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Across academia, government, and Silicon Valley, on social media, and in leading journals, intellectuals and political leaders are openly debating what comes after liberalism. Yet inside the military profession, this conversation is either ignored or waved away with half-measures, critiques of Samuel P. Huntington, and calls for more civil-military engagement. What’s missing is a serious reckoning with how a post-liberal political order, should one ever arise, could reshape the military profession itself.

By liberalism, I mean here both the broad Enlightenment “classical liberalism” of individual rights and limited democratic government, and its late-20th-century “progressive” form dominated by bureaucratic proceduralism. Post-liberalism in this thought experiment refers not to a single ideological program but to the family of arguments that liberalism may be exhausted. Whether a post-liberal America would still be an Aristotelian “America” as defined by its constitution and first principles is its own debate. My concern here is how the military profession may adapt if liberal norms no longer anchor it.

Otto Hintze argued well over a century ago that military organization is never independent but mirrors the political order of the state it serves. As such, the Huntingtonian model of military professionalism, rooted in liberal democracy, is historically contingent rather than universal. If liberalism weakens, the profession of arms will inevitably adapt to whatever civic order replaces it. Because the military has always drawn its legitimacy from its regime, officers ought to be prepared to redefine professionalism in post-liberal contexts rather than assume present norms will endure.

Huntington and the Liberal Baseline

Huntington’s 1957 The Soldier and the State was the first attempt to establish a canon for the liberal-democratic military profession. Huntington defined professionalism as a triad of expertise, responsibility, and corporateness. The officer, in this model, is a neutral expert: highly skilled in managing violence, responsible to the state, and isolated from partisan politics. However, Huntington did not reduce the officer corps to mere technocrats with howitzers. He insisted that officers needed a distinct institutional culture to resist liberal society’s individualism, precisely so they could serve liberalism without being washed away by it. “A bit of Sparta in the midst of Babylon,” as Huntington famously praised the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

Civilian leaders set policy, the military executes. “I am a soldier,” George S. Patton summarized. “I fight where I am told, and I win where I fight.” In return, the state shields the soldier from the political and legal consequences of the violence he unleashes on its behalf. The American officer corps has long assumed this “objective control” model as the natural order of things, protected not by the letter of the law but by unwritten norms.

But The Soldier and the State was written at the height of liberal self-confidence, in a Cold War world where liberal-democratic institutions appeared both durable and inevitable, and served as a powerful counter to a Soviet Red Army entirely co-opted by the political. Huntington’s model remains indispensable as a framework tied to a particular moment in history. To assume it timeless is to mistake a momentary prescription for a universal law. What is considered political is never frozen in time, nor is our understanding of what constitutes “neutrality.” One recent critique noted that the current U.S. military uses Huntington as a shield, allowing officers to retreat behind hollowed norms of neutrality even as politicization grows unchecked.

Beyond Huntington

Several thinkers, aware of the volatile nature of civil-military relations, have since sought to revise Huntington’s approach. In The Professional Soldier, written just shortly after Huntington in 1960, Morris Janowitz described the military amidst changing social and political currents. For him, the officer corps was less a cloistered guild of neutral experts than a “constabulary,” constantly renegotiating its legitimacy with a changing society: adaptation instead of Huntington’s separation.

James Burk took this a step further, arguing that military professionalism is bound to the culture in which it is embedded. If liberal democracy wanes, so too does the Huntingtonian conception of objective control. Professionalism would not so much disappear as it would take on the coloration of whatever regime comes next.

Rebecca Schiff’s concordance theory expands this, suggesting legitimacy arises not from separation but from mutual agreement between military, political elites, and citizenry through taking a keen look at military professionalism outside Western liberal democracies. Schiff identified four indicators of domestic military intervention: the officer corps’ social composition, the political decision-making process, recruitment method, and military style.

Peter Feaver, on the other hand, reframed civil-military relations as a “principal-agent” problem, showing how political oversight constantly shapes professionalism through elected civilians acting as principals and the military as agents. Deborah Avant and Michael Desch highlighted how domestic institutions and global pressures condition the profession, often in ways Huntington never anticipated. Desch argues that external threats, not professional norms, are the primary drivers of strong civilian control, and that the American model is historically unusual. Together, they suggest that the military profession is less a timeless equilibrium than a constantly shifting bargain between officers, civilians, and the political order of the day.

