Imagine:
A school-to-military pipeline for public -- but not private -- schools.
Transgender and HIV-positive service members thrown out of the military, and COVID vaccine refusers let back in.
Senior officers being accused of disloyalty and possibly thrown out because they did something conservatives don't like.
Chapter 4 of Project 2025 lays out a conservative administration's plans for the Department of Defense (DoD). Chapter 4 resides in the Section 2 of the book titled, "The Common Defense", which includes chapters not just on the Department of Defense, but on the Departments of Homeland Security and State, the Intelligence Community, and the Agency for International Development. This placement aligns with the DoD's place among the national security apparatus.
The DoD is the nation's military instrument of power, headed by a civilian Secretary of Defense, who, along with the heads of several other agencies in this section, form a part of the President's National Security Council (NSC). More on the NSC in a minute. The chapter was written by Christopher Miller, an Army veteran who served as "Acting" Secretary of Defense from November 9th, 2020 until January 20th, 2021. "Acting" means he stepped up into the Secretary's spot when the previous Secretary left, but was never confirmed by the Senate. (Interestingly, the Secretary of Defense he stepped in for was Mark Esper, who was, at one time, Chief of Staff for the Heritage Foundation, the Project's authors!)
A prelude to the Project's intentions for the military appears in Chapter 2 ("Executive Office of the President") under the section on the NSC (see pages 50-53). The NSC is a body designated by the National Security Act of 1947 charged with advising the President on national security and foreign policy matters. The Project recommends the NSC do two specific things:
First, "take a leading role in directing the drafting and thorough review of all formal strategies: the National Security Strategy, the National Defense Strategy, the Nuclear Posture Review, the Missile Defense Strategy, etc."
Second, "rigorously review all general and flag officer promotions to prioritize the core roles and responsibilities of the military over social engineering and non-defense matters, including climate change, critical race theory, manufactured extremism, and other polarizing policies that weaken our armed forces and discourage our nation’s finest men and women from enlisting to serve in defense of our liberty" (emphasis mine).
In short, the NSC -- almost all of whom are political appointees -- should write the playbooks and and pick the people to run the military who will do what they want. This mandate to take a leading role in "directing the drafting and thorough review" of the strategies that guide the military's employment could bypass agency experts and nonpartisan officials who provide experience and continuity in these otherwise nonpartisan tasks — the people MAGAs call "the Deep State."
In the introduction to Section 2, "The Common Defense," we get the Project's thoughts about why conservatives believe the military is "a deeply troubled institution:"
First, "It has emphasized leftist politics over military readiness," and “the Biden Administration’s profoundly unserious equity agenda and vaccine mandates have taken a serious toll.” Additionally, “the atrophy of our defense industrial base, the impact ofsequestration, and effective disarmament by many U.S. allies have exacted a high toll on America’s military.” "Moreover, our military has adopted a risk-averse culture—think of masked soldiers, sailors, and airmen—rather than instilling and rewarding courage in thought and action." These problems appear to lay in policy decisions — but does the chapter's author believe the people in the military are part of the problem, too?
Answer: "The good news is that most enlisted personnel, and most officers, especially below the rank of general or admiral, continue to be patriotic defenders of liberty." Then, ominously, "But this is now Barack Obama’s general officer corps" (emphasis mine, and a quick note: 'General Officers' refer to both Admirals and Generals -- the ones with stars on their shoulders or collars. They are the most senior officers in the military, leading fleets, divisions, air wings, and more. There are about 800 of them on Active Duty throughout the military.)
The chapter itself lays out four major priorities to "reform" the DoD:
No. 1: Reestablish a culture of command accountability, nonpoliticization, and warfighting focus.
No. 2: Transform our armed forces for maximum effectiveness in an era of great-power competition.
No. 3: Provide necessary support to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) border protection operations. Border protection is a national security issue that requires sustained attention and effort by all elements of the executive branch.
No. 4: Demand financial transparency and accountability.
As for adversaries (the "great-power" competitors), the Project puts China as the first, most capable adversary, one that we have to be ready to fight soonest. Then it mentions "threats from" Russia, but treats this problem as one to be solved by 1) making allies in Europe do more for their own defense and 2) focusing on improving and modernizing our nuclear weapons. North Korea and Iran are also top adversaries — North Korea just recently achieved nuclear capability, and Iran is apparently close.
