They’re Not Breaking America. They’re Dismantling It
In a single week in February 2026, the following things happened to the United States of America:
The CIA killed the World Factbook—the most authoritative public intelligence reference in the world, born from the ashes of Pearl Harbor in 1943, maintained for eighty-three years, used by presidents, soldiers, teachers, journalists, and librarians. Gone overnight. No explanation. No replacement. No archive.
The Secretary of Defense cut the U.S. military off from Harvard University—ending all graduate-level professional military education, fellowships, and certificate programs at one of the world’s premier institutions for strategic studies. He did it with a post on X. He holds a master’s degree from the institution he just banned his officers from attending.
The Washington Post—the newspaper that broke Watergate, that published the Pentagon Papers, that carried the motto “Democracy Dies in Darkness”—fired a third of its journalists. Its owner, Jeff Bezos, had already killed an endorsement of Kamala Harris to protect a $3.4 billion NASA contract, driven away 375,000 subscribers, and rewritten the editorial mission to serve libertarian ideology. The editor he installed went AWOL during the layoffs and appeared on the NFL Honors red carpet the next night.
The Office of Personnel Management issued a final rule to strip civil service protections from up to 50,000 federal employees, making them fireable at the president’s discretion. This brings the total federal workforce reduction to 242,260 since January 2025.
These are not separate events. They are the same event.
The Pattern
A country runs on institutions. Not personalities. Not slogans. Not loyalty. Institutions. The military runs on educated officers who understand the world they are asked to defend. Intelligence runs on accurate, accessible information about that world. Journalism runs on reporters who can hold power accountable. The civil service runs on career professionals who maintain continuity between administrations. These are not luxuries. They are load-bearing walls.
In a single week, the load-bearing walls were attacked simultaneously.
The attack on Harvard removes strategic education from the officer corps. The attack on the Factbook removes basic intelligence from the public and the government. The attack on the Washington Post removes investigative journalism from the national discourse. The attack on the civil service removes the independent professionals who keep the government functioning regardless of who sits in the Oval Office.
Each one, taken alone, looks like a policy dispute. A budget decision. A personnel action. A billionaire’s business judgment. But taken together, they reveal a single operation with a single objective: the systematic elimination of independent knowledge from American public life.
The Doctrine
There is a military term for what is happening. It is called a controlled demolition. You do not destroy a structure by attacking it at random. You identify the load-bearing elements—the columns, the beams, the connections that hold everything up—and you sever them in sequence. The structure does not fall all at once. It falls in on itself. Neatly. Efficiently. The rubble lands where you want it to land.
The load-bearing elements of a functioning democracy are not its politicians. Politicians come and go. The load-bearing elements are the institutions that produce, protect, and distribute independent knowledge: universities that educate leaders, intelligence agencies that inform the public, newsrooms that investigate the powerful, and a civil service that serves the nation rather than the party.
Every one of these was hit this week. And every one was hit by a different hand, creating the illusion of separate actions by separate actors for separate reasons. Hegseth hit Harvard. Ratcliffe hit the Factbook. Bezos hit the Post. The Office of Personnel Management hit the civil service. Four hands. One demolition.
The Numbers
Since January 2025, the federal government has shed 242,260 employees. The Defense Department alone has lost more than 60,000. The Treasury Department has lost more than 30,000. The Department of Agriculture has lost more than 20,000. Seven federal agencies have been targeted for outright elimination, including the Institute of Museum and Library Services—the agency that supports every library and archive in the country—and the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which houses Voice of America, the broadcast service that transmits news into countries with authoritarian regimes.
The administration proposed cutting the National Science Foundation by 57 percent. NASA by 24 percent. The National Institutes of Health by more than 40 percent. Congress rebuffed the worst of these cuts, but the intent was declared. The intent is the point.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created after the 2008 financial crisis to protect Americans from predatory lending, has been gutted. The Department of Veterans Affairs—which provides healthcare to the people who fought the country’s wars—is slated to lose 80,000 employees. The Social Security Administration has been cut so deeply that callers face dramatic wait times and an enormous backlog of cases.
