The secret police playbook

From the article:

We have spent the last decade studying how authoritarian security organizations are built, staffed, and sustained. We asked, who does the dirty work of these regimes – and why?

Our new book Making a Career in Dictatorship traces the career trajectories of more than 4,000 officers in Argentina’s dictatorship-era security apparatus and pairs that evidence with case studies from Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and The Gambia. What we found contradicts what most people assume about how violent secret police organizations emerge.

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Most people assume that repressive organizations are filled with true believers — ideological extremists who genuinely want to harm others, or at minimum sadists and sociopaths for whom the work is personally gratifying. The logic of this view is that the way to build a secret police force is to find the worst people and give them badges.

Our research tells a different story.

When we combed through the personnel archives of Argentina’s Intelligence Battalion 601 — the secret police unit that orchestrated the disappearance, torture, and killing of thousands during the country’s so-called Dirty War — we were not looking for monsters. We were looking for patterns. And the pattern we found was strikingly mundane: the officers who joined Battalion 601 had, in the main, performed worse than their peers at the military academy. They had graduated toward the bottom of their cohorts. They had stalled in the lower and middle ranks. They were men whose regular career paths had quietly closed.

These were not the most extreme officers in Argentina’s army. They were the most stuck.

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But in Argentina in the 1970s, the military dictatorship offered another option: a parallel unit that needed staffing, valued loyalty over competence, and offered career-pressured officers a second chance. The dirty work of state terror — kidnapping, torture, disappearing people — was psychologically repugnant enough that high-performing officers with smooth career trajectories had every reason to avoid it. But for the men at the bottom of the cohort, it was a ladder.

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This is what we call the detouring logic: career-pressured officers “detour” through repressive units not because they are fanatics, but because the detour is the only viable path upward. The regime does not need to recruit extremists. It only needs to create the right organizational conditions — and then let ordinary career anxiety do the rest.

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An existing institution — in this case, federal law enforcement or the military — provides the talent pool. It already contains, by the logic of any competitive promotion system, a substantial number of career-pressured officials: people who have plateaued, who feel passed over, who sense their professional options narrowing.

The second pyramid is the new or repurposed unit — the one that will be staffed with willing enforcers. ICE has existed for more than two decades, but it is now being massively expanded. Its budget tripled under the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” to a level larger than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined. The agency is hiring over 10,000 new agents. It is, structurally, a rapidly growing second ladder — and it needs to be filled.

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Career-pressured officers are not making ideological commitments. They are making career bets. For the detour to be worth taking, they need to know they will be protected when they push legal and ethical limits. This signal must be credible, and it must be public — because it needs to be heard by everyone calculating whether the bet is worth making.

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The conventional wisdom holds that professional, merit-based institutions are firewalls against authoritarianism. If promotions depend on competence rather than loyalty, the thinking goes, the bureaucracy will be committed to rules and law rather than to any particular leader. The whole case for civil service reform — from the Pendleton Act onward — rests on this premise. The logic of the highly professionalized American military system that underpins civil-military relations likewise follows this logic.

Our research tells a different story. The Argentine army maintained a rigorously meritocratic promotion system through democracies, dictatorships, and everything in between. It was explicitly designed as an apolitical professional body. And yet this same institution produced both mass repression and repeated coups.

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There is one more thing you need to know about the career-pressured officer we have been describing. This playbook has a second edge—one leaders rarely anticipate.

In our book, career pressure produces two rival solutions to the same career problem. One is the described detouring: officers demonstrate loyalty through repression because a coercive assignment offers the only ladder left. The other is forcing: when careers collapse and exits close, some officers decide the best way to salvage their future is to remove the leadership that made them expendable—by conspiring against the regime rather than serving it.

That is why Trump is playing with fire when he weaponizes career pressure. The same pressure that can fill a growing coercive apparatus with willing enforcers can also manufacture a coup risk. And if the regime fast-tracks yesterday’s losers, it also threatens yesterday’s winners. When promotion and prestige are suddenly rerouted, even high performers can become angry stakeholders—raising incentives for moves that destabilize the leadership that rewrote the ladder.

Also, here’s a New York Times article about the book.