Defense: Why is Trump purging the Pentagon?

President Trump shredded “America’s soft power” by gutting USAID, said Max Boot in The Washington Post. “Now he seems bent on damaging U.S. hard power too.” Hours after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced plans last week to cut 5,400 civilian Pentagon employees, Trump conducted his own “Friday-night massacre.” He fired a half-dozen top military leaders, including Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr.—the second African-American to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—and Adm. Lisa Franchetti, chief of Naval Operations.

Hegseth offered no rationale for the dismissals, except that they would somehow refocus the military on its “core mission of deterring, fighting, and winning wars.” But it’s telling that Trump’s chosen replacement for Brown is Lt. Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine, a white, retired, three-star Air Force officer. Caine’s selection tells “Black and female officers that their prospects for promotion may be gravely limited,” said Fred Kaplan in Slate. Worse is Trump’s stated reason for the pick: that when he met Caine during a 2018 visit to troops in Iraq, Caine put on a MAGA hat and told him, “I think you’re great, sir. I’ll kill for you, sir.” Trump’s proud sharing of this story—denied by Caine and other officials—is a “nerve-wracking” clue to the president’s plans for the military once he’s cleansed its upper ranks of diversity and suspected disloyalty.

Gen. Brown “is an honorable man,” said Rich Lowry in National Review, but he had to go. The former F-16 pilot “used his position as a political soapbox,” releasing an emotional video after the 2020 killing of George Floyd about the challenges of being Black in the Air Force. Brown’s job is to be a killer, not to pontificate on “hot-button political and social issues.” Like many of the other fired generals, he is a bland product of an “ossified” system that rewards “bureaucratic conformity” over original thinking. That’s doubly true of the military lawyers known as “judge advocates general” (JAGs), said The Wall Street Journal. When Trump fired the three JAGs overseeing the Army, Navy, and Air Force last week, it set off a predictable “media panic” about imminent “lawlessness.” In truth, the JAGs had long favored “risk elimination over mission success,” leaving America’s military far less lethal and effective than it needs to be in this dangerous world.

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Call me paranoid, said Charles P. Pierce in Esquire, but yes, it does feel “troublesome” that Trump specifically fired the lawyers charged with resisting illegal presidential orders. Nor was it reassuring when Hegseth explained the JAGs had been fired to stop them from being “roadblocks to anything that happens.” We know what kind of “anything” Hegseth might have in mind, said Paul McLeary in Politico. The former Fox News host promotes a swaggering “warrior ethos” that rejects the Geneva Conventions. In Trump’s first term, he successfully lobbied Trump to pardon two soldiers charged with war crimes and to reinstate Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL accused of killing civilians and stabbing a teenage ISIS prisoner to death.

Trump’s purge has nothing to do with “lethality, or promoting ‘warfighters,’ or any other buzzwords,” said Tom Nichols in The Atlantic. It’s the next step in his pursuit of total power. After capturing the intelligence services, the Justice Department, and the FBI, the Pentagon is “the last piece he needs to establish the foundations for authoritarian control of the U.S. government.” With “his generals” in charge, Trump can start building a military that is loyal to him—and not to the Constitution. “It is praetorianism, plain and simple.”