Right now,
the world's two most powerful militaries,
America and China,
are both clearing out their top generals at a pace
not seen since the lead up to World War 2.
In America,
senior commanders are being fired,
resigning,
or pushed out.
Meanwhile,
in China,
at the same time,
entire layers of their high command are
disappearing into investigations,
prisons,
and in some cases,
even death sentences.
Apparently job security gets worse the closer you get to the nuclear codes.
But these are the same people responsible for commanding millions of troops,
overseeing enormous nuclear arsenals,
and trillions of dollars in defense spending between them.
I think that raises some pretty big questions
that are worth exploring,
like why are so many top generals being removed,
who's replacing them,
and what are these.
New generals preparing for.
I'm Chris Cappy.
Hit the subscribe button and let's find out.
Now,
to be clear,
what's happening in the United States and in China is not the same thing.
The political systems,
the methods,
and the reasons for removing these officers are very different as we'll see.
But what we're looking at today and what we're focusing on
is the shocking scale of military leadership turnover
at the top in both countries.
And that kind of turnover actually has historical precedent.
This phenomenon has happened only once before in recent history.
But before we get into that,
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Now back to the episode.
In the years leading up to World War Two,
several major powers carried out similar massive military purges.
In the late 1930s in the Soviet Union,
Joseph Stalin purged his military leadership
in a decidedly brutal fashion.
During what became known as the Great Purge,
tens of thousands of Soviet officers were removed,
imprisoned,
executed,
or sent to the gulags.
Stalin feared that powerful military officers
could become his political rivals
or participate in coups,
so the regime targeted commanders who were accused of,
or
they fabricated evidence of disloyal conspiracy,
espionage,
or insufficient political reliability.
Stalin's HR department had a very aggressive severance.
Meanwhile,
in Nazi Germany at the same time,
they were going through their own leadership shake-up.
In 1938,
Hitler purged two of his most senior commanders,
his,
his war minister Blomberg and his army commander Fritz.
He believed that they were too cautious and too
ideologically committed enough for his future war plans.
The Nazis weren't Nazi enough.
Immediately,
scandals suddenly appeared around both men.
Blomberg was pushed out over his new wife's past,
while Fritz was falsely accused of liking his fellow man a little too much.
The message Hitler sent to the rest of the officer corps was pretty clear.
Hesitation was becoming a career limiting condition.
In 1939,
as war broke out across Europe,
the United States started its own version of a military purge.
President Franklin Roosevelt made General George C.
Marshall
Army Chief of Staff and gave him the job of turning a small,
outdated American force
into something that could survive a modern industrial war.
Marshall thought
too many of the senior officers were.
Old,
cautious,
and mentally stuck back in the past war of World War 1.
Over the next couple of years,
Marshall forced hundreds of US military officers
into early retirement
or fired them.
Then he promoted younger leaders who were more
willing to experiment with new types of armor,
air power,
radios,
and combined arms warfare.
And some of the resistance really was old school.
There were still senior officers at the time who
believed horse cavalry had an important battlefield future.
Just as tanks were proving what mechanized warfare could do in Europe.
Nothing says prepared for the next war,
like
arguing that horses need just one more chance.
Marshall helped push the army toward armored divisions,
mechanized
and younger command structure.
Basically,
before America could fight the Axis powers,
it first had to defeat the guys still emotionally invested in saddles.
Fast forward 80 years and something strangely familiar is happening today,
and the reasons behind these military purges are worth.
Remembering,
because the same themes keep showing up today,
loyalty to political leadership,
doubts about competence,
and arguments over whether the generals in charge are
actually prepared for the next kind of war.
The first signs of a military purge in China started
when their leader Xi Jinping took power in 2012.
He immediately starts purging left and right.
He goes after the junior officers at first,
because Xi inherited a military where
corruption had become deeply embedded in the promotion system.
Officers were literally buying their way into higher ranks.
It would be like if you could go to your platoon leader in the US Army and just
pay him to be promoted to platoon sergeant.
But by 2014,
entire networks inside the People's Liberation Army
were under corruption investigation.
At this point,
the purge had gone from targeting the lower level petty fraud
to high level senior officers
who are now under the microscope.
These are the men who had spent their entire lives,
decades building influence inside the Chinese PLA.
Then suddenly they found themselves detained,
interrogated,
and disappeared from public view.
They're black bagged and sent to watch
and.
Hours of re-education videos,
if they're lucky.
President Xi Jinping was targeting the officers involved in what's called the
patronage bribery system.
This system had come to define the Chinese military for decades.
Xi Jinping was attempting to
tie new troops loyalty to himself
instead of to their officers.
