In what’s been known as a “Friday night massacre” on the Pentagon, President Donald Trump eliminated six prime generals or admirals on Feb. 21, 2025, together with Air Drive Normal C.Q. Brown and Navy Admiral Lisa Franchetti. Trump additionally fired navy attorneys who advise senior officers on the legality of their conduct in fight and at house.
Over on the FBI, the president has tapped loyalists Kash Patel and Dan Bongino to direct the manager department’s largest inner safety company. These males have little administrative expertise in federal legislation enforcement however have repeated Trump’s lies concerning the 2020 election.
Trump has reportedly used denialism – about Joe Biden profitable the 2020 election and that Jan. 6 entailed pro-Trump protesters violently assaulting law enforcement officials – to assist vet appointees for senior nationwide safety and intelligence posts. Loyalty exams can display screen for appointees who will enthusiastically perform a president’s agenda and comply with orders – even when requested to interrupt the legislation.
Such coordinated personnel modifications – firing Pentagon attorneys, appointing loyalists to guide the FBI and deciding on Trump’s private bodyguard to guide a safety service – are according to a technique of “personalizing” the safety forces.
That personalization is a trademark of strongman rule all through the world.
President Donald Trump greets members of the Joint Chiefs of Workers at a joint session of Congress on the U.S. Capitol on March 4, 2025.
AP Picture/Julia Demaree Nikhinson
Loyalty to the chief, not the legislation
Safety pressure personalism occurs when leaders reshape the nation’s safety forces by purging nonpartisan, law-abiding officers and selling loyal officers who would by no means rise by means of the ranks on benefit.
Whereas an expert navy in a democracy is loyal to the Structure, personalist safety forces are loyal to their chief.
Typically this course of entails recruiting personnel from the chief’s get together or allied ethnic, tribal or extremist teams. It might even embody making a paramilitary pressure, presidential guard or a brand new particular forces unit staffed with officers and rank-and-file loyal to the chief. These forces then stay outdoors of the conventional navy chain of command.
Repressing dissent – and democracy
When leaders put loyalists answerable for the lads with weapons, it turns into simpler to repress opposition from residents, political figures and any dissenting navy leaders.
That’s for 3 causes.
First, personalised safety forces usually tend to comply with the chief’s orders to shoot peaceable anti-government protesters. Safety forces loyal to Nicaragua’s president, Daniel Ortega, killed roughly 300 protesters in 2018 and 2019 when civil society teams mobilized to protest Ortega’s proposed pension cuts. Loyalist navy or paramilitary forces in Russia and Belarus have equally quashed public dissent in recent times.
Second, as a result of residents typically know that personalised safety forces usually tend to shoot residents than to defend them in opposition to international threats, opposition teams are much less more likely to manage a protest. This makes it simpler for leaders to silence unbiased media, jail opposition political candidates, stuff poll bins and steal votes in order that they by no means lose one other election.
A couple of years after Ortega’s forces killed protesters within the streets, he jailed seven opposition presidential candidates and claimed to have gained the 2021 election.
Third, personalism of safety forces weakens the ability of different teams which may in any other case constrain the chief, equivalent to elites within the ruling political get together and even generals who oppose a pacesetter’s energy seize.
If elites worry loyal safety brokers, they have a tendency to maintain their mouths shut after they disagree with the chief – or else, analysis reveals, face a purge. Generals, too: Analysis finds that loyal safety forces cut back the chance of navy coup makes an attempt.
Leaders who don’t hand over energy
Our information on safety pressure personalization in autocracies signifies that when leaders put loyalists answerable for safety forces, eradicating these leaders from energy peacefully by means of elections or protest turns into way more troublesome.
Take the instance of Syria, the place President Hafez Assad got here to energy after a profitable navy coup in 1971. The nation had skilled greater than a dozen coup makes an attempt since 1946. The most important menace to Assad’s energy was one other navy coup.
To attenuate this menace, he created a customized safety pressure by selling fellow Alawites, a minority ethno-religious group, to the senior ranks of the Syrian navy. Assad sponsored navy housing for loyal officers and created an overlapping community of family-controlled safety items outdoors the formal navy.
Nevertheless it was helpful for enabling the Assad household to rob the nation blind and be sure that the chief’s son, Bashar Assad, succeeded his father.
Nationwide law enforcement officials assault opposition demonstrators in a protest in opposition to Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega’s authorities in Managua on March 30, 2019.
Maynor Valenzuela/AFP through Getty Pictures
Syria didn’t have free and honest elections below the Assads, and ruling get together elites couldn’t examine the chief’s energy. When residents mobilized peacefully in 2011 to oust the Assad regime, loyal safety forces killed and imprisoned tens of hundreds of Syrians.
The Assads’ reign of terror solely ended after 12 years of brutal civil battle.
Observe the cash
Personalised safety forces want cash – each to make sure loyalty and to amass the weapons wanted when the chief orders violent repression.
So leaders who personalize their safety forces should funnel enormous sums of cash to probably the most loyal items, typically making them extra highly effective than the common military.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, for instance, receives income from state oil exports and controls sanction-busting smuggling networks. Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s Particular Guard items, although smaller than the common navy, at all times had higher gear and coaching.
In 2003, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni assigned his son, Muhoozi Kainerugaba, to guide a brand new Presidential Guard Brigade and gave this unit the job of combating terrorism so he might management navy support from the U.S. The longtime chief’s son now instructions all the Ugandan Armed Forces. Age 81 and together with his son answerable for the lads with weapons, Museveni appears set to win his eighth time period in workplace subsequent yr.
Safety forces personalization within the US?
The purges on the Pentagon in late February won’t rework the U.S. safety equipment into a customized pressure in a single day, nor will they probably spur the navy to oust Trump. Although the Structure establishes civilian management over the navy, senior officers can nonetheless resist strain from Trump to quash protest.
However the firings do spark issues about politicizing the navy. So do different strikes by Trump that sign better ambitions to personalize the safety forces, equivalent to deciding on loyalists to guide the FBI and Secret Service and purging the navy attorneys who assist troopers abide by the legislation.
Have a look at the brand new faces and comply with the cash. Will the Trump administration bypass the senior ranks to advertise junior officers whose navy careers rely on Trump remaining in energy? Will the US$50 billion “savings” that Protection Secretary Pete Hegseth needs to extract from the Protection Division as a substitute fund a brand new safety pressure?
Probably the most severe signal of safety personalization within the U.S. could be the creation of a brand new pressure outdoors the common navy chain of command – suppose the Division of Authorities Effectivity, however with weapons. Professional-Trump navy contractors are already calling for the federal government to fund a “small army of private citizens empowered to make arrests” and deport immigrants.
If Trump seeks an unconstitutional third time period in 2028, one potential state of affairs might play out: A loyalist praetorian guard like that might be a menace to kill protesters and struggle safety items nonetheless loyal to the Structure.
