Scenario: Coup in 2012

by Monte Paulsen

Gregory D. Foster warns of "a serious breakdown in civilian oversight of the military," in the fall issue of the Washington Quarterly. Foster calls it "a crisis marked by the failure of civilian officials in both the executive and legislative branches of the federal government to exercise discerning, responsible authority over a parochial military establishment that is wedded to an archaic conception of war and self, insatiably greedy for resources... disturbingly politicized (yet, ironically, politically tone-deaf) at the top, and beset by largely unrecognized but nevertheless pervasive civic illiteracy within its own ranks."

Foster is no peacenik. The West Point graduate and former Vietnam infantry commander is director of research at the National Defense University in Washington. Yet Foster warns that civilian control of the U.S. armed forces is slipping, in large part because of the culture of secrecy and separatism that has grown up around the military since the end of the Cold War.

Col. Charles J. Dunlap Jr. also warns of a collapse of civil-military relations as a result of excessive secrecy. In the U.S. Air Force Institute for National Security Studies, the Air Force judge advocate wrote an essay in the form of a fictitious letter from the future describing the military coup in the year 2012.

"In the mid-1990s, the overclassification problem arose with respect to the military's burgeoning involvement in information warfare, particularly offensive information warfare. Military leaders coyly declined to discuss the topic, citing high-security classifications. Indeed, the subject was so grotesquely overclassified that even within the armed forces and the civilian defense establishment few knew any of the particulars," Dunlap wrote.

Fortunately for us, Dunlap returned the U.S. government to civilian control in an equally imaginary counter-coup in 2015.