It then goes on to lay out "Needed Reforms" for the following DoD subject areas: Policy, Acquisition and Sustainment, Research and Development, Foreign Military Sales, Personnel, Intelligence, the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Space Force, Special Operations, CYBER Command, Nuclear Deterrence, and Ballistic Missile Defense. The reforms are, on the surface, aimed at accomplishing Priorities 1, 2, and 4. Interestingly, Priority 3 and the border are not mentioned again.
The proposed policy reforms, and adversary discussions, are not particularly interesting or new. These ideas appear in lots of places, from professional military journals to news stories, campaign speeches, and books like the Project. They are also not particularly controversial goals in and of themselves: more ships, better recruiting, a faster way to get technology tested and into the field, a stronger defense industrial base, fiscal discipline and transparency, and more. It's in the personnel reform proposals that we see the most detail, and the most clarity in the Project's partisan intent for the military.
How do we know this? Whenever GOP lawmakers approach the menu of reforms laid out in Chapter 4, they almost always focus on the personnel stuff. Why work to pass a leaner military budget and make defense contractor CEOs earn their pay, when you can score political points by holding up all flag officer promotions over an abortion policy, suing the DoD over a vaccine mandate, and trying to defund DEI offices? I guide your focus to the personnel reforms because that's always been their priority, at least since the Tea Party days, and certainly in the MAGA era.
Here are the Project's 5 DoD Personnel reform proposals. (all emphases mine)
1) "Rescue Recruiting and Retention." Here, the solutions include things like letting more recruiters into schools, making every public school child take military entrance exams in order to graduate (but not private school kids!), and creating more Junior ROTC units in schools. In short, a school-to-military pipeline for public, but not private, schools.
2) "Restore Standards of Lethality and Excellence." Using only one paragraph, it demands the expulsion of transgender sailors and those who are HIV-positive, because "they are predisposed to require medical treatment" and "physical fitness requirements should be blind to gender, race, ethnicity, or orientation".
3) "Eliminate politicization, reestablish trust, and accountability, and restore faith to the force." In short, everything they don't want is 'politicized'. This includes:
"Codify language to instruct senior military officers to make certain that they understand their primary duty to be ensuring the readiness of the armed forces, not pursuing a social engineering agenda."
Letting COVID vaccine refusers back in, restored to their previous ranks and with any pay they lost.
"Eliminate Marxist indoctrination and divisive critical race theory programs and abolish DEI offices and staff."
Audit the courses at military academies to remove Marxist indoctrination and eliminate tenure for academic professionals. Also look into DoD schools and "remove all inappropriate materials."
End the use of any taxpayer dollars to pay for abortion care, or "transgender surgeries."
4) "Value the military family." The Project argues that military families should get higher pay and allowances, more housing options, spouse employment opportunities and protections, expanded childcare, and education savings accounts. I'll return to this proposal in a moment.
5) "Reduce the number of generals.. Why? "The number of O-6 to O-9 officers is at an all-time high across the armed services (above World War II levels), and the actual battlefield experience of this officer corps is at an all-time low. The next President should limit the continued advancement of many of the existing cadre, many of whom have been advanced by prior Administrations for reasons other than their warfighting prowess." (Of note, if you don't know, "O" — for officer -- "6" — for grade, indicates a Navy Captain or an Army/AF/Marine/Space Force Colonel, and grades 7, 8, and 9 indicate one, two, or three-star ranks.)
When read with a knowledge of authoritarian and far-right history, this last proposal is terrifying. To paraphrase: The Project is arguing that there are too many of them ("all time high"), they are not loyal like the rest of the military ("Barack Obama's general officer corps"), and they are actively doing things that conservatives don't like ("pursuing social engineering agendas, advanced for reasons other than their warfighting prowess, etc"). Taken together, a call to "reduce the number of" them evokes images of the Red Scare of the 1950s, or even of Stalin's Great Purge in the 1930s, where 80% of the USSR's generals and admirals were executed. This is not, of course, the likely way the Project intends to effect this reduction - note the words "limit the continued advancement". That's a good description of what Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville tried when he held up all but a few senior officer promotions through most of 2023 to protest the DoD's policy expanding abortion access. Maybe they'll just start by scaring them into retiring.
Back to the part about "valuing the military family." It is, in my opinion, the most revealing self-contradiction in the entire Project.
