On the last day of September 2025, hundreds of generals and admirals from across the world were summoned to the military base in Quantico, Virginia, where they sat on folding chairs and listened to the president and the secretary of defense deliver what turned out to be a pair of campaign-style speeches. Flying the senior leadership of the United States military in created considerable expense and operational disruption, but the brass showed up because their civilian superiors had ordered them to. They sat stoically silent through the political program, as they had been trained to. Then they flew back to their posts.

The exercise demonstrated nothing about strategy or readiness, and a great deal about the military chain of command—chiefly, that it would hold under almost any indignity.

On the last day of September 2025, hundreds of generals and admirals from across the world were summoned to the military base in Quantico, Virginia, where they sat on folding chairs and listened to the president and the secretary of defense deliver what turned out to be a pair of campaign-style speeches. Flying the senior leadership of the United States military in created considerable expense and operational disruption, but the brass showed up because their civilian superiors had ordered them to. They sat stoically silent through the political program, as they had been trained to. Then they flew back to their posts.

The exercise demonstrated nothing about strategy or readiness, and a great deal about the military chain of command—chiefly, that it would hold under almost any indignity.

That stoic silence displayed in that hall is the central subject 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 U.S. civil-military relations to appear in a generation and, at this moment, it deserves the broadest possible readership. Schake argues that this silence is both the success of the U.S. system and the source of the current danger. The military will hold. The question her book forces readers to confront is what, exactly, will happen while the military holds.

Schake is not a kneejerk-liberal critic of the Trump administration. She was a director in George W. Bush’s National Security Council, a senior policy advisor on the McCain-Palin campaign, and a Hoover fellow. She is the former deputy director-general of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, and the current Kissinger chair at the Library of Congress. She co-edited a book on civil-military relations with Jim Mattis in 2016 and worked for Colin Powell on the Joint Staff in the early 1990s. She has paid actual professional costs, on the Republican side, for her principles; Hegseth fired her from the Defense Policy Board in April 2025. As a result, her position cannot be dismissed as partisan, because it is conservative and institutionalist all the way down.

The book’s diagnostic frame is simpler than its 250-year empirical sweep suggests. Schake boils civilian control down to two stress tests: Can a president freely dismiss senior officers, and will officers execute lawful policies they personally oppose?

On those deliberately narrow metrics, she argues, 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 military has saluted and complied. It deployed to U.S. cities over the objections of governors and mayors when ordered to. It carried out boat strikes in the Caribbean after a classified Justice Department memo reportedly indemnified the participants against prosecution.

None of this represents a crisis of civilian control. To the contrary, civilian control is working precisely as designed. For Schake, this is the crux of the matter. The United States’ crisis is real, but it’s political, and Americans should not expect the military to save them from it.

Drawing on Eliot Cohen’s Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leaders in Wartime and Peter D. Feaver’s principle of the civilian “right to be wrong,” she offers a model in which civilians retain primacy and the military’s job is to obey legal orders, advise honestly, and resign when conscience requires—but never to substitute its judgment for civilian judgment, even in defense of democracy.

That last clause is what makes the book a genuinely fresh intervention in a crowded field. It separates her from the so-called crisis of civilian control school, which sees 30 years of quiet erosion, and from H.R. McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty, which Schake has argued rests on “an innocence about politics at the highest levels” and treats publicly defying the president as the standard of military duty—a standard, she warns, that an unscrupulous officer can invoke as readily as a scrupulous one.

Thus, for Schake, the problem is not only Trump and Hegseth at Quantico. It is also Joe Biden, as a candidate in 2020, confident that the military would “escort [Trump] from the White House with great dispatch” if he refused to leave; campaign conventions deploying veterans as stage props; Democratic Sen. Mark Warner suggesting that “the uniformed military may help save us from this president”; a video in which Democratic members of Congress reminded service members of their obligation to refuse unlawful orders, which, as Schake observed in a March essay in the Atlantic, made compliance with the law itself “seem like a political act.”

The fantasy that the military will refuse Trump’s orders and thereby save the republic is not just wrong, it is a category error. Feaver and Heidi Urben laid out the practical case against it in Foreign Affairs in September 2024: Any officer attempting to refuse an order would face contradictory legal guidance, replacement, and personal ruin, and a determined president can fire down the chain until he finds compliance. Lindsay P. Cohn of the Naval War College put it more sharply in Lawfare in February 2025: The Hegseth purges actually reduce the likelihood of a military coup and increase the likelihood of military compliance with bad orders.

Schake’s own version of the point, in a Lawfare piece last June, is the one that should settle the matter: “The military cannot save us from the political leaders Americans elect. And we should not want them to.” The book takes that point a step further: “Not only can our military not save American democracy, it can’t even save itself from democracy.”

None of this means that Schake regards the military as bound to obey any order whatsoever. The law is clear that officers must refuse illegal orders. The extreme hypothetical—Trump, impeached and removed by the Senate, directing the Army to fire on the Capitol—falls plainly on the refusable side of that line. The trouble is that the public expects their military to refuse immoral orders, not just illegal ones.

For Schake, many of the cases under debate—threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act against political opponents, striking drug boats on the high seas, and federalizing National Guard deployments in cities whose governors object—are “lawful but awful.” She believes that the military largely will, and should, carry these out.

In her Lawfare piece, Schake argues that a system that depends on individual flag officers drawing the line case by case “invites two bad outcomes: insubordination and ineffectualness.” By the time the Capitol-shelling hypothetical is in play, every other check—Congress, the courts, the electorate—has already broken. The military, then, would still be the last line of defense. Schake insists that letting it come to that is the failure, not the litmus test.

Ultimately, Schake fears that each act of civilian politicization that the military weathers in silence, as the generals did in the hall in Quantico, makes the next one easier to ask of it. In time, the costs compound. What comes next, Schake warns, is “an increasingly partisan military”—not insubordinate, but recruited and shaped under conditions her two tests of civilian control cannot catch, and therefore eventually a different institution than the one those tests were built for.

The challenge is that the nature of civilian control means that the military cannot push back against these efforts at politicization. Which is why, ultimately, it is civilians more than the women and men in uniform who need to read The State and the Soldier.

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