Eliot Cohen went the furthest of all to lay a petard underneath the neat lines of Huntingtonian theory. His book Supreme Command argued that four case studies of strong civilian leaders (Abraham Lincoln, Georges Clemenceau, Winston Churchill, and David Ben-Gurion) did not abstain from intrusion but dictated strategy through direct engagement. All of these writers, however, are still operating from a liberal framework, assuming the continuing primacy of the autonomous, rights-bearing individual.

Present Challenges to Liberalism

Debates are happening because liberalism is under growing strain. Citizens increasingly regard government as distant, unresponsive, and rigged in favor of elites. Populist movements from left and right are fueled by this loss of legitimacy. People resort to mass protest movements or political violence instead of community organization or civic engagement. Globalized markets and relentless meritocracy have created unprecedented inequality. Society promises diverse pluralism but delivers homogeneity. Science and technology, the supposed tools of humanity, now use us. The very machines built to liberate us from natural law have produced an ecological crisis, a fertility crash, and digital dependency. The state once designed to be restrained becomes a surveillance state. The only political solutions offered are liberal ones: either progressive liberals arguing for restrictions on the market and greater governmental intervention to restore equity, or classical liberals (so-called “conservatives” or “libertarians”) arguing for a freer market and smaller government for more meritocracy.

A political philosophy founded on rights-bearing individuals liberated from constraints, secured by a state limited to protecting rights, and empowered by market forces has, after 300 years of maturation, produced its opposites: inequality, alienation, and a creeping sense of entrapment. Even the foremost assumptions of the classical liberal, that human beings are rational and autonomous creatures in pursuit of universal objective truth, are no longer considered valid. The postmodern “incredulity towards metanarratives” has removed them. “Truth” tends to be regarded as a product of social-linguistic conditioning. There is no such thing as a “neutral vantage point.” Reason and institutions are nothing more than tools of power. Individuals are shaped and constrained by the discourses and culture they are born into.

Postmodernism is not just academic, but has rippled out into the professional classes and society at large. Doctors and lawyers may still orient themselves toward love and justice. The postmodern officer has no such anchor. Philosophically untethered from his cherished “neutrality” and increasingly incapable of articulating how the profession of arms can be linked to a telos, he finds himself adrift in the political landscape. Where there is no vision, the people perish.

Douglas MacArthur once declared, “There is no substitute for victory.” The postmodern American military has moved beyond such outdated notions. Now victory is a social construct. And if the ultimate end of war can no longer be grounded in universal principles, the means must justify themselves. Strategy devolves into technique. The officer’s value is measured less by character, wisdom, or good judgment than by his ability to optimize processes.

Thus, it comes as no surprise that in our day, American officers have increasingly styled themselves as individual systems managers. RAND engineers, operations researchers, and staff planners are the archetype: the officer as a rational STEM expert whose value lies in managing complexity. Within this managerial state, officers become loyal to their expertise itself, as easily plugged into J.P. Morgan as a combatant command.

Expertise subsumes Huntington’s responsibility and corporateness. Officers are held unaccountable for strategic failures. Politicization infiltrates through the walls of separation. The oath becomes, in practice, not to the Constitution and political leaders but to the technocracy of arms. Risa Brooks writes that what counts as professionalism today is unstable and has critically undermined its relationship with civilian authority. Feaver, Avant, and Desch show how the American civil-military bargain is historically unusual and highly susceptible to outside forces. The contemporary American officer still espouses Huntingtonian language, but in practice his promotion systems and incentives reflect a different order.

Civilian control under this current model becomes subjective rather than objective. Control is exercised through cultural and ideological alignment. Professionalism comes to mean technical excellence plus adherence to dominant cultural narratives.

This is the present challenge: an officer corps that claims neutrality by retreating into process yet must promote through performatively reproducing prevailing orthodoxies. The result is a military that is simultaneously insulated from society by impenetrable techno-jargon and deeply politically enmeshed through ideological policing. It is professionalism void of substance, shiny and nacreous as the inside of an oyster shell and just as empty. It foreshadows what the military may look like if liberalism gives way.

