In 1992, an Air Force lieutenant colonel named Charles Dunlap published an essay in Parameters, the journal of the Army War College. Titled “The Origins of the Coup of 2012,” the article, which Dunlap described as a fictional “darkly imagined excursion into the future,” takes the form of a letter from an officer condemned to death for opposing a military coup that has taken place in the United States. The letter argues that the coup was the result of trends that were already observable in 1992. The condemned letter writer’s thesis is that after years of being handed the tough jobs the rest of the government seemed incapable of handling, the U.S. military, with the acquiescence of the American people and their government, simply took over.
Dunlap’s protagonist writes: “Faced with intractable national problems on one hand, and an energetic and capable military on the other, it can be all too seductive to start viewing the military as a cost-effective solution. We made a terrible mistake when we allowed the armed forces to be diverted from its original purpose.”
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