There is nothing normal or acceptable about Donald Trump’s decision to fire a slew of senior military leaders in the Pentagon. It’s a direct attack on the integrity of the American military.
I’m not arguing that presidents shouldn’t fire generals. There are times when it’s necessary — wise, even. Before he found his way to Ulysses S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln fired a number of Union commanders for poor performance.
Harry Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur after MacArthur defied Truman during the most dangerous days of the Korean War. Barack Obama fired the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, early in his first term, and then fired his replacement, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, after McChrystal’s team was openly disrespectful of the president in interviews with a Rolling Stone reporter.
But in each of these cases, you could see a clear reason, the most obvious (and common) being poor battlefield performance or insubordination.
But that’s not what happened last Friday at the Pentagon. The Trump administration fired Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the chief of naval operations, Gen. James Slife, vice chief of staff of the Air Force, and — most ominously — the officers who served as the top lawyers of the Army, Air Force and Navy.
None of those individuals were insubordinate and none were leading a failing war. General Brown’s chief sin appeared to be endorsing the military’s diversity efforts. For example, after George Floyd’s murder, General Brown recorded a four-minute video reflecting on his experiences as a Black Air Force officer. Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News host turned secretary of defense, had previously questioned whether Brown had been promoted to chairman because he was Black.
Hegseth, for his part, has long expressed disdain for the role of military lawyers. In his 2024 book, “The War on Warriors,” he derisively referred to them as “jagoffs” and blamed them for restrictive rules of engagement and for war crimes prosecutions of American service members.
Trump’s unconventional firing was supplemented by an unconventional hiring. He replaced General Brown with Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine, a retired three-star Air Force general who has never held a major combatant command like the Central Command, which controls American forces in the Middle East, to give one example, or been a service chief.
Trump has long expressed a fondness for General Caine. He says that Caine told him in his first term that the fight against ISIS could be finished in one week. Trump has also claimed that Caine said he “loved” Trump, would “kill” for Trump, and that he put on a MAGA hat in front of Trump.
Others dispute Trump’s story. In a CNN profile, a former colleague of General Caine’s described him as a humble man of integrity. The story quotes a “military official who served with Caine” as saying that he “doesn’t have a MAGA hat” and that “he’s never put one on.”
But regardless of Caine’s personal integrity, Trump’s actions perfectly fit the pattern of Trump’s presidency so far — he fires better-qualified people, hires unusual, less-qualified replacements and then declares that the era of “D.E.I.” is over.
The problem is much more serious than a downgrading of qualifications. To understand why Trump might want to fire senior officers and replace them with people he perceives to be loyalists, you have to remember his first term and all the ways in which senior military officials actively resisted Trump’s worst and most brutal impulses.
For example, Gen. James Mattis resigned as secretary of defense after Trump abandoned our Kurdish allies in northern Syria and ordered a precipitous withdrawal of American troops. Russian mercenaries later occupied abandoned American positions and posted videos taunting the retreating Americans.
Trump’s next secretary of defense, Mark Esper, infuriated Trump in 2020 by publicly opposing the invocation of the Insurrection Act, which permits the president to deploy active duty troops to impose order in American cities. He also resisted Trump’s demand that law enforcement shoot protesters who were demonstrating outside the White House.
Esper recalls Trump saying in June 2020, inside the Oval Office: “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?”
Trump also repeatedly suggested shooting unarmed immigrants who were crossing the border, treating people seeking asylum in the United States as if they were part of an invading army.
Trump harbors a special hatred for Gen. Mark Milley, the man Trump himself selected to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during his first term. Milley’s alleged sins included apologizing for appearing, in uniform, at a photo op with Trump at an Episcopal church after federal law enforcement violently cleared Lafayette Square of protesters. Trump famously walked across the park with Milley and Esper right behind him.
During the 2024 campaign, Trump suggested that Milley might deserve execution for calling his Chinese counterpart, Li Zuocheng, twice, in the closing months of Trump’s first presidency. Milley made the first call to assure China that the United States was not planning to strike China, a nuclear power, after Milley received reports that China believed America was planning an attack.
A second call came after Jan. 6, 2021, when Milley sought to assure China that the United States remained stable. He told Li that the United States was “100 percent steady.”
Senior military officials also objected to a wild order that Trump issued in the waning days of his first term. He directed a complete withdrawal from Afghanistan and Somalia before the end of his term. He also ordered a complete withdrawal of American troops from Germany.
Those orders triggered intense pushback from within the administration, both from military brass and from Trump’s own appointees, including the national security adviser, and Trump eventually relented. There was no sudden withdrawal.
Let’s stop for a minute to think about each of those incidents — the professional military was pushing back against abandoning allies all over the world, deploying troops to shoot civilians and the use of military leadership in political photo ops. They weren’t disobeying Trump. They were advising him, but they were giving him advice he did not like, to put it mildly.
Not all the military’s actions were appropriate. As Jonathan Swan and Zachary Basu reported in Axios in 2021, there were Pentagon officials who “deliberately deceived” Trump by understating troop levels in Syria. They quote Jim Jeffrey, Trump’s envoy to Syria, as saying “We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there.”
That’s entirely inappropriate and insubordinate, and any official who participated in the deception should be fired, but there’s no indication that the military leaders Trump fired last week had any role at all in that.
