American Junta

Now that everyone's talking about Thomas Sowell's yearning for a military coup, Professor Bainbridge tackles the more important question of whether a coup would work. As James Joyner has already pointed out, the definitive text on this matter is Charles Dunlap's The Origins of the Military Coup of 2012, though I would also recommend the Harper's symposium on the topic from a couple years back, whose roundtable included Dunlap, Andrew Bacevich, Richard Kohn and Edward Luttwak. Sadly, all those worthies were too sober-minded to take the possibility of an actual Seven Days in May all that seriously, and so the discussion turned rather quickly to the somewhat duller topic of civilian-military relations - but it's still worth a look.

From the Atlantic, meanwhile, here's Thomas Ricks on the Dunlap essay, and then Ricks' longer, much-lauded essay on on the civilian-military divide.