By Jarrett Stepman | Daily Signal
Firing incompetent generals is a good thing. In fact, it might be what the military needs right now to regain the confidence of the American people.
According to a number of reports, President-elect Donald Trump will be creating a commission to review leaders in the military with the assumption that many of the top brass will be fired.
Trump will be using a “warrior board” of retired officers, The Hill reported, to review our current crop of three- and four-star officers and will weed out the ones the commission disapproves of.
That’s not all.
Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth—an Army veteran who has been awarded two Bronze Stars, and who served in Iraq and Afghanistan—said in past interviews that it’s necessary to remove “woke” senior military officials who have left the U.S. armed forces in a sorry state.
“First of all, you’ve got to fire [the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] and obviously you’ve got to bring in a new secretary of defense, but any general that was involved—general, admiral, whatever—that was involved in any of the DEI woke s—, has got to go,” Hegseth said in an early November interview on “The Shawn Ryan Show” podcast. DEI is shorthand for diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Pete Hegseth is ready for day one as Defense Secretary.
‘All the woke Generals must be fired immediately.’pic.twitter.com/ai9cqoImj4
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) November 13, 2024
Trump and Hegseth—the author of “The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free” and “Modern Warriors: Real Stories from Real Heroes”—clearly intend to shake up the military at the top.
The Left, however, isn’t taking it well.
Legacy media is reporting on that development as if it’s some kind of ominous sign that Trump will “politicize” the military. They are even calling it a “purge.”
One left-wing podcaster, Fred Wellman, who includes “democracy advocate” in his X bio, even posted that removing generals is “truly fascist.”
Ah, yes, civilian control of the military, so fascist.
For a quick history lesson, a president’s removal of generals and other high-ranking military leaders—especially after years of relative “peace”—has often been a significant boon, not a hindrance, to the military.
Peacetime militaries—and I only use that phrase loosely to refer to our own era of near-constant, low-level asymmetrical conflicts—frequently calcify. Leaders who successfully navigate the bureaucratic treadmill to make it to the top ranks in those times are frequently not the best wartime leaders.
Militaries need to be shaken up from time to time.
In the War of 1812, many American military officers were holdovers from the American Revolution. Many had grown old and ineffective. The crucible of war allowed junior commanders like Winfield Scott to emerge as a brilliant young general who would prove instrumental in that war and future conflicts.
In the Civil War, there was a tremendous shake-up of the senior ranks on both sides.
Marginal officers like Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, who was almost entirely overlooked at the Virginia Military Institute, proved himself to be one of the most astoundingly gifted military commanders once he had a chance to prove himself in battle.
Abraham Lincoln suffered through far too many mediocrities at the top before finding war winners like Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman. Almost none of the top commanders at the beginning of the war ended up in the same place by the war’s end.
Right now, the United States clearly needs a shake-up at the Pentagon in the worst way.
The world is in turmoil, thanks in no small part to the Biden administration, and we are closer to seeing an actual peer-to-peer conflict than perhaps at any point since World War II.
Yet, many on the Left are hyperventilating about the move. Why?
It’s a pretty good sign that they know they’ve made serious inroads into military institutions that are historically traditional and conservative. They don’t want to lose their grip on the military, just as they fear losing control of any other institution they dominate.
The primary issue, beyond typical military calcification, is that our current military leadership appears to be filled with those who have floated to the top amid the general woke-ification of American society and government.
It’s not Trump who will be “politicizing” the military; it’s the military itself that has been politicized. DEI, critical race theory, and other radical ideologies have been force-fed into military institutions, and the Biden administration was only too happy to accelerate that transformation.
They justified DEI by saying that it would create a better, more cohesive military and deepen the pool of recruits. That was the same unproven, bogus argument corporate America made when it went whole hog on “diversity” to the point of climbing aboard the discrimination bandwagon.
But much like the corporate DEI push—which proved a financial liability, rather than a boon—the military DEI advocacy has failed to “succeed” by even the most basic measures.
Nearly every branch of the military now faces a historic recruitment crisis, not to mention a surge in worrisome incidents that suggest a decline in competence and warfighting capability.
To make matters worse—and this is why Trump’s shake-up is almost certainly necessary—the military has failed to hold anyone at the top accountable for notable failures on the international stage.
Those failures have significantly weakened this country’s prestige and credibility abroad.
Most notably was the shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan. After that failure, nobody at the top got fired. The Biden administration and the military moved on, as if nothing had happened.
If we can’t handle our business against the Taliban, isn’t it worth questioning our ability to counter far greater potential adversaries, such as China?
To underscore the notion that the military has lost all accountability at the top, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin disappeared for nearly a week early this year to take care of a health issue before notifying the president.
If these are the sorts of “invaluable” leaders we may lose if Trump gets his way, it’s hard not to see the president-to-be’s “warrior board” as a net positive. This country should expect a lot better of its military.
This seems like an important moment for a “democratic” correction to a military that has seen a sharp decline in public trust.
Under Biden, the buck stopped nowhere. With Trump, maybe more capable leaders will have a chance to rise to the top and get our military back to focusing on preparedness and defending the American people.
First published on The Daily Signal
From Frank Gaffney: A laudable hallmark of Donald Trump’s first presidency was “Promises made, promises kept.” With his selection of my friend, Pete Hegseth, to be the next Secretary of Defense, he seems set to deliver on one of his most important pledges in the 2024 campaign. Think of it as “Make America’s Military Great Again.”
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