wall street journal reported this week President-elect Donald Trump's transition team has drafted an executive order “establishing a board to purge generals” that could allow for the swift removal of flagships and generals who “lacks the necessary leadership qualities” He said that there is a sex. The effort, the paper said, is likely to have a “chilling effect on military leaders” due to President Trump's past pledge to fire “woke generals,” a term for officers who value diversity over military readiness. It has the potential to bring about
Trump's opponents quickly took up the draft, accusing him of trying to “politicize” the military. Critics use the term “purge” to evoke comparisons to Stalin's removal of senior Red Army officials before World War II, which led to major Soviet military failures early in the war.
The greatest challenge currently facing the U.S. military is the weakening of the military spirit that underpins its effectiveness.
This means that, like Stalin's purges, any attempt to remove flag officers and generals from the U.S. military is ideologically motivated and deemed insufficiently loyal to Trump and his administration. The aim is to eliminate officers who will be held accountable. President Trump's relationship with top U.S. military leaders has always been troubled, but his suggestion that he is trying to purge officers based on loyalty is at best overreaching and at worst slanderous.
A more accurate interpretation of such a commission would be an effort to restore accountability that has been lacking in the U.S. military for some time. Recently, a Marine was court-martialed for accountability after a suicide bombing killed 13 service members at Kabul's Hamid Karzai International Airport during the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Lt. Col. Stuart Sherer appeared repeatedly in uniform to hold political and military leaders accountable.
Richard Cohn, a prominent American military historian, wrote in a 2009 article in World Affairs magazine that, “Nearly 20 years after the end of the Cold War, the U.S. military has spent more money on armaments than the rest of the world. was the source of funding.” After overthrowing the governments of two important countries with less than a tenth of the U.S. population within a matter of weeks, it was impossible to defeat the insurgents or completely break out the sectarian civil war. Nor could it be suppressed. ” What accounts for this lack of military effectiveness, he asked?
loss of accountability
In his 2012 book, “Generals: Commanding America's Armed Forces from World War II to Today,” Thomas Ricks, formerly of the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, examines recent developments in our military. Explained the failure. He argued that many of these failures were due to a lack of officer responsibility for losses on the battlefield. Commander relief was common during World War II. “Architect of Victory” General George Marshall regularly rescued underserved men.
For decades after the war, political leaders, not military authorities, worked to save officers. Often, police officers are simply “kicked upstairs,” as was the case with William Westmoreland in Vietnam and George Casey in Iraq. An Army officer who was in the early stages of Operation Iraqi Freedom said, “A private who loses his rifle suffers far more than a general who loses a war.”
It's also important to remember that while the president needs the consent of the Senate to appoint officers, he has the power to remove them without Congressional approval. Presidents have exercised this power since the beginning of the republic. For example, Thomas Jefferson appointed officers based on ideological alignment, with the goal of replacing the Federalist-dominated Army leadership with a Republican one. The creation of West Point was one way to accomplish this goal.
Remove “dead wood”
Commissions like the one Trump's team is considering are not new in American military history. During the Civil War, Congress created a joint committee on the conduct of the war to investigate operational and tactical issues and the performance of officers in the field. Before World War II, Marshall established a committee led by retired officers to review officers' records and “remove officers from promotion for reasons deemed proper and sufficient.” The goal was to clear out the “dead wood” to make room for younger, more capable police officers.
The US military is in trouble. Although it still enjoys a relatively high reputation among the American public, that rating has declined in recent years. Although military failures likely contributed to this decline, a more important factor is what the late political scientist Samuel Huntington called “transformation.” The term refers to the slow but steady erosion of the military ethos, replaced by priorities such as “diversity”, which now often takes precedence over military effectiveness as a policy goal.
The military's efforts to address a perceived lack of diversity can make the situation worse. By promoting “identity politics,” meaning that justice depends on attributes such as skin color rather than a person's identity, these efforts risk dividing people rather than unifying them.
In my opinion, the greatest challenge facing the U.S. military today is the weakening of the military ethos that underpins its effectiveness. If Mr. Trump's proposed board can meet this challenge, I fully support it. In fact, I support Voltaire's satirical joke about Admiral Byng's execution for lack of aggression at the Battle of Menorca. [England] It would be nice to shoot the admiral once in a while. Pour Encouragement Les Autres” And I’m sure the vast majority of active duty and retired military personnel would agree with me.
