Lick boot, or else ...

By the pricking of my thumb, something wicked this way comes.

Der Führer Adolf Hitler ist tot.
(“The Führer, Adolf Hitler, is dead.”)

That was the message Major Otto Ernst Remer, of the Wachbataillon Großdeutschland, received on 20 July 1944—the signal meant to unleash Operation Valkyrie, the Wehrmacht-led plan to decapitate Adolph Hitler’s government.

Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg would kill Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair, and, in the chaos, Germany’s elite guard units would be turned—unknowingly—against the Nazi regime itself.

Arrest the SS.
Arrest the Gestapo leadership.
Seize Goebbels.
Seize Speer.
Seize all those who were “conspirators” to kill Hitler.
Capture Berlin.
Direct the other military districts to accept the new regime in the name of security and to restore order, proclaiming that the saboteurs and assassins were now captured.
End Hitler’s government in a day.

It almost worked.

It didn’t because the plotters forgot the most basic element of a coup: control the lines of communication. Hitler survived with a few scratches, phoned Berlin, and Remer—realising he’d been drafted into a plot against the Führer—flipped back to loyalty and crushed it. General Fromm shot the conspirators before the day ended.

The Reich endured for another year.

Millions perished.

Every student of history knows the moral: coups are not magic. They only succeed when the military leadership is either complicit or at least neutral. No army, no coup. From Caracas to Cairo, it’s the same rule.

Which brings us to today’s farce.

Enter the Secretary of “War”—the womanizing alcoholic DUI hire with the flag-print hanky, prepared to crank out 100 push-ups, and run laps, to prove how small his manhood is. In an act of stupidity or arrogance (take your pick), every flag officer of the United States military has been summoned to Quantico for a “secret” meeting.

Think about that.

All our admirals and generals in one place, at one time—and the fact publicly known. Not even in the middle of a nuclear strike would we cluster the entire upper brain of the U.S. military in a single, target-rich location. In operational security terms, it’s lunacy.

We lack the capability to securely transport all these flag officers to one location simultaneously. So, we’ll have some of the most senior members of the military doing what? Schlep-rock on Sun Country? Southwest? Delta?

I hope they don’t go through EWR. Or DFW.

And for what?

This isn’t 1945.

We have real-time, SCI-level secure video and audio across every theatre on the planet. For a decade inside the DoD, I sat in those meetings with Austin, Petraeus, Casey, Pace, Meyers, Odierno—you name it—without ever needing to drag them all to the same base. We even held global conferences with every combatant commander, their deputies, the service chiefs, the Joint Staff—all on screen, all live. No airplanes. No flag-waving circus.

So why now? Why this?

Why risk the entire flag corps to watch the “DUI Hire” do push-ups or give a speech?

Well, I’ve spent the better part of two days thinking about it, and talking with former military officers about it.

Unfortunately, none of the answers should give you warm fuzzies.

Why would you want to do this

(if you’re an authoritarian lackey like Hegseth trying to please a wannabe dictator like Trump)

1) Loyalty theater.

You don’t need Quantico to brief strategy; you need it to measure obedience. A mass summons forces every one- and two-star to visibly choose: attend promptly and applaud, or hesitate and self-identify for the purge list. After months of firings and billet cuts, this is the dominance display—“I hold the sword; you hold your tongue.”

2) Purge mechanics disguised as a pep rally.

Centralize the brass, announce “realignment,” then hand out new reporting lines and “acting” appointments. Anyone grimacing at the applause lines gets sidelined by Friday. The recent, highly unusual removals set the precedent; a roomful of careerists under the klieg lights makes the rest easy.

3) Coup-proofing the regime, not the republic.

Authoritarians don’t just seize armies; they coup-proof them—fragment commands, elevate loyalists, and inject political commissars in everything but name. An all-hands conclave lets Hegseth impose a common narrative and loyalty signals across services in one shot, reducing the odds of inter-service slow-roll or quiet resistance. (Note: the administration has telegraphed major structural and doctrinal shifts already.)

4) Paper-trail denial.

If the next orders skirt legal gray zones—domestic deployments, intelligence tasking, rules-of-engagement tweaks—you don’t email them. You deliver “commander’s intent” in person, on a need-to-know whisper track, and let subordinates write the implementing guidance. That keeps the combustible line—the one that later shows up in court—off paper. Reporters can ask why; the transcript won’t exist.

5) Leak trap & map of the resistance.

Announce three innocuous things and one spicy one; then watch which version leaks from which service within hours. Now you have your leaker graph—and your next set of reassignments. The suddenness and secrecy make this easy A/B testing for counterintelligence.

6) Optics for the base; humiliation for the institution.

Trump wants footage that says, “the generals answer to me.” Aerials of motorcades and a sea of stars feed the narrative of conquest over the “Pentagon bureaucracy.” Even the White House’s mixed, minimizing chatter only adds to the mystique: it’s “routine,” until the hand-picked “Secretary of War” commands the Praetorians to assemble.

7) Forcing function on a new doctrine.

If they intend to flip the strategy slider—from Indo-Pacific primacy to a Western-Hemisphere first posture, or some sudden realignment—doing it face-to-face compresses dissent cycles. You don’t debate slides; you nod, salute, and catch your flight. (That rumored doctrinal pivot is already floating in the press.)

8) Message to adversaries (and allies): we can mass on command.

Yes, it’s a security own-goal. But it’s also a televised flex: the system moves when the boss snaps his fingers. Deterrence through pageantry—shaky substance, strong symbolism. Reuters and AP calling it “rare” and “abrupt” is the point, not the problem.

Bottom line: Hegseth gets a loyalty audit, a purge accelerator, and a doctrinal hard-reset in a single spectacle. Trump gets the shot he craves—the generals came when I called—plus a stress test of who might balk when the next order is less photogenic and more unconstitutional.

The Valkyrie Echo

Operation Valkyrie failed because the conspirators underestimated two key elements: the resilience of Hitler's government to assassination and the speed of communication. They thought they could choreograph loyalty; instead, they exposed themselves.

What we are witnessing, most likely, with Hegseth’s Quantico circus is the mirror image. Instead of conspirators trying to turn the military against the regime, the regime is stress-testing whether the military can still be turned against the republic.

This is not about “readiness” or “strategy.”

It is likely about humiliation, obedience, and optics.

Trump wants his money shot: every general in one place, summoned like vassals to court, forced to play audience to the clown prince of pushups.

Hegseth gets his purge-list starter kit.

And the rest of us get a glimpse of just how fragile civilian control of the military becomes when it is staged like loyalty theater instead of assumed as constitutional bedrock.

History teaches that no coup succeeds without the support of the military. The more pressing lesson, watching Quantico, is that no republic survives for long once its army is made to kneel before a tyrant in public.