Stephen Miller's Shadow Military: The Quantico Warning
How a MAGA ideologue built a parallel command system to direct military strikes, purge resistant officers, and prepare troops for domestic deployment
Grüezi!
Early release for this one on Substack…
1 Miller Time
On 30 September 2025, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth summoned nearly 800 generals and admirals to Marine Corps Base Quantico. But whilst Hegseth and the President delivered the speeches – “I’ve never walked into a room so silent before,” Trump observed – he wasn’t really running the show.
The gathering in rural Virginia, an hour south of Washington DC, bore the political stamp of Stephen Miller, the 40-year-old White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Adviser who spent over half his life learning political warfare from his mentor, the late David Horowitz.
It’s more than culture-war theatre about push-ups. It exposes the systematic machinery that Miller has constructed: ideological framing inherited from Horowitz’s blueprint, operational control through an empowered Homeland Security Council that supersedes traditional chains of command, and personnel transformation executed by Hegseth as Miller’s instrument.
This isn’t speculation about future authoritarian drift. Miller already directs lethal military strikes (Venezuela boat attacks killing civilians), domestic Guard federalisations (violating Posse Comitatus Act per federal court ruling), and officer purges (removing generals who might resist). The question isn’t whether this machinery exists – it’s how it will be used.
2 The Mentor and the Protégé
David Horowitz first encountered Stephen Miller on right-wing talk radio, when the 16-year-old called in to rage against his Santa Monica high school’s multiculturalism. Horowitz, a former Marxist-turned-reactionary firebrand, recognised a kindred spirit.
In Miller, Horowitz saw someone he could teach to “use the language of the civil rights movement against the civil rights movement” – casting white men as victims and calling liberals “the real racists.”
The mentorship lasted through Miller’s time at Duke University founding Horowitz’s Students for Academic Freedom chapter, through his work in Senator Jeff Sessions’s office, and through his elevation to Trump’s inner circle.
When Miller joined Trump’s 2016 campaign, Horowitz coached him on how to insert inflammatory language into speeches. As Harold Meyerson wrote in The American Prospect after Horowitz’s death:
“Mentors matter: As Roy Cohn once instructed Trump in the power of lying, so Horowitz instructed Miller in the power of hating.”
The instruction went beyond rhetoric. In December 2012, whilst Miller served as communications director for Senator Sessions, Horowitz sent him an email that became “a starting gun of sorts for the tactics of the 2016 election:”
“Behind the failures of Republican campaigns lies an attitude that is administrative rather than combative. It focuses on policies rather than politics... The only way to beat them is with an equally emotional campaign that puts the aggressors on the defensive; that attacks them in the same moral language, identifying them as the bad guys.”
Horowitz wrote that “fear is a much stronger and more compelling emotion” than hope, and that Republicans should appeal to voters’ “base instincts.” This was tactical instruction for political warfare that Miller would later implement from positions of real power.
The ideological lineage is clearest in Horowitz’s 2021 book “The Enemy Within: How a Totalitarian Movement Is Destroying America.” For Horowitz, Democrats were “the enemy within,” a totalitarian movement where “the barbarians are already inside the gates.”
When Trump told military commanders at Quantico that handling “the enemy within” would become their major mission, he was using Horowitz’s language – channelled through Miller, who knew exactly how to frame political opponents as existential threats requiring extraordinary countermeasures.
3 The Parallel Command Structure
That framing wasn’t just rhetoric. Miller operationalised Horowitz’s ideology. National Security Presidential Memorandum-1, signed by Trump on his first day in office, merged the Homeland Security Council and National Security Council “on topics agreed to in advance” by then National Security Adviser Mike Waltz and Homeland Security Adviser Miller.
In practice, he has turned the HSC into an “autonomous entity” – a departure from previous administrations where the HSC operated under the NSC’s umbrella and reported to the National Security Adviser. Miller now handles policy for immigration, counterterrorism, cyber threats, and domestic military deployments, whilst the NSC handles traditional foreign policy. This ensures Miller directs troops who might be ordered into American cities.
Miles Taylor’s book “Blowback” details how in 2018, Miller, then Trump’s immigration adviser, asked the Coast Guard Commandant: “Why can’t we use a Predator drone to obliterate that boat?”
