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On the last day of September 2025, hundreds of generals and admirals from across the world were summoned to the military base in Quantico, Virginia, where they sat on folding chairs and listened to the president and the secretary of defense deliver what turned out to be a pair of campaign-style speeches. Flying the senior leadership of the United States military in created considerable expense and operational disruption, but the brass showed up because their civilian superiors had ordered them to. They sat stoically silent through the political program, as they had been trained to. Then they flew back to their posts.

The exercise demonstrated nothing about strategy or readiness, and a great deal about the military chain of command—chiefly, that it would hold under almost any indignity.

On the last day of September 2025, hundreds of generals and admirals from across the world were summoned to the military base in Quantico, Virginia, where they sat on folding chairs and listened to the president and the secretary of defense deliver what turned out to be a pair of campaign-style speeches. Flying the senior leadership of the United States military in created considerable expense and operational disruption, but the brass showed up because their civilian superiors had ordered them to. They sat stoically silent through the political program, as they had been trained to. Then they flew back to their posts.

The State and the Soldier: A History of Civil-Military Relations in the United States, Kori Schake, Polity, 272 pp., $29.95, October 2025

The exercise demonstrated nothing about strategy or readiness, and a great deal about the military chain of command—chiefly, that it would hold under almost any indignity.

That stoic silence displayed in that hall is the central subject of Kori Schake’s new book, The State and the Soldier: A History of Civil-Military Relations in the United States. It is the most important book on U.S. civil-military relations to appear in a generation and, at this moment, it deserves the broadest possible readership. Schake argues that this silence........

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