For Xi,
a corrupt military was also dangerous to his power.
Nowhere is there a better explanation than this
than Xu Kaiyo,
who grew up poor in a small Chinese village,
where his grandparents were both farmers and his father worked
as a clerk in the grocery store.
But despite these humble beginnings,
he tested extremely well in his high school exams.
So he gets into the Harbin Institute of Military Engineering in China,
which is this elite university that's
usually only reserved for China's princelings,
who are the descendants of senior Communist Party leaders.
And
he somehow got into the Chinese version of
West Point without basically having the correct name.
Chu becomes a rising star in the CCP
and for many decades he's in charge of
basically which officers get promoted and which don't.
So you can imagine the kind of power he wielded.
He takes millions of dollars in bribes
to promote some over others.
By 2013,
he's worked his way up to the highest rank in the entire
system.
He's vice chairman of the Central Military Commission.
At that point,
he had climbed about as high as you could go without actually being Xi Jinping,
and that's when everything starts to fall apart.
At 70 years old,
he's tragically diagnosed with terminal cancer,
and then right afterwards,
he's charged with corruption by the CCP.
But why did they charge a dying man?
Because President Xi Jinping
was sending a message to everyone else.
No one was untouchable.
Soon after that,
another high ranking general.
Gao Bhushan is charged with a massive
pay for promotion scandal as well.
The purge was moving from these junior leaders to senior leadership,
to men who run the entire system.
By this point,
the anti-corruption campaign audit
was starting to look more like a demolition job.
In 2016,
Xi Jinping abolished old command regions,
and he then replaces them with new theater commands.
This helped centralize power under just him.
The entire high ranking military system
is then completely reshaped.
And by 2016,
being a senior PLA officer
had become a very efficient way to quickly discover whether
Xi Jinping liked you.
And this is where the American side of the story starts to take shape.
The United States didn't suddenly reinvent the idea of firing generals.
In the American system,
the military is deliberately subordinate to elected civilian leadership,
and presidents have removed even enormously powerful commanders
when they believed that the relationship had broken down.
President Truman famously fired General Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War,
after the two clashed over strategy,
and MacArthur publicly challenged the administration.
Policy.
MacArthur was one of the most famous commanders in American history.
President Obama famously fired Stanley McChrystal,
a legendary US Special Forces commander,
who was the man in charge of operations in Afghanistan.
And it was because the two had personal and strategic disagreements.
But in all cases,
the generals weren't sent to Guantanamo Bay with a bag over their head.
I mean,
the CIA
did do that a lot,
but just not with their own generals.
So by the time Trump returned to office for a second time,
In 2025,
his second administration starts a major leadership
overhaul not seen since the 1930s.
The US generals weren't charged with crimes and sent to prison like in China.
Instead,
senior officers were just
quietly passed over for promotion.
Others were encouraged to retire early
or to resign or they were fired.
We can't know for certain what's going on
inside the heads of the Pentagon officials,
because many of these personnel decisions
happen without a detailed public explanation.
So when we talk about why these officers are being removed,
we're piecing it together from public statements,
policy changes,
congressional testimony,
and who is actually being replaced.
Essentially we're reading between the lines instead of pretending we have
access to the room where these decisions are being made.
In 2025,
a massive change started to take place though.
The Pentagon ordered a huge reduction of 20% of the four-star generals.
Then they ordered a 10% cut to all flags.
Officers,
senior leaders
who expected to hold their position for years,
and they were suddenly dealing with just leaving in a few months.
Commands that were supposed to transition gradually
begin turning over very fast.
It's a shock to the system.
The military's least favorite thing is change,
and its second least favorite thing is
change.
The highest ranking US military officer,
the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs,
Charles Brown at the time,
is fired by President Trump.
The chairman is the principal military advisor.
Adviser to the president,
the Secretary of Defense,
and the National Security Council.
This triggered speculation.
Was all this about strategy or was it about disagreements behind closed doors?
Was there not enough loyalty?
On September 30,
2025,
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth
and President Trump hold a massive in-person
meeting with 800 of America's top generals,
admirals,
and senior enlisted leaders.
It was an unprecedented gathering of American military leadership.
At the meeting,
they outline an overhaul of military standards.
Hegseth is put in charge of firing and clearing out generals
who disagree with the next direction.
The clearest public face of this shake-up is the Defense Secretary,
the War Secretary Pete Hegseth,
the civilian official who's in charge of the Pentagon.
He's a former Army National Guard infantry
officer who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan,
later became a Fox News host,
and was appointed by Trump in 2025.
He's been one of the people most publicly arguing
that the Pentagon's senior leadership needs to change.
But Hegseth encouraged generals not on board with the new plan
to leave the service.