Post-Liberalism

“Post-liberal” is not a synonym for authoritarianism or a politician in Budapest. The term refers to a broad family of intellectual projects that argue liberalism has exhausted itself through atomization of society, erosion of common values, and the inability of procedural rules to resolve deep cultural divides. This has in turn spawned the deconstructivism that now threatens to tear the liberal world apart. Political theorists from right and left like Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, Gladden Pappin, Alasdair MacIntyre, Chantal Mouffe, and John Gray, among others, have argued that a durable political order may require reintroducing substantive common goods, strong moral traditions, and alternative forms of sovereignty from renewed localism to “aristopopulism.”

These debates are not happening on the margins. Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed was recommended by President Barack Obama. Curtis Yarvin attended President Donald Trump’s second inauguration.

These thinkers are shaping the future policymakers who will one day sit in Congress, staff the White House, and issue orders to the military. The officer corps cannot afford to remain complacent, assuming that the Huntingtonian framework will remain viable by default. The cautionary tale of Imperial Germany illustrates the danger of subordinating politics to military ends, producing what Ritter called a “political doomsday machine.” James Burk reminds us that professionalism is contingent. If liberalism wanes, so too will its military model.

I now present five possible views of a post-liberal officer corps and its relationship to the state, organized by familiarity. Huntington titled his book The Soldier and the State, but in practice the state — its political order, its first principles — always comes first, even in Prussia. These models are derivative of the political orders that would allow them to take root. And, as with Huntington’s own categories, they are not mutually exclusive. They may be mixed at different levels as society demands, such as the contemporary Russian mixing of patrimonial and mercenary. This does not seek to predict whether liberalism will collapse or manage to adapt to the present crisis. Rather, this seeks to explore how a military profession might diverge from the familiar baseline. The point is not to map a single destiny but to sketch the range of possibilities that a post-liberal order may impose on its soldiery. Nor is the point to endorse any one of them over the other, as all of them have significant failings and critical vulnerabilities.

These models also differ in what they imply about the future of the state itself. Liberalism and the modern nation-state arose together. It is hard to imagine one fading without questioning the future of the other. The neo-Prussian, Heinleian, and patrimonial models assume a unitary state but ideologically transformed. The mercenary and chivalric envision a partial decay into networks of megacorporations or localities. Keeping these in mind may clarify not only what sort of officer corps would emerge, but what sort of polity he would serve.

Patrimonial

Patrimonialism represents the baseline state toward which civil-military relations drift unless institutions intentionally resist it. As political polarization and distrust of institutions intensify, those in power may determine that loyalty to the party is a more reliable guarantor of control than loyalty to the Constitution. A leader, remembering Cohen’s examples of successful political intrusion, could directly seize control of the military in order to centralize power in an indefinitely-extended emergency. Promotions would cease to be a function of professional merit and would become a reflection of ideological purity and personal allegiance. Senior officers would be expected to publicly endorse political positions. Military units would be used to enforce partisan orders. The institutional guardrails that separate the military from domestic politics would be dismantled.

This condition is by far the most common military organization outside of the West. Authority is conferred primarily through factions, nepotism, and political litmus tests, not merit. The state and the military are so intertwined it is difficult to determine where one ends and the other begins. The Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s “civil-military fusion” and the Russian siloviki are contemporary examples.

However, the U.S. military’s professional ethos, though under stress, is deeply inculcated. A powerful heritage of non-partisanship and meritocracy stands as a formidable bulwark against complete politicization of the officer corps. The oath to the Constitution remains a powerful and unifying force. Furthermore, the sheer size of the U.S. armed forces make a top-down, ideologically driven purge difficult to execute without sparking mass resignations or revolt.

A patrimonial military is a deeply compromised profession, becoming an extension of the regime rather than a national institution. There are rare cases of patrimonial militaries achieving success through organizational innovation (the Ottoman Janissaries) or sheer mass and ruthlessness (the Soviet Red Army). More often, patrimonialism corrodes competence, as appointments are based on favor rather than internal standards of excellence. The result is a steady decline in combat effectiveness and a heightened risk of the military being turned against its own citizens or rival factions.

