# Armed Forces Hub The United States military is the largest single institution in the federal government — roughly 1.3 million active-duty personnel under civilian control through the [[Department of Defense]] (styled the "Department of War" since the September 2025 renaming). This MOC maps the armed forces as a structure: the six service branches, the senior leadership, the operational command chain, and the reserve component that has become the flashpoint of the era. For the KB, the military matters along two axes that recur throughout the second term. The first is **[[Civil-Military Relations]]** — the project to replace the professional officer corps' tradition of nonpartisanship with personal loyalty to the commander in chief, executed most visibly in the February 2025 purge of senior officers. The second is **domestic deployment** — the question of whether and how the military can be turned inward against American cities, protesters, and immigrants, which runs through the [[Insurrection Act]], the [[Posse Comitatus Act]], and the [[National Guard]] federalization fights. The constitutional design point worth holding onto: the [[Joint Chiefs of Staff]] *advise*, while the operational chain runs President → Secretary of Defense → [[Combatant Commands]]. ## The department and its leadership - **[[Department of Defense]]** — the civilian-led department; SecDef [[Pete Hegseth]]; the "Department of War" renaming and the Feb 2025 officer purge - **[[Joint Chiefs of Staff]]** — the senior uniformed advisers; Chairman Dan Caine after CQ Brown's firing ## The six service branches - **[[U.S. Army]]** — the principal land force - **[[United States Navy]]** — the sea service; CNO [[Daryl Caudle]] after Franchetti's firing - **[[United States Marine Corps]]** — the expeditionary force (within the Department of the Navy) - **[[U.S. Air Force]]** — air power - **[[U.S. Space Force]]** — space operations (within the Department of the Air Force) - **[[United States Coast Guard]]** — maritime service, housed in [[Department of Homeland Security]] in peacetime ## Operational command and the reserve → **[[Combatant Commands Map]]** — ASCII-art map of the 11 commands and the chain of command: who commands what, as of July 2026, and why the [[Joint Chiefs of Staff]] and the service chiefs are not in the line. - **[[Combatant Commands]]** — the 11 unified war-fighting commands; NORTHCOM (homeland) and SOUTHCOM (cartels) are the KB-salient ones - **[[Goldwater-Nichols Act]]** — the 1986 statute that put the combatant commanders in the operational chain and left the service chiefs out of it - **[[National Guard]]** — the dual state/federal reserve; the center of the 2025 domestic-deployment confrontations ## Cross-cutting law and concepts - **[[Insurrection Act]]** — the principal statutory path to domestic military deployment - **[[Posse Comitatus Act]]** — the bar on military law enforcement that the Insurrection Act overrides - **[[Unitary Executive Theory]]** — the removal-power doctrine behind the officer purge ## Related - [[Federal Agencies]] — the parent executive-branch MOC - [[Intelligence Community Hub]] — the defense intelligence agencies (NSA, DIA) overlap here - [[Oversight and Accountability Hub]] — the watchdog tier