by Victor Davis Hanson,
Is the era of rounding up government or academic “experts” to declare their support or opposition to ongoing controversies over?
Public declarations by Anthony Fauci and his associates to follow their “expertise” or “science” did not work out well and persuaded few.
Recall the 1,200 partisan healthcare “professionals” of June 2020 who flipped to assure us that it was mysteriously now medically OK to break quarantines—but only if to publicly protest during the post-George Floyd unrest.
Do we remember the “70 arms control and nuclear experts?” In 2015, they were collected by Obama subordinates to convince America to embrace the flawed administration’s so-called Iran Deal.
In 2021, “Seventeen recipients of the Nobel Memorial Prize in economic sciences” assured there would follow no inflation from the Biden administration’s massive borrowing and spending.
Hyperinflation followed.
Most recently, five former Secretaries of Defense—William Perry, Leon Panetta, Chuck Hagel, James Mattis, and Lloyd Austin—co-authored a public letter to Congress. They blasted the Trump administration’s dismissals from command of several generals—including the current chairman of the joint chiefs, General C. Q. Brown Jr.
They argued that such firings were political and thus would weaken the military and depress recruitment. As a result, they demanded congressional investigations.
Oversight of anything in government is always welcomed. But there are a number of inconsistencies in the letter that unfortunately diminish the force of its argument.
First, firing generals is hardly new. Many presidents have relieved commanding officers—even wartime combat theater commanders—without much, if any, explanation.
Consider just one recent pre-Trump presidency—the tenure of Barack Obama. He fired Gen. David McKiernan as commander of all American troops in Afghanistan. And he did so without much explanation.
No president had dismissed such a wartime theater commander since President Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur in 1950.
Obama then fired his replacement Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Obama also dismissed, arguably quite unfairly, one of the signees of the current letter, Gen. James Mattis, from his directorship of U.S. Central Command—without any coherent or convincing explanation.
In all three cases, the Obama replacement generals did not display any record of improvement over their fired and often gifted predecessors.
Obama, for reasons both good and bad, also approved the firings of Rear Adm. Charles M. Gaouette, an aircraft carrier group commander. The list of Obama’s dismissals goes on and on: Air Force Major Michael Carey, Vice Adm. Tim Giardina—and most controversially Army Gen. Michael Flynn who headed the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014
Firing generals or appointees who do not agree with the visions or strategies or even the politics of the commander in chief is thus somewhat routine.
So, for example, is the political firing of appointees to non-partisan defense advisory boards. President Biden fired 18 such nonpartisan appointees to service academy boards—without explanation. President Obama, upon entering the White House, fired almost the entire board of the nonpartisan American Battle Monuments Commission without cause—and replaced them with ideologically akin appointees.
Second, as for worries about recruitment, one might counter that the recent curtailment of DEI ideological fixations is already beginning to restore previously anemic recruitment to near-record single-day sign-ups.
The Pentagon in the past was not always completely candid about either shortfalls in recruitment or the reasons for such reduced signups. Some would argue that it was near suicidal to drum out some 8,500 veteran officers and enlisted men for refusing the COVID-19 vaccinations, the vast majority of whom had acquired natural immunity from the virus. Now the military concedes they are sorely needed and is inviting them to reenlist.
Pentagon data that increasingly is calibrated in terms of race, gender, and sexual orientation, have also shown that in recent years, white males, who serve and die—asymmetrically to their demographics—in combat theaters, have shied away from the military, and disproportionally account for general recruitment shortfalls.
One likely explanation is that they apparently felt that inordinate political Pentagon DEI emphases and public congressional commentary from Pentagon brass about supposed endemic “white privilege” or purported racist cabals were aimed at them. In 2021, Secretary of Defense Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Milley seemed to weigh in before Congress on highly political and polarizing matters of critical race theory—even connecting the January 6 demonstrations to supposed “whiteness”, opining on “white rage,” and recommending the controversial racialist works of Ibram X. Kendi.
Politics in the Pentagon predated the current Trump administration.