Mercenary

This model could emerge from a fiscal and political retreat from imperial responsibilities. As the cost of maintaining a global military becomes politically and economically untenable, the state would begin to outsource its needs to private military companies. This would be sold as a more efficient, less politically costly alternative to a standing army. The military-industrial complex would shift to these companies as primary customers. The best and brightest officers, disillusioned with low pay and suffocating bureaucracy, would find more lucrative opportunities with these firms. The state’s military would shrink to a small, specialized force, with the bulk of its power projection handled by private entities.

From condottieri to the East India Companies, these professional soldiers are loyal only to their corporation. They are self-regulating, jealously guard their privilege of violence-for-pay, and serve regimes on contractual terms, as the present Executive Outcomes and the post-Wagner Africa Corps do. Mercenary professionalism is viewed as shareholding, not national service. However, constitutional and ethical objections to such a national mercenary force are understandably immense. The Constitution explicitly grants Congress the power to raise and support armies, a power that Americans would be loath to see surrendered to private companies. Without a capable standing army, there is the risk that a powerful private military company would obtain dominant leverage over the state and public order, as recent history (and the nightmares of authors from Niccolò Machiavelli to Mike Pondsmith) demonstrates. Public outrage over “soldiers without borders” and a lack of accountability in past operations by private military companies, would likely indicate a cool reception for this model in the United States.

If this model were indeed to prevail, the U.S. government would lose its monopoly on the use of force, a foundational principle of the modern nation-state. Its foreign policy would be conducted not by public servants, but by corporations operating on a for-profit basis. This could lead to a complete lack of transparency and any sort of accountability. In a crisis, the government would be dependent on a private entity, which would inevitably prioritize its bottom line over national security.

Heinleian

This model is named for the American novelist Robert A. Heinlein (U.S. Naval Academy Class of 1929), author of Starship Troopers and many other influential works of science fiction. A profound societal calamity, like a catastrophic defeat or a collapse of civil society, could create a demand for a unifying national purpose. The idea that service is the only path to national revival could gain traction, propelled by a populist-nationalist movement. The military, as the most respected and visible institution of service, would become the arbiter of civic virtue. A reform movement in the wake of a constitutional convention could tie voting rights, office-holding, and other privileges to military service. The officer corps would be upheld as the new moral aristocracy.

The Heinleian model differs from 20th century fascism in that it exalts service, not party, state, or volk. Its illiberal philosophy lies in reserving the privileges of citizenship for those who perform military service. Officers become guardians of tradition and the body politic. Professionalism merges with virtus, as in the cursus honorum of the Roman Republic. The military becomes the avenue by which civilians achieve full political standing. Anyone can be a citizen, as long as they serve.

In such a polity, the purpose of the state is redefined. The liberal state exists to secure individual rights and mediate competing visions of the common good. The Heinleian state exists to cultivate and sustain a virtuous military.

Of course, this model is fundamentally at odds with the principles of universal suffrage and individual rights enshrined in the Constitution. The prospect of disenfranchising a large portion of the population from citizens into civilians would spark a massive legal and political battle, and possibly a rebellion depending on the level of helotry the civilians are to be reduced to. The idea of creating a designated underclass is (at present) anathema to the American way of life. Furthermore, the U.S. military is not currently designed as a gatekeeper to citizenship. Most general and flag officers would likely resist such a radical role shift — though one suspects many junior officers might see an opportunity in it.

Such a Heinleian society could be cohesive, motivated, racially diverse, and high-trust at the cost of militarism, Singaporean levels of authoritarianism, and underutilizing a significant fraction of its population. The military would become the most powerful institution, not just in security, but in politics and culture. This could lead to a stable but deeply illiberal state, where the military’s influence on policy reigns unchallenged.

