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Military thinkers discuss the unthinkable
Eternal vigilance being the price of liberty, Americans-who spent decades war-gaming a Soviet invasion and have taken more recently to daydreaming about "ticking bomb" scenarios-should cast at least an occasional thought toward the only truly existential threat that American democracy might face today. We now live in a unipolar world, after all, in which conquest of the United States by an outside power is nearly inconceivable. Even the best-equipped terrorists, for their part, could dispatch at most a city or two; and armed revolution is a futile prospect, so fearsomely is our homeland secured by police and military forces. To subdue America entirely, the only route remaining would be to seize the machinery of state itself, to steer it toward malign ends-to carry out, that is, a coup d'état.
Given that the linchpin of any coup d'état is the participation, or at least the support, of a nation's military officers, Harper's Magazine assembled a panel of experts to discuss the state of our own military-its culture, its relationship with the wider society, and the steadfastness of its loyalty to the ideals of democracy and to the United States Constitution.
The following forum is based on a discussion that took place in January at the Ruth's Chris Steak House in Arlington, Virginia. Bill Wasik served as moderator.
ANDREW J. BACEVICH is a professor of international relations at Boston University and the author, most recently, of The New American Militarism. He served as an officer in the U.S. Army from 1969 to 1992.
BRIG. GEN. CHARLES J. DUNLAP JR. is a staff judge advocate at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. In 1992 he published an essay entitled "The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012." (His views here are personal and do not reflect those of the U.S. Department of Defense.)
RICHARD H. KOHN is the chair of the curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and editor of the book The United States Military Under the Constitution of the United States, 1789-1989, among others.
EDWARD N. LUTTWAK is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the author of many books, including Coup D'Etat: A Practical...