During his speech to these 800 some odd officers,
he compared himself to World War 2 Secretary of War.
He compared Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
General Dan Kane to General George Marshall,
the two men who were responsible for reshaping the US military prior to World War 2,
the ones that we just talked about earlier.
So Hegseth framed this overhaul.
Firing of all this leadership
around preparing the force for future war.
Whether you think this is overdue reform or completely reckless,
inexcusable overreach
is not really the point of this video,
it's kind of besides the point.
I find it crazy that the entire structure of the US military is being changed.
Whether you agree with these changes or not.
These decisions have some pretty big consequences for the country.
After the giant meeting,
dozens of senior officers,
generals,
admirals,
and military judges stepped down and announced early retirements.
The US Army's top uniformed officer,
the Chief of Staff,
Randy George,
was pushed out into an early retirement.
He was in charge of training,
equipment,
procurement,
and running the entire United States Army.
In the US,
chiefs like this are typically allowed to complete their four-year terms.
So removing one early is highly unusual.
It's clear that no position is untouchable.
It was a total restructuring.
The Navy Secretary was fired in 2026.
In fact,
at least 6 of 8 top US military leadership have been fired,
left,
or removed in the last year.
Behind the scenes,
civilian officials believe parts.
The Pentagon had become too slow,
too bureaucratic,
and in some cases,
too resistant to policy direction.
Right now at the Pentagon,
there has been a string of procurement
of new weapons systems that have failed,
from billions of dollars in new frigates to failed light tanks.
Both sides of the political aisle were
starting to point blame at military leadership,
blaming them for failing to respond to new threats like drones fast enough.
And throughout all of this,
the US military's top levels of leadership
based its own corruption scandals.
There were years of revolving doors between people in the
defense companies and top levels of the military command.
At a certain point,
the line between retiring from the
Pentagon and interviewing for a defense contractor
chairman position got pretty blurry.
At the same time,
a new kind of war was emerging,
one that was driven by fast-paced change in drone,
cyberattacks,
and near peer competition with China.
So inside the halls of Washington for many years,
there was a growing belief that the
current generation of military generals were failing.
A good example is the US Army's new drone battalion in Europe,
which was created to figure out how to integrate lessons from the war in Ukraine
into American drone tactics.
Hegseth later moved to shut the battalion.
Reflecting a broader disagreement over whether
drones should live inside specialized units
or be pushed down
all the way to ordinary soldiers and formations.
So underneath all the bureaucracy in the United States
is a pretty important argument over funding,
organization,
and how the army actually fights.
Because if you get that wrong,
then somebody 20 years from now
gets to explain why they spent billions of
dollars on the equivalent of really advanced horses.
There's an important.
Political layer to all of this.
In China,
Xi Jinping has openly spent years tightening Communist Party control
over the military and removing officers whose loyalty he questioned.
In the United States,
the situation is pretty different,
but politics still matter.
The administration wants senior officers who will carry out its priorities.
So in both countries,
these firings are also about who the
political leadership trusts to command the military.
The purge in China is on a whole other level though,
and the Recent escalation in the purge
is said to have to do with coups against Xi Jinping and a possible Taiwan conflict.
In 2022,
Xi Jinping
takes his military purge to the next level.
120 of China's mid-level officers suddenly disappear,
are arrested and fired.
This includes China's then Defense Minister who suddenly
disappeared from public view for months on end.
And when he reappears a year later,
he's charged with corruption.
He's one of the men given a suspended death sentence in 2020.
26.
Although in China,
this means that the execution is delayed by a
few years and it might not end up happening.
By now,
nearly all the 30 generals and admirals who
run key specialized departments and theater commands in China
have been totally expelled.
Keeping your name on the command roster at this
point was becoming its own form of job performance.
Roughly 50 to 70% of all of China's generals have been fired or removed
since the purge started in one way or another.
Then Xi Jinping starts.
Targeting a very specific group of officers who are
responsible for China's most strategically important military unit,
its ballistic missile force.
The top 5 generals of China's rocket force are removed.
Commander Lee is sacked.
At the same time,
Chinese officials call this part of an anti-corruption campaign.
But speculation starts to rise that maybe
these men simply weren't aggressive enough.
Maybe they disagreed with war plans over Taiwan
and would hesitate
when the war started.
In January 2026,
the Chinese purge hits the second most powerful man in China,
General Zhang,
second to Xi Jinping himself.
He was arrested and accused of leaking nuclear secrets to the United States.
Getting promoted in the PLA was starting to come with the occupational hazard
of becoming very interesting to the internal state security services.
They were calling him a CIA asset,
and not a year prior,
he was best friends with Xi Jinping.