Taylor writes that Miller “argued for the potential mass killing of civilians by suggesting they were not protected under the US Constitution because they were in international waters.”
Miller denied the account, but seven years on he is directing strikes on civilian boats, killing people in operations outside any theatre of war.
According to The Guardian, Miller has played “a leading role” in directing US Air Force and Navy strikes on Venezuelan boats suspected of drug trafficking, with his role at times superseding that of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who took on Waltz’s NSC role. Miller’s deputies “tightly controlled targeting decisions, often informing top officials only hours before attacks.” A 2 September strike killed all 11 people aboard a boat from a Venezuelan village; a later one killed three more. The administration provided no evidence of drugs or weapons aboard either vessel.
This is a departure from traditional national security processes, where military operations flow through the NSC with the National Security Adviser coordinating across Defence, State, and intelligence agencies.
Under Miller’s system, the HSC handles everything involving military force near American borders or on American soil. Miller reports directly to Trump, bypassing institutional checks.
One White House source told Axios that Miller has made the HSC run “like clockwork” and that it’s “infinitely more effective than the NSC with a tiny fraction” of the staff.
This isn’t bureaucratic efficiency. It’s concentration of the authority required for lethal force.
4 Hegseth as Instrument
Miller needs more than deployments. He also needs a compliant officer corps that will not resist when orders come to move against “the enemy within” in American cities. That’s where Hegseth comes in – not as an independent actor, but as Miller’s instrument for personnel transformation.
Pentagon spokeperson Sean Parnell gave the official Pentagon version of the relationship: “Hegseth enjoys a great working relationship with Stephen Miller. They are completely aligned on carrying out President Trump’s America First agenda.” When Rolling Stone asked a senior administration official about Hegseth, the source said simply: “He does what Stephen wants him to do.”
Hegseth’s personnel moves serve Miller’s larger project. Consider Stuart Scheller. He was court-martialled in 2021 for posting videos whilst in uniform attacking senior military leaders over the Afghanistan withdrawal, convicted, and forced to resign.
In January 2025 he was hired by the Pentagon as a Senior Advisor. By July, Hegseth – who praises Scheller for having “courage to speak up when no one else would” – announced that an officer cashiered for insubordination would be leading a comprehensive review of officer evaluations, promotion boards, command selection, and professional military education.
Scheller’s review isn’t the only lever for selecting in compliance. In September 2025, Hegseth cancelled the Army’s Command Assessment Programme (CAP). CAP combined physical testing, cognitive assessments, emotional intelligence evaluation, and 360-degree feedback from peers and subordinates. A Pentagon spokesman called CAP “a failed, woke experiment.”
The “woke” label makes little sense. A review revealed that CAP “selected white men for command roles at a higher rate than women and minority officers.” CAP’s actual problem was that it represented an independent mechanism standing in the way of political cronyism. It blocked commanders from favouring loyalists. That’s what made it intolerable.
With CAP eliminated and Scheller redesigning promotion processes, Hegseth has constructed dual control mechanisms. If an officer can’t be selected out or brought in through the promotion system, fitness testing provides an alternative.
Hegseth’s Quantico directives require every service member – including four-star generals – to take PT tests twice yearly and meet height and weight standards “every year of service.”
The standards themselves matter less than the discretion they grant. Every senior officer understands that service can be terminated for fitness scores and a tip of the scales.
“We got many of you out of here because we weren’t satisfied. We know everything about everybody.” – Donald Trump, Quantico
Since January 2025, Hegseth has fired: Gen. C.Q. Brown (Chairman of Joint Chiefs, first Black officer in the role), Adm. Lisa Franchetti (Chief of Naval Operations, first woman in the role), Adm. Linda Fagan (Coast Guard Commandant, first woman), Gen. Timothy Haugh (NSA Director and Cyber Command chief), Vice Adm. Shoshana Chatfield (senior NATO position, first woman to lead Naval War College), Air Force Vice Chief James Slife, and numerous others.
Highly qualified officers with decades of distinguished service face removal for insufficient political loyalty or association with the “wrong” people, whilst those who demonstrate fealty advance.