Neo-Prussian

A charismatic leader, promising to restore order and national greatness in the face of perceived failure, would begin to demand personal loyalty over loyalty to institutions. The officer corps, disillusioned with political dysfunction and bureaucratic inefficiency, might willingly trade its allegiance to a failing system for a direct relationship with a strong, effective leader. Professionalism would be redefined to being a ruthlessly effective tool of state power. The military serves the leader’s will without question, seeing political debate as a civilian mess to be best avoided. Unlike the patrimonial model, which corrupts professionalism to short-circuit potential military opposition, the neo-Prussian has a high degree of interdependence and trust between the officer and the regime. Leaders of the regime always have military experience.

The officer corps is a professional caste loyal to the leader and the state, not to an abstract constitution. Officers swear to their ruler, with professionalism defined by strict internal standards of excellence and loyalty. Neutrality is maintained by executing orders faithfully and “staying out of politics.” This carries a special allure to the American military mind. “Prussian efficiency” has long been the gold standard for effectiveness dating all the way to Friedrich von Steuben, then Emory Upton’s reforms, and later the post-World War II emulation of Auftragstaktik and veneration of Carl von Clausewitz. However, the institutional checks and balances of the U.S. government, as well as the oath to the Constitution, are specifically designed to prevent this very outcome. The decentralized nature of military command and the existence of multiple power centers (Congress, the president, the joint chiefs) make it impossible for any single leader to command personal fealty across the entire force. There also would be significant internal resistance from officers who would see this outcome as irredeemably unconstitutional.

This model promises a powerful and historically effective military, but one that is an instrument of the leader, not the people. It could lead to a stable but authoritarian state, with the military acting as the enforcer of the leader’s will. The officer corps would be highly insulated and self-regulating, but it would have forfeited its role as a neutral servant of the republic.

Chivalric

As the military becomes increasingly diverse and reflective of a society in the midst of a culture war, a segment of the officer corps might begin to feel that the state has lost its moral compass. They may look beyond value-neutral professionalism for a higher purpose, finding it in a specific religious tradition, a philosophical school, or a set of founding principles they believe the state has abandoned. Their loyalty would be to this transcendent order, the Constitution being a document that derives its legitimacy from these higher principles. In a conflict of duties, their moral allegiance would supersede their legal one. A collapse of civil society could then cause these officers to act on their transcendental ideals.

Medieval knights swore fealty both to obey their liege and to defend the Catholic Church, pledging to both a secular sovereign and a transcendent moral or religious order. When the two conflict, the transcendent order prevails. Professionalism becomes a vocation.

It is worth noting that the pluralistic and multicultural nature of the U.S. military makes a single, shared “transcendent order” impossible pending an outbreak of national fervor that would make the Second Great Awakening look like Burning Man. An officer corps swearing allegiance to specific spiritual tenets would be in direct conflict with the constitutional principle of religious freedom. The institutional separation of church and state would make this model untenable, likely leading to deep unrest and a crisis of command pending complete revision (or removal) of the Constitution. As in the mercenary model, this could also entail the state losing its monopoly on violence, as the new “knights” of this order could foment a feudal political structure where they promise to serve the state but remain free to exercise power in their personal fiefdoms. Such a society would increasingly resemble a new dark age.

A chivalric military would be a highly motivated and moral force when brought together, but thinly spread, decentralized, and unruly without a very strong leader (see Richard the Lionheart versus his inept brother John Lackland) to hold it in check. Internal schisms would occur over doctrinal disputes, as well as full-fledged rebellion if officers believe the state has strayed from its first principles.

Which Model?

These scenarios are not abstractions without consequence. One can already see evidence of patrimonial promotion incentives, transnational militaries, and New York Times articles written by ex-generals debating what is a transcendental order.

One might describe this as a shift from objective control through clear institutional boundaries to subjective control through cultural and ideological conformity. The labels differ depending on perspective, but the mechanism is observable.

Again, these models are not predictions but thought experiments. The point is not that any particular one (or any of them) will come true, but that the profession must be intellectually prepared for civic orders that may succeed the status quo.

Indeed, it is very difficult to imagine a United States of America, the grand historical experiment of liberalism, that has explicitly abandoned the liberal and constitutional basis for its government without simply describing a completely new country altogether. To lose liberalism may mean to lose America as we know it. That may prove the ultimate limit on any of these models.

