers and lawyers who object to unlawful conduct, turn off the extremism screens, and send the graduates to a rapidly growing ICE that the law has not effectively constrained.
Now ask yourself, what are they building?
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