Third, the Pentagon over the last four years does need a shake-up, given the humiliation in Afghanistan, the greatest disaster in a half-century since the 1975 flight from the embassy roof in Saigon. Confusion reigned over the Chinese military and likely spy balloon that nearly traversed the continental U.S. with impunity. The U.S. failed to respond promptly and disproportionally to several Iranian-connected terrorist attacks on U.S. military installations in Iran, Jordan, and Syria. And the Houthis brazenly disrupted Red Sea international maritime traffic with near exemption for months.
Because of the Biden administration’s poor decisions, the U.S. military seemed to have lost much of its previous deterrence in key international waterways such as the Red Sea, the South China Sea, and the Straits of Hormuz.
Recruitment until recently was stagnant. Stockpiles of key munitions were dangerously low. And the U.S. had not found any strategic resolution after interventions in Afghanistan, Syria, or Libya.
Moreover, since the beginning of outside military audits in 2017, the Pentagon had flunked all three in succession.
Fourth, over the last decade there have been flurries of all sorts of professionals’ letters—from military, economic, and political “experts” decrying the particular policies of the administration in power. Most do not resonate since many of their criticisms would be equally applicable to other administrations of the opposite party and thus fairly or not, are deemed political.
In the past, several retired generals have weighed in contrary to the uniform code of military justice, by blasting their commander-in-chief as a Mussolini-like character, a liar, comparable to the architect of the Birkenau death camp at Auschwitz, and indeed in need of removal “the sooner the better.”
The recent past Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley, contrary to the law, inserted himself into the chain of command. He quite improperly contacted his Chinese military counterpart to warn him about a supposedly dangerously erratic President Trump. And in recent retirement, he claimed the ex-president—and now current president—was a “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous man to the country.” That seems a fairly politicized thing to do.
Fifth, some of the signees themselves have come under bipartisan criticism. Former secretary of State Leon Panetta was one of the 51 signees in October 2020 who falsely claimed the Hunter Biden laptop had all the “hallmarks” of a Russian influencing campaign.
It had none.
We know that because the laptop at the time was in the possession of the FBI, which had already internally authenticated its contents. Panetta has since refused to apologize for what might be legitimately called a “disinformation” letter.
Remember, the partisan letter was solicited by Biden campaign advisor Antony Blinken, soon-to-be-secretary of state, to arm candidate Biden in the upcoming and last debate of 2020 with some sort of defense against the incriminating contents of the laptop.
It was promoted by clearly partisan former interim CIA Director Michael Morrell and retired military partisans such as Gens. James Clapper and Michael Hayden as well as former CIA Director John Brennan.
Because the letter was timed to the final 2020 debate in the last weeks of the election, and because it was known at the time to be patently false, but passed off by Biden as authenticated by “authorities”, it may well have played a pivotal role in determining the outcome.
Other signees themselves were relieved as defense secretaries by presidents of both parties, whether fairly or not—including Chuck Hagel and Jim Mattis. Signee Lloyd Austin weathered calls for his resignation when for several days he was veritably AWOL, undergoing a serious medical procedure, without informing his superior, the Command-in-Chief.
The point is not to criticize the critics, but rather to bring some humility into the conversation that the firings of defense secretaries, high-ranking military officers, and appointees to military advisory boards predated Donald Trump, as did the politicalization of the military.
The current secretary of defense Pete Hegseth believes he is depoliticizing a previously unduly politicized military, not further weaponizing it.
Whether that proves an accurate diagnosis can be adjudicated in the upcoming months by a number of barometers:
Will the Pentagon for the first time in recent years soon pass an outside audit?
Will current restorative surges in recruitment be sustained and more than meet formerly unmet targeted enlistments?
Will currently envisioned defense cuts target the unnecessary programs that hamper battle efficacy or instead harm operational ability?
Will lost deterrence return to the U.S?
Will there be more or fewer theater-wide wars, such as those in Ukraine and the Middle East?
Will the Pentagon procurement pivot from traditional military systems and platforms, following lessons in the Middle East and Ukraine, in order to emphasize drones, and cheaper and more numerous munitions?
And lastly and most importantly, will the generals who replaced those fired prove more adroit in defending U.S. interests and less political—or less so?
The realities that follow from these firings, not necessarily the firings themselves, or the anger at them, will answer those questions.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/vdh-who-really-politicized-pentagon