5 The Quantico Leap
In the days before the Quantico meeting, there was a lot of speculation about its purpose. Would Hegseth demand loyalty oaths? Announce mass firings? Would proceedings be classified? Eugene Fidell, a military justice expert, warned that “signing nothing and saying nothing” might be wisest.
The reality proved less dramatic and more insidious. There were no pledges, no dismissals. Instead, Hegseth lectured on fitness and “toxic leadership reviews,” whilst Trump ranged widely. But buried within was a message that perhaps because it was delivered so awkwardly, lands so hard:
“Last month, I signed an executive order to provide training for a quick reaction force that can help quell civil disturbances. This is gonna be a big thing for the people in this room, because it’s the enemy from within and we have to handle it before it gets out of control.”
The enemy from within. Horowitz’s phrase, a little mangled. Horowitz’s framework for treating political opponents as existential threats. Now delivered to nearly 800 military commanders as their future mission.
One senior official described the event to media as “madness” and “unlike any order in living memory.” Another called bringing commanders home from front-line stations “reckless” but consistent with efforts to keep the officer corps “on a tight leash.”
According to officials who spoke to news organisations, Miller was involved in planning the event, determining attendance, and shaping its message. The gathering served multiple purposes: demonstrating the administration’s power to summon military leadership on demand, assessing which commanders would comply without resistance, and signalling that domestic deployment against “the enemy within” would become a major mission.
6 The Machinery in Motion
What makes this development so concerning isn’t that it resembles a military coup. American democratic institutions remain strong enough that a direct military seizure of power is implausible. What makes it concerning is that it doesn’t require a coup to be effective.
Consider what Miller has constructed, following Horowitz’s December 2012 instruction to wage “equally emotional campaign that puts the aggressors on the defensive:”
Ideological framing: Horowitz’s “enemy within” concept – treating Democrats as totalitarian threats – channelled through Trump to military commanders as their mission.
Operational control: Miller’s empowered HSC directing military strikes (Venezuela), domestic deployments (Guard federalisations), with authority at times superseding Secretary of State and bypassing traditional NSC processes.
Personnel transformation: Hegseth’s promotion review led by a court-martialled loyalist, CAP elimination removing any objective assessment, fitness standards providing discretionary removal authority, preliminary purges clearing resistant officers.
Legal boundaries tested: Federal Judge Charles Breyer ruled Miller’s California Guard deployment violated the Posse Comitatus Act, characterising it as an attempt to create a “national police force with the President as its chief.” The deployment cost tens of millions, involving over 4,000 California Guard soldiers and 700 Marines. Miller’s response? Expand operations to more cities. If the courts rule it illegal – find workarounds, keep moving. Precedents mount up.
None of this machinery requires democracy’s sudden death. It requires each component to function as designed. Officers who might dissent fail fitness tests or lose promotions. Those who comply advance. Domestic deployments become a matter of routine. Courts issue rulings that are appealed, stayed, worked around.
Miller works with minimal traditional oversight. Scheller redesigns promotion boards. Hegseth eliminates objective assessment programmes. Trump federalises Guard units over governors’ objections.
Each individual action has justifications. Each faces legal challenge. Each continues regardless.
7 No Quantico of Solace
Perhaps the most significant aspect of the Quantico meeting is what it reveals about the governance patterns under construction. Horowitz died in April 2025, but as The American Prospect noted, “his spirit has state power.” His protégé controls a parallel national security structure.
The “enemy within” framing now defines military missions. His December 2012 instruction – wage emotional warfare, attack opponents morally, use fear – has become administration doctrine.
Miller spent years learning from Horowitz. He absorbed the ideology: Democrats as totalitarian enemies, fear as the strongest weapon, white men as victims requiring defence. He implemented the tactics: inflammatory rhetoric, moral attacks on opponents, appeals to base instincts.
Now he has his finger on the trigger: directing strikes, deploying troops domestically, purging resistant officers, accumulating precedents.
Democratic resilience doesn’t come from hoping leaders won’t abuse power. It comes from institutional structures that make abuse both difficult and costly.
What the Quantico address and its institutional context reveal is systematic and patient pressure on those structures.
Will the cracks become a fracture? The silence of the generals gave nothing away.
Thanks for reading!
Best
Adrian