And now, as of this week, 50,000 more career civil servants will be reclassified as at-will employees, strippable of their jobs at presidential discretion. Ninety-four percent of public comments opposed the rule. The administration finalized it anyway.
What They All Have in Common
Every target in this demolition shares one characteristic: independence.
Harvard produces officers who think independently. The World Factbook provided facts independently of political narrative. The Washington Post investigated power independently of the powerful. Career civil servants served the government independently of the president.
Independence is the common thread. It is not that these institutions were failing. It is that they could not be controlled. A general who studied international security at Harvard might question an order that contradicts strategic reality. A journalist at the Post might publish a story that embarrasses the administration. A career scientist at the NIH might produce research that conflicts with a donor’s interests. A civil servant might refuse to implement a policy that violates the law.
Each of these is, in a functioning democracy, a feature. In an authoritarian project, it is a defect to be eliminated.
The Adversary’s View
I have spent a career studying how adversaries think. In any conflict—kinetic, economic, informational—the single most valuable thing you can do to an opponent is degrade his ability to understand the world accurately. If you can blind him, you do not need to outfight him. He will defeat himself.
If you were a strategist in Beijing or Moscow, watching the United States in February 2026, here is what you would see: a nation voluntarily blinding itself. Cutting its own officers off from strategic education. Deleting its own intelligence reference. Gutting its own newsrooms. Firing its own civil servants. Stripping protections from the professionals who provide institutional continuity.
You would not need to launch a single cyberattack. You would not need to deploy a single agent of influence. The target is doing your work for you. The Americans are running a demolition operation on their own institutions, and they are doing it faster and more thoroughly than any foreign adversary could.
China is building three new military universities. We are closing the door to one. China is spending $780 billion a year on research and development. We are cutting our National Science Foundation by more than half. China has fused its military and academic institutions into a unified engine of national capability. We are pulling them apart because a television commentator thinks education makes soldiers soft.
What I Know
I was a Ranger and an overseas operator. I have worked in biophysics laboratories, in anti-poaching operations in Southern Africa, in defense policy analysis, in over a hundred countries on six continents. I have operated in places where institutions had already been demolished—where there was no independent press, no professional civil service, no protected academic freedom, no reliable public intelligence. I know what those places look like. I know what happens to the people who live in them. Many die unnecessarily. Carelessness. Neglect. Murder.
They do not look like strength. They look like decay dressed up in flags.
A country that cannot educate its officers, inform its public, investigate its leaders, and protect its civil servants is not a country that is becoming stronger. It is a country that is being hollowed out. The uniform stays. The insignia stays. The slogans get louder. But inside the structure, the load-bearing walls are gone, and the whole thing is waiting for the wind.
The Controlled Demolition
In demolition engineering, there is a concept called the initiation sequence. It is the precise order in which charges are detonated to ensure that a structure collapses inward rather than outward. The sequence matters. You do not blow the roof first. You blow the supports. The roof comes down on its own.
The supports of American institutional knowledge are being blown in sequence. Education. Intelligence. Journalism. Civil service. These are the four columns. When they are gone, everything above them—policy, strategy, diplomacy, military readiness, scientific competitiveness, democratic accountability—comes down. Not with a crash. With a settling. A slow, quiet collapse that most people will not recognize until they reach for something that used to be there and find only air.
That sixth-grade teacher in Oklahoma City reached for the World Factbook on Wednesday. He found a blue page telling him to stay curious.
That war correspondent in Ukraine reached for her newspaper on Tuesday. She found a layoff notice in her inbox while she sat in a freezing car in a war zone, writing by headlamp.
The next young officer who wants to study international security at Harvard will reach for an application. He will find a locked door, shut by a man who walked through it himself.
And 50,000 career civil servants will reach for the protections that have kept the American government functioning across twelve administrations. They will find that those protections have been reclassified out of existence by a 250-page rule that 94 percent of the public opposed.
This is not chaos. This is sequence. This is not incompetence. This is the plan. The building is still standing. The flags are still flying. The slogans are getting louder. But listen carefully and you can hear it—the quiet crack of load-bearing walls giving way, one by one, in the dark.