General anxiety. Will Trump destroy the U.S. military? The national security establishment wants you to think so.
“He will destroy the Department of Defense, frankly,” Sen. Jack Reed, who leads the Senate Armed Services Committee, told Reuters. The article warns of a looming “purge” of generals, using the word four times. For the reporters, four star generals are not simply “fired,” the word for us working stiffs. They are purged, a sinister word evoking Stalin because, well, what kind of monster would subject our sainted generals to the kind of at-will employment the rest of us toil under?
Similar hand-wringing articles about the fate of the military appeared in countless other news publications this week. The articles inevitably quote Democratic Party congresspeople and anonymous officials and experts. Do they not see how self-serving it is for anyone to cast their firing as a politically-motivated Stalinist purge?
The “purge” framing is part of a broader narrative emanating from Washington that the incoming commander-in-chief doesn’t have enough respect (that is, deference) for the national security state. You don’t have to like Trump — he wasn’t my pick — to understand how important civilian control of the military is, and how weird it is for generals to be anonymously telling the press that he shouldn’t be exercising that control.
You also don’t have to like Trump to think there might be cause to fire the very people who have presided over major wars in Ukraine and the Middle East with no end in sight. The concern that Trump might turn the Pentagon into his own partisan army overlooks the ways in which the military was constitutionally designed to prevent exactly that. For all its faults, the U.S. military is just not a fragile or political institution.
And if it makes you feel better, it’s not like any fired generals would be unemployed for long. Once “retired” from service, they’ll go on to make millions on the boards of major corporations, positions they won’t disclose in their side jobs as paid commentators on cable news.
If you think I’m exaggerating about the revolving door, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, retired Army Gen. Mark Milley, recently thanked a bunch of big bank executives “for your service” during a paid speech for the American Bankers Association. Perhaps Senator Reed could explain to me how profiting off of your status as a retired general doesn’t in any sense “destroy the Department of Defense,” but presiding over the catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan does not. Or the Gaza war, which has metastasized into a regional war with Iran. Or the Ukraine war which has literally no articulated endgame and where the killing continues.
Clearly, the national security establishment doesn’t really care about actual security; but rather their place in the status quo. So in that sense, could Trump destroy the military? Let’s hope so.
Trump’s favored Defense Secretary right now is Florida congressman Mike Waltz, sources tell me. As with all things Trump, this can change overnight, but he’s the front runner currently, they say. Waltz would be an interesting choice due to his longstanding criticisms of the Pentagon.
A former Army Green Beret, Waltz has seen war from the trenches rather than from a desk in Washington. Perhaps as a result, he is an unusually strong critic of the ways of the U.S. military institution (and the Pentagon). His focus has been the disconnect between what Washington says, directs, and dreams and the reality “out there” in the field.
Waltz is especially critical of the Biden administration’s handling of the Ukraine war, which he says lacks an endgame. Biden’s position that he would provide military aid to Ukraine for “as long as it takes” Waltz has criticized as “a slogan, not a strategy.” Last week, Waltz said it was time for Russia and Ukraine to negotiate a settlement to the war, telling NewsNation:
“[T]he point is, uh, get them both to the table. And we have to ask ourselves — this is the other thing that Biden couldn’t or wouldn’t define — is it in America’s critical national interest for no matter how long it takes, how much it costs, or how many people die, to have every Russian off of every inch of Ukraine, including Crimea? Those are the fundamental questions we have to ask ourselves.”
This is a position Washington is terrified of even suggesting. The commonality between Trump and Waltz seems to be that the Ukraine war is reaching no military solution, so something should change. But whereas Trump seems primarily concerned about the ongoing economic cost of U.S. military aid to Ukraine, Waltz seems more concerned with the strategic question of what a deal might mean for the situation on the ground.
Waltz’s regard for the reality on the ground is also shown in his reaction to the Biden administration’s absurd position that the United States is not at war. In the presidential debate, Vice President Harris claimed that there were no U.S. military in active duty in a combat zone anywhere in the world for the first time this century. (Her comment echoed a similar remark by Biden earlier this year, that “the United States is not at war anywhere in the world,” a misleading assertion I corrected here.) Waltz responded with a detailed rundown of the various U.S. military engagements that often go overlooked. Here’s what he told CNN:
“I immediately thought of the three soldiers from Georgia, uh, who were killed by Iranian backed missiles and drones in Jordan. I thought of the two Navy Seals who died trying to intercept Iranian smugglers. And off the coast of Somalia, I thought about the ships that have been used as target practice by the Houthis with, uh, drones and anti-ship missiles supplied by Iran.
Heck, an aircraft carrier just got a combat medal for the first time since World War two for its actions off the Red Sea. We could keep going down the list. The special operators that are in Syria right now, as we speak, we just had six wounded in a raid on an ISIS compound. We had another six wounded by a missile attack.
I mean, this is a long list.”
The endless fighting of the U.S. military is a long list, as readers of this newsletter (and followers of our short form news account you can follow on X) know. I’m skeptical as to whether Waltz (or Trump) can shorten that list much past Ukraine, but it will be interesting to see play out.
The Gaza ceasefire negotiations are essentially dead, with Qatari officials reportedly telling Hamas political leaders that they are no longer welcome in the country. So ends the Biden administration’s past year of “tireless,” “around the clock,” “hour-by-hour” efforts at securing a diplomatic agreement between Hamas and Israel.
If only the White House was as good at diplomacy as its comms people were at coming up with idioms for how seriously it was taking all of this. The administration is still carrying on the charade, insisting yesterday on its “continued commitment to bring the war in Gaza to an end as quickly as possible.” (The Biden administration is already turning to the UAE to magically produce a January surprise.)
There’s little reason for optimism in the next Trump administration either, as Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu suggested today. Netanyahu said of his recent calls with Trump: “We see eye-to-eye on the Iranian threat in all its aspects and on the dangers they represent.” Oh goodie.