Trump’s decision to fire the JAG generals gives the game away. I served as a JAG officer in the United States Army Reserve and deployed to Iraq during the surge in 2007. I also served in South Korea during Operation Key Resolve in 2010, a military exercise in which American and South Korean forces responded to a simulated North Korean attack.
I’m intimately familiar with the role of JAG officers in the military. We serve as advisers to commanders. We do not command troops in combat. But legal standards are directly relevant to combat operations. They can dictate the tactics soldiers use, the weapons commanders deploy and the treatment of prisoners we capture.
Dismissing JAG officers doesn’t change the rules, but it can degrade the quality of the legal advice that commanders receive. If military lawyers are afraid to provide good-faith advice for fear that it will anger the nation’s political leadership, then the chances that American forces will make a catastrophic mistake skyrocket.
We are not stronger if we are more vicious and vindictive. American mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq hurt our war effort. Inflicting civilian casualties hurt our war effort. Nor are we taking care of our own troops if we embrace a more ruthless way of war. The moral injury of indiscriminate violence hurts the souls of our soldiers.
I’ll give you an example. In one of our deployment’s worst moments, a young soldier opened fire on a truck that was driving toward a checkpoint at high speed. The truck matched the description of a truck that our intelligence told us had been modified to serve as a vehicle-borne I.E.D. When the truck wouldn’t stop, the soldier pulled the trigger.
The man behind the wheel wasn’t Al Qaeda. He was a father of six who was taking his sheep to market. He wasn’t trying to blow up our combat outpost. He simply wasn’t paying much attention to the road.
The bullet hit him between the eyes, killing him instantly. The truck rolled over into a ditch, killing all the family’s sheep (and thus most of its wealth) and wounding a passenger, a family friend who was riding in the truck.
I’ll never forget consoling the soldier who fired the fatal shot. He was utterly distraught. He had done nothing wrong — he followed the rules of engagement perfectly — but the pain of taking an innocent life was overwhelming.
Our rules — as imperfect as they are — are intended to protect soldiers from that pain. They’re intended to allow them to fight with honor. A true warrior ethos strives to protect the innocent.
Trump is surrounding himself with sycophants. That’s dangerous in virtually every circumstance, but it’s particularly dangerous in the military. He is in command of the most powerful military force that has ever existed.
If that military had immediately indulged his base instincts during his first term, we could have seen the most terrible scenes unfold — soldiers opening fire on protesters, military occupation of American cities, bloodshed on the border and catastrophic military retreats abroad.
The military is obligated to follow the president’s lawful orders. It is not obligated to simply salute and say, “Yes sir” at every order he gives, and it should provide professional military advice if it believes an order is unwise.
This is part of the culture of the American military. I’ve seen subordinates offer respectful pushback when they believed commanders were making mistakes. I’ve never met a good commander who didn’t welcome the honest counsel of his subordinates; the best commanders sought it out.
Providing honest counsel is fundamental to American military culture, but it is not part of Russia’s culture, and if there’s a theme to Trump’s second term so far, it’s not Make America Great Again; it’s Make America Into Russia. The Russian military is brutal and unthinkingly obedient — and that’s exactly what the president wants.
Some other things I did
In my Sunday column, I stepped back and took a look at the big picture of the first month of Trump’s presidency. There were many strands, but they were all part of the same cord. Trump governs with one idea in mind: Trump’s enemies are now America’s enemies. There is one standard of justice for his friends and another one for everyone else:
America has endured dangerous periods of democratic backsliding before. The Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction and helped plunge the South into the darkness of Jim Crow. Woodrow Wilson was a racist authoritarian who segregated the Civil Service and prosecuted thousands of Americans who objected to U.S. entry into World War I.
But I cannot recall a moment in which a president broke free of the bounds of law and morality so quickly and comprehensively. In one month, Trump has endorsed Russian propaganda, switched sides in the Ukraine war, threatened our closest allies, attacked the constitutional order and begun imposing a two-tiered system of justice.
This state of affairs is unrecognizable to most Americans. But Putin recognizes it. So does Xi Jinping. In Trump, they can plainly see a version of themselves. He is doing their work for them. He is damaging American democracy, diminishing American power, and destroying American alliances with an energy and an efficiency that must exceed their wildest dreams.
On Monday, we published my conversation with Kori Schake, the director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. She also worked at the State Department, the Department of Defense and the National Security Council.
We focused on Ukraine, but I also asked her if the Republican Party was united behind a MAGA foreign policy, or if Reagan Republicans had any fight left in them. Here was her response:
Boy, I hope and believe the fight isn’t over. I think Republicans are beginning to find their footing after the disorientation of the number of ways in which President Trump and his administration have overturned traditional conservative positions and policies.
But I have to say, David, sometimes I feel like a saber-toothed tiger in a tar pit, as a Reagan Republican. I do worry, though, that foreign policy is one area where the president has the widest autonomy.
There are very few ways that Congress or civil society can prevent a president from making foreign policy decisions. Where Congress, especially Republicans in Congress, have stronger leverage is on defense policy. That’s where the authorities belong to Congress and that’s where the money belongs to Congress.
The last thing I’ll say about the foreign policy debate in Congress is that I was more hopeful before Republican senators voted to confirm Tulsi Gabbard, a clear counterintelligence vulnerability for our country, to lead the 18 intelligence agencies. And before so many Republicans voted to confirm Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense.
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