March 14, 2025
Will Trump Reshape the American Military
Last month, the Trump administration carried out a large-scale firing of senior military leaders, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chief of Naval operations, the vice chief of staff of the Air Force, and the top military lawyers from the Army, Navy, and Air Force. While expected, these moves were nonetheless largely unprecedented, upending longstanding bipartisan and civil-military norms around the continuity of military leadership across political transitions to a new administration. Kori Schake and Erica Frantz join Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Jim Townsend on this week’s episode to shed light on what the Trump administration’s dismissals of military leaders might mean for the state of U.S. civil-military relations, the health of U.S. democracy, and the conduct of U.S. foreign policy,
Kori Schake is a Senior Fellow and the Director of Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
Erica Frantz is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Michigan State University and a co-author of The Origins of Elected Strongmen.
More from CNAS
-
Brussels Sprouts Live: Four Ambassadors Reimagine the Transatlantic Relationship
Podcast
Today's episode comes from the CNAS Annual Conference held last week in Washington, D.C. The theme of this year's conference was “New Rules,” and nowhere is that more evident ...
By Andrea Kendall-Taylor
-
U.S. Posture Changes and the Future of European Defense Planning
Podcast
Over the last several weeks, European allies have been trying to interpret a steady stream of signals from Washington about the future of the U.S. military role in Europe, dis...
By Andrea Kendall-Taylor & Jim Townsend
-
Window of Opportunity? Deterrence and Moscow’s Calculus
Podcast
In the last episode of Brussels Sprouts, we looked at the dizzying series of U.S. announcements about America’s military posture in Europe. Since then, new reporting has emerg...
By Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Jim Townsend & Jeffrey Edmonds
-
The Coming Crisis of NATO Deterrence
Commentary
If Washington signals an unwillingness to engage in conventional military action to defend Europe, Putin will conclude that Russia has escalation dominance on the continent an...
By Celeste Wallander