Sed Contra

This essay does not argue liberalism will collapse, only that military officers should be intellectually (and spiritually) prepared for alternatives. Some may argue that the answer is not post-liberalism but a recovery of “true” American classical liberalism along the lines of a Jeffersonian democracy with its suspicion of standing armies and preference for state militias. Such a vision promises fidelity to part of the Founders’ intent and added insulation against the dangers of a politicized federal military.

Three problems stand in the way. First, turning that clock back is impossible without first dismantling the post-Civil War constitutional order and possibly repealing the Fourteenth Amendment. Such upheaval is historically far more likely to result in Caesar than Cincinnatus. Second, the militia-based model of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson is not a professional military, and thus out of the scope of this essay. Thirdly, protecting a nation-state with nothing but a citizen militia is a pipe dream. Independence in the 21st century requires a permanent professional military, if only to sustain a nuclear deterrent. No polity can remain sovereign without one.

Others may object that abandoning liberalism means abandoning the rule of law — and with it, any recognizable professional military ethic. But as Adrian Vermeule notes, the rule of law is not a liberal achievement. Roman law, medieval jurists, and early modern legal traditions all operated independently of liberal individualism, yet they maintained robust systems of order, justice, and legality. Vermeule provocatively writes: “The real question is not whether the rule of law can be obtained in the absence of liberalism, for it obviously can. The real question is whether it can be obtained in the [continued] presence of liberalism.”

This should give pause to those who assume a possible decline of liberalism necessarily spells blood in the streets. As Burk wrote, military professionalism is unlikely to dissolve into something unrecognizable. A post-liberal profession of arms would still be governed by a code of conduct, discipline, and justice, just as Roman legions, knightly orders, and the Bourbon armies of Louis “L’État, c’est moi” XIV once did, and as the People’s Liberation Army does today — all without being “liberal” in any sense of the word.

The real fragility, then, is not in the oath that officers take but in the civic order that stands behind it. Officers swear to constitutions, but constitutions cannot interpret themselves. If district judges cannot agree on the Constitution’s meaning, why pretend soldiers can? If civilian authorities appear to abandon their obligations to law or citizens, the military is placed in a bind: obey and risk becoming the tool of tyrants, or resist and shatter the political order you swore to uphold.

That tension is not hypothetical. It is the dilemma of every officer from Alcibiades to Zumwalt.

The temptation is to resolve this situation by retreating into separation: civilians here, politics there, military over here, clean lines and clear spheres. But the task is harder, and more human. Professions endure not in isolation but when they cultivate thick boundaries that can breathe, strong enough to resist invasion, yet porous enough to inform one another.

After Liberalism

Like the Prodigal, though the West has denied eternal verities in the name of isolated, cynical, ironic detachment, we have found the result neither nourishing nor convincing. We gaze into a future where “extreme license coexists with extreme oppression.” Some seek truth, both old and new. Others seek to enrich themselves in the upheaval that could come in the decline of liberalism, just as the turmoil of the 1630–50s preceded its birth in the 1680s. Depending on what a society hopes to find, it will reshape its politics accordingly.

The military will, and ought to, follow. Or, if civic collapse is deep enough, it may abandon Huntingtonian professionalism entirely, seize power, and attempt to force its own political order into being.

Burk and Brooks remind us that our current civil-military model has always been contested, delicate, and culturally dependent. A coherent, intentional polity may cultivate neo-Prussian subordination or civic-spirited Heinleinism. A fragmented one might drift toward factionalism or chivalric decentralization.

The future American officer will not be Huntington’s 20th century ideal. He will be wrought by whatever comes next, whether liberal in its present form or authoritarian, aristopopulist, communitarian, or something we don’t have a label for yet. The question is not whether the military can survive through such a turning of the age — it always has — but whether we are willing to think seriously about it before history compels us to.

Peter Mitchell is a U.S. Army officer and author.

The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the views or positions of U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or any part of the U.S. government.

**Please note, as a matter of house style, War on the Rocks will not use a different name for the U.S. Department of Defense until and unless the name is changed by statute by the U.S. Congress.

Image: Midjourney

Correction: A previous version of this article mistakenly states that The Professional Soldier by Morris Janowitz was written in the midst of the 1960s. It was published in 1960.