Project 2025's DOD and IC Overhaul: Loyalty Screens, Weakened Civilian Control, and Strategic Drift
Project 2025 proposes purging general officers and intelligence analysts deemed insufficiently loyal to a presidential agenda, framing professional military and IC judgment as ideological contamination — a blueprint that would collapse the distinction between civilian control of the military and partisan capture of it, while stripping the strategic early-warning function that independent intelligence exists to provide.
The most consequential accountability mechanism Project 2025 targets is professional independence within the uniformed military and the Intelligence Community. By proposing NSC review of all general and flag officer promotions to screen for alignment with a political agenda, the document does not restore civilian control — it inverts it. Constitutional civilian control means the elected government sets policy and the military executes it; it does not mean the military's senior leadership is personally vetted for loyalty to one president's ideological preferences. The Church Committee in 1975 documented in granular detail what happens when the IC becomes an instrument of executive will rather than analytic truth: covert programs multiply, dissent is suppressed, and catastrophic policy failures follow with no internal correction mechanism. Iraq 2003 is the modern case study — the NIE on WMD was a product of precisely the groupthink and deference to political preference that Miller's chapter criticizes, yet the proposed remedy — stronger political direction from above — is the original cause of that failure, not its cure.
The proposal to use acting appointments to circumvent Senate confirmation at State and elsewhere compounds the problem. The Founders placed the confirmation power in the Senate specifically to create a check on executive patronage; bypassing it through indefinite acting roles is not a workaround, it is the abuse the framers anticipated. From a restraint-doctrine perspective, a State Department and IC staffed by loyalists rather than regional and linguistic experts is institutionally incapable of the diplomatic tradecraft that reduces the need for military force. The Costs of War Project has documented that post-9/11 military spending runs into the trillions in discretionary outlays, and independent economists have consistently found that the same dollar invested in education or healthcare produces two to three times as many jobs as defense spending. A national security apparatus optimized for political reliability rather than analytic accuracy will generate the threat inflation that justifies ever-larger budgets and ever-more-forward deployments — the maximalist posture that restraint doctrine identifies as both strategically counterproductive and fiscally ruinous.
The document's own framing inadvertently concedes the core accountability argument: Miller writes that 'the best gauge of such willingness is congressional approval' and invokes the Founders' division of war powers, noting that departures from constitutional design — Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan — have been costly. That is correct. But the mechanisms that enforce those constitutional limits are exactly what Project 2025 elsewhere proposes to weaken: an independent IC that can tell a president 'no,' a professional officer corps that can raise operational objections through the chain of command, and whistleblower protections that allow analysts to report when intelligence is being politicized. Removing those friction points does not produce a more agile military; it produces a more obedient one, which is a different and far more dangerous thing.
The concrete reform path runs in the opposite direction: fully fund the DOD Inspector General and restore its direct-reporting line to Congress; codify the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act against executive reinterpretation; require that the DOD pass a clean financial audit before any top-line budget increase is approved — a standard no Pentagon has yet met; and anchor general officer promotion criteria in published, non-partisan readiness and operational metrics rather than NSC political review. These are not anti-military proposals. The DOD's own audit failures, the Pentagon's status as one of the world's largest institutional greenhouse-gas emitters, and the billions in largely uncompetitive private contracts documented by independent oversight bodies represent the real readiness crisis — one that political loyalty screens will accelerate, not cure.
Original source — excerpted
project2025 Project 2025 ch. 4: Department of Defense (pp 119-122)"— 87 — Section Two W hile the lives of Americans are affected in noteworthy ways, for better or worse, by each part of the executive branch, the inherent importance of national defense and foreign affairs makes the Departments of Defense and State first among equals. Originating in the George Washington Administra - tion, the War Department (as it was then known) was headed by Henry Knox, America’s chief artillery officer in the Revolutionary War; Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, was the first Secretary of State. Despite such long and storied histories, neither department is currently living up to its standards, and the success of the next presidency will be determined in part by whether they can be significantly improved in short order. “Ever since our Founding,” former acting secretary of defense Christopher Miller writes in Chapter 4, “Americans have understood that the surest way to avoid war is to be prepared for it in peace.” Yet the Department of Defense “is a deeply troubled institution.” It has emphasized leftist politics over military readiness, “Recruiting was the worst in 2022 that it has been in two generations,”…"