In order to serve in the military, a kid must grow up with a basic level of health, fitness, and education. The rest of the Project seeks to rip those basic needs away from all but military families. Where else in the Project do you see calls for better pay, childcare, housing, and education? Why can't we do these things for all families? If we are going to grow the military like we need to, we must collectively invest in health care, education, and nutrition. The Project clearly stands against doing this in its other chapters, despite its assertion in this chapter that "the most powerful weapon systems will remain the six inches between the ears of our citizens and the strength of their hearts and content of their souls". Two examples: In the chapter on the Department of Education (see page 337), they want to restrict the National School Lunch Program, brought about in part because so many draftees into the Army in World War 2 were malnourished. In the chapter on the Department of Agriculture (see page 299), they want to limit who can receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. Others have written about the Project's plans for education and health care, and clearly they would get in the way of their plans for the military. Such restrictions are not just cruel, they undermine national security by making it harder for Americans to be fit, healthy, and educated.
The Project's plans for the military would further enrich the nightmarishly expensive military-industrial complex, reduce opportunities for military service and the benefits that come from it, and work to turn the military into an instrument of Presidential - not national — power. Electing a Democratic President is no guarantee that these problems will be solved — after all, the military-industrial complex blossomed over decades with help from both major parties. But defeating Project 2025 in 2024 would stop the threat of thousands of service members losing their jobs and the world's largest armed force possibly being turned against its own citizens at the demands of one man.
Here are some other critiques of this chapter and the ideas in it, in the hopes the reader may find them useful in any discussion about it. If you're just interested in what's in the chapter, you can stop here.
The military is not just an instrument of power, it is also a socioeconomic springboard. Think of all the monetary benefits you get in the military — pay, housing, free health care, education, all that - and add on the benefits veterans get in society (from military discounts to home loans), and you've got a pretty lucrative career opportunity. It's clear through the Project's sweep of proposals and their emphasis on abolishing DEI programs (which, ultimately, aim to bring more historically marginalized communities into the organization) that they intend for these opportunities and benefits to have a very limited availability. Conservatives recoil in horror at the thought of policies providing for government-funded health care, education, food, housing, and child care - but are happy to offer these to military families, made up of people who already had the necessary advantages of education, health, and fitness to qualify for the uniform in the first place. It's the very kind of "socialism" they crusade against - except when it's offered to a particular constituency. Imagine if there were calls for these kinds of benefits for educators, health care workers, first responders, child care and elderly care workers, farmers, tradespeople, or pick your line of work. We would transform our society.
When Republicans have power in Congress, they have ample opportunity to enact the fiscal and policy reforms littered throughout the chapter. Voting for the DoD budget is one of the easiest things for any legislator to do -- it's the only budget that nobody criticizes in the political mainstream. No politician ever asks "how will we pay for it?" if it's in the DoD budget. With all of their emphasis on "fiscal responsibility," however, what does the GOP do? We usually just see threats of shutdown and actual shutdown when they have the gavels, and polarizing fights over personnel policy add-ons to spending bills (like the ones in the paragraphs above) that have to be weeded out by Democratic majorities in order to avoid becoming law.
Former Pres. Trump's attempts and desires to use the military to suppress domestic dissent, coupled with a lack of detail about the priority of "border protection operations," leave the reader wondering what the Project's true plans are for use of the military domestically. Laws exist to restrict the use of DoD for domestic force. The chapter hardly mentions anything about the National Guard. Military personnel swear an oath to the constitution and laws, not a person. One wonders what a conservative President might try to order a military to do domestically, and one wonders what orders a military loyal to a person instead of the laws may follow.
There are lots of phrases in this chapter ("Marxist ideology," "social engineering agenda") that evoke the image of a suit-clad conservative ranting at a legislative hearing, but there are no specific examples given of where these problems exist. The lack of examples, interpretation, or definition is likely intentional — you know what MAGAs think DEI or CRT mean, and you know it's not even close to the truth. But the point is that conservatives get to define these terms (as anything they don't like) and hope the words have the right combination of appeal and fear in order to suppress dissent. It's no surprise that instead of looking to reform the military along the admirable lines of enforcing fiscal responsibility and revitalizing the defense industrial base, the GOP brings their "Moms for Liberty"-style playbook into the halls of power.
There is no discussion that links their long-held focus on "fiscal responsibility" with any discussion about the amount of money that goes to defense contractors with each defense spending bill. There is a good deal of discussion about the legislative budgetary process, oversight for military offices, and taking more risk in research and development. These are admirable areas for reform, but nothing is said about holding companies whose sole income is taxpayer dollars (through contracts) accountable in any way for performance or accomplishing their role in the defense industrial base.
Oh, man.
Splendidly done with terrifying material. Thanks!