Trump’s Silent Sabotage of America’s Military

The Pentagon isn’t collapsing by accident. It’s being hollowed by design.

Ousted Air Force Chief of Staff General David Allen.

Trump’s Silent Sabotage of America’s Military

The Pentagon isn’t collapsing by accident. It’s being hollowed by design.

The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #495: Tuesday, August 19th, 2025.

Earlier today, I showed you the probabilities…the cold math…of Putin’s creeping takeover of America. Tonight…we pivot from numbers to muscle.

Because if the Kremlin is going to own this country…it won’t happen with tanks on Pennsylvania Avenue. It’ll happen when the last line of defense…the United States military…is softened, hollowed…bent into submission.

In a move that reads more like a coup than a cabinet shuffle…Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has pushed Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin into early retirement…barely two years into his four-year term.

This marks yet another forced exit in Trump’s ongoing purge of top military brass. The pattern is clear: loyalists over competence…spectacle over strategy.

If You’re Waiting for Tanks…You’re Already Lost

The image most Americans carry of conquest is dead wrong.

They expect paratroopers on the White House lawn, warships in New York Harbor, fighter jets screaming over Washington.

But that’s Hollywood.

The real thing is slower. Quieter. Deadlier.

And it’s happening right now.

Donald Trump is softening the U.S. military for Vladimir Putin.

Not with some grand stroke. Not with a speech declaring surrender. But with a thousand acts of sabotage: the firings…the secrecy…the politicization…the budget attrition…the slow conditioning of a proud institution into a prop.

That’s how you topple a military that was once the envy…and the fear…of the world. You don’t break it. You bend it. You corrupt it. You hollow it until it salutes a man… not a Constitution.

The Illusion of Chaos

People look at Trump’s relationship with the Pentagon and say: “It’s just chaos. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

Wrong.

Trump’s moves with the military are not random tantrums. They’re patterned. Deliberate. Cumulative. (Do I believe he is smart enough to know exactly what he needs to do. No. I do not. But, instructions come from someone…who is.)

And when you line them up next to the secrecy with Putin…the vanished transcripts… the interpreter notes locked away…the unexplained phone calls…you see the outline of something worse: an American commander-in-chief aligning the U.S. military with Moscow’s interests.

This isn’t speculation. It’s observation. The pattern is there…hiding in plain sight.

Mechanism #1: Purges and Promotions

Every authoritarian in history has understood one thing: you cannot control a professional military. Not directly. Not forever.

Professional officers are trained to serve the law…the Constitution…the institution…not the man. That makes them dangerous to any would-be dictator.

So what do strongmen do? They purge. They promote. They replace competence with loyalty.

• Stalin did it in 1937. He gutted the Red Army…executed thousands of officers… and replaced them with pliant men who saluted the Party first. The result? Catastrophic early losses to Hitler…but a military that was politically reliable.

• Erdogan did it in 2016. After a coup attempt…he purged Turkey’s military and restocked the ranks with loyalists. Now…the Turkish military serves Erdogan personally, not the republic.

Trump is following the same playbook…American-style.

Every general or civilian leader who pushed back on NATO commitments…questioned his authoritarian instincts…or defended the independence of the military has been sidelined…humiliated…or forced out.

And who rises in their place? Sycophants. Yes-men. Ideologues. People who know their job is not to defend the country…but to defend Trump.

That’s how you soften a military: strip out the spine.

Because once the professional culture cracks…once officers realize that independence means unemployment…the institution bends. Slowly at first. Then all at once.