This week in Turkey, some members of the military tried to stage a coup to remove what they say is an increasingly authoritarian President Recep Erdogan. It appears to have failed. When launching a coup, one must be mindful of the fact that successful or not, you are going to create economic instability (and lower economic growth). Businesses won’t want to invest until they know what the revised “rules of the game are”. If you are successful, people are going to want to see what your policies are going to be before they commit money. If you are unsuccessful, people are still going to view your country’s government as unstable and that will reduce investment and economic growth too. But if you are still committed launching a military coup, here are some general principals to follow:
1.) Remember that time is not on your side.
The key to a successful coup is to get yourself into power before anyone knows what the heck is going on. The longer the coup goes on, the less likely it is to be successful. You must convince the opposition quickly that the battle is over, you have won, and any further resistance would be in the service of a lost cause.
2.) Make sure that a significant majority of the Army AND the Air Force are on your side.
Or at least that they are not opposed to you. The more opposition you have within the armed forces, the more effective resistance you can expect. If the military is split 50/50, you might even end up with a civil war on your hands. If you care about your country and not just your own power, you shouldn’t launch a coup where this is a likely outcome. In any case, it would help if there were a respected military person on your side to at least keep military opposition to you to a minimum. The Turkish Coup Plotters (TCP) did not do this. There doesn’t appear to have been any major military figures lending support. Capturing generals and holding them hostage (as the TCP appears to have done) may be necessary to prevent them from issuing orders and coordinating resistance to you, but other officers are likely to take up the slack and oppose you anyway. Also, not having the Air Force on your side will result in you not having air superiority, without which you won’t win a conventional conflict. You may even have your helicopters getting shot down, which is what appears to have happened.
3.) Make sure that at least some level of the political opposition to the existing regime is on your side.
Erdogan may be increasingly authoritarian, but it is telling that everyone of all political stripes seems to have come out against the coup. I don’t mean that they just stayed silent and didn’t support it, they actually came out strongly against it. If you can’t get a fraction of the political opposition on your side, your coup really doesn’t have much of a chance.
4.) Have someone of some stature ready to begin the task of governing that day.
Your men may love you. They may follow you anywhere, including into a coup. But outside of the men under your command, you are probably a no-name. To get the population to at least tacitly accept your coup, it takes more than that just showing up at the palace with a beret and a pistol and announcing that you are the big head cheese. It takes somebody with some stature to reassure the population that there is a steady hand guiding what will likely be a very uncertain transition and that the country is not about to collapse into chaos. Otherwise, you might end up chaos as everybody freaks out and opportunists launching their own rival bids for power. I am guessing that this isn’t really what you are going for.
5.) Launch your coup at night.
This was one smart thing the TCP did. By launching the coup at night, the population is inside where you want them to be and not out on the street where they might get killed (or resist your coup). Ideally, the people will go bed, wake up to a new government (yours), get up and go about their day as if nothing had happened.
6.) Take control of the major traffic choke points.
The TCP appears to have attempted to do this. Blocking the bridge over the Bosporus for example , and taking control of the airports, if done right, restricts movement of your opposition and hinders their ability to mount an effective response to you.
7.) Launch the coup in the political AND economic centers of the country at the same time.
Kudos to the TCP for getting this right (or at least attempting to get this right). Nothing takes the fun out of a coup more than to capture the presidential palace, have control the political capital, broadcast from the President’s chair (now your chair) to the world telling them that you are in charge, only to find that the economic center of country is in full rebellion against you and you have done nothing to control that city. In a county like Turkey where the political capital and economic capital are not the same city, it is imperative that you grab control of both cities at the same time.
8.) Take control of the major communication outlets.
Part of a successful coup is making the country think you are in full command, before you actually are. Having control of the T.V. & radio stations and blocking the internet are key both to project an image that you are in charge, but also to prevent your opposition from mobilizing support against you. The TCP, in the beginning, appears to have done all of these things.
9.) Make sure the President doesn’t have FaceTime on his phone.
Otherwise, he might be able to call into the one TV station you didn’t get off the air and exhort his followers to take to the streets to oppose you. Once the followers are in the streets, either your coup is over (and you are at best looking at a long and painful prison term) or you need your troops to massacre them, which they may be reluctant to do given that your stated reason (probably) for the coup is to save the country from the bastard currently in charge. You don’t want to project the image (yet) that in fact you are the bastard that the country needs to be saved from.
10.) Capture (or kill) the President.
If you do this, he can’t organize resistance to you. If you think killing him will inflame his supporters and generate violent resistance to you by making a martyr out of him, then capture him, hold him (and his family) in a secret place, and make sure he can’t communicate with anyone (like via Facetime or something). The TCP didn’t do this. They should have.
Launching a successful military coup is a lot harder than it looks. But if you follow these 10 rules, you greatly increase your chances of a happy outcome (for you anyway). Once you have deposed your opposition, you can spend the rest of your life building out your base of support through patronage (giving your wonderful, virtuous, non-corrupt friends access to enough wealth that they and their families are sure to support you) and through coercion (those awful, horrible, corrupt individuals who oppose you need to be made to forcibly enjoy your benevolent hospitality at one of your luxurious “resorts”, if you know what I mean).