General Zhang was the only high.
Ranking general with combat experience.
He had served in China's war against Vietnam in the 1980s,
and because of this,
he had the respect of many young PLA soldiers.
We know that Zhang likely wasn't sacked for incompetence
because he was the man who oversaw China's
rapid military modernization over the past decade,
which makes the incompetence explanation a little awkward
because Zhang's resume was basically the entire PLA's modernization brochure.
He transformed the old PLA.
Into a more efficient,
modern,
technologically advanced mechanized fighting force.
Even American commanders
say how great China's military modernization efforts are.
Zhang may have been arrested
because he was not politically on board with an invasion of Taiwan,
because there's evidence that Zhang structured the troops' training schedule
so that they would not be ready in time.
China experts claim that Xi Jinping had a preference
to pursue speed and scale,
while Zhang favored a more focused and deliberate.
Approach.
Just look at how the Communist Party listed their priorities for the PLA.
It mapped out a huge range of developing capabilities,
including the rapid construction
of warships to enhance missiles.
But under Vice Chairman General Zhang,
resources were instead poured into
unmanned platforms in this new type of network centric warfare.
Mao Zedong once said,
our principle is that the party commands the gun
and the gun
must never be allowed to command the party.
It's another way of saying the generals can have the
weapon as long as everyone remembers who owns the trigger.
But why is it that in authoritarian countries,
the military leadership is executed
or removed by force?
Why are Chinese and Russian generals arrested,
imprisoned or executed in public.
Their entire families
often thrown into jail for treason.
Why aren't they just asked to retire or forced out like in the US military?
Part of the reason for this difference is because in China,
even when military officers leave their command,
their former troops stay loyal to them.
General Zhang,
for example,
many of his subordinates in his chain of command were more loyal to him
than Xi Jinping.
The reason dictators jailed most of their popular generals in the past is because
a retired PLA general can still have hundreds
of thousands of troops more loyal to him.
And the party,
the PLA is fundamentally a political organization.
The army is an armed wing of the Communist Party.
So ultimately this old vestigial patronage bribery system in the PLA
had made an entire class of officers who were loyal to those who promoted them
instead of the party.
Those promotions were done through bribes.
This is why it was so important for Xi Jinping from his perspective
to root out corruption.
Disloyalty from Chinese troops to General Zhang
could have been dangerous to his rule.
It threatened him.
If you let a powerful general retire in the PLA
can actually be more dangerous.
That makes popular,
well-liked generals a loose end.
These popular generals have often come back to destroy dictators in past history.
History is filled with examples of dictators being
overthrown by their most popular military generals.
Xi Jinping's fear of a coup from this general may not
have been just paranoia though.
On January 18,
2026,
Xi Jinping was supposed to be checking into a luxury hotel in Beijing.
Then unconfirmed reports out of China claimed that General Zhang
had planned to capture Xi Jinping
and to overthrow his rule.
Instead,
Xi was tipped off ahead of time by someone within the operation.
Zhang's men were ambushed by security forces and there
was a fierce gunfight at the hotel allegedly.
Both sides suffered losses,
but in the end the coup plot failed.
Shakin Xi Jinping ordered his most trusted friend arrested immediately.
In Beijing,
trusted friend was becoming a temporary job title.
Whether those unconfirmed reports of a coup are true or not,
I take them with a big grain of salt.
The larger point is that replacing senior military leaders
makes a huge change,
and there are multiple theories from different experts
on how to read all of this.
The charitable interpretation is that both governments believe their
militaries have serious problems and are replacing leaders.
To make them more capable.
The darker interpretation is that political leaders
are also using military reform to consolidate control
and surround themselves with commanders who are yes men,
who they trust to blindly follow orders.
Those two theories,
those two explanations aren't mutually exclusive though.
Generals can be removed because leadership think that they're ineffective,
politically,
unreliable,
or both.
The results of all of this is that.
Experts have warned that it's left China and the United
States less prepared to fight a war against each other.
One can only hope it's true that these
countries won't fight a war against one another.
But history shows us leadership shake-ups like this
can mean the opposite.
Periods of rapid military transformation
often happen when governments believe the strategic environment has changed,
and that makes what's happening in Washington and Beijing
worth paying attention to.
But no matter what the reason for the motivation for this purges,
history has shown when all the world's top military leadership is removed.
The hint of more to come.
If you like this video,
check out this episode on how the FBI is going after Mexico's corrupt politicians
and the US is fighting the cartel in Colombia,
or check out this playlist here.
Remember,
the Cappy Army Show is now available wherever you get your podcasts,
so
download it today.
I'm Chris Cappy.
See you in the next transmission.