Lawful, but Enormously Destructive

The sacking of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chief of naval operations, and the Air Force’s vice chief of staff, as well as the judge advocate generals of the Army, Navy and Air Force on Friday night was completely legal—and appalling.

The consequences of this Friday night massacre will be long lasting and damaging. The JAGs embody the deep respect that the United States military has long had for the rule of law. Although they merely advise and do not command, their role is a critical one. The decapitation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Navy, and the firing of the second most senior Air Force officer was bad enough.

The replacement of General C. Q. Brown, a highly decorated and cerebral officer, as chairman by a retired lieutenant general was bizarre and unprecedented. By law the role of chairman should be filled, unless the president deems an extraordinary exception necessary, by a four star who has led a service or a combatant command. Lieutenant General Dan Caine was relatively junior, and he spent 2009 to 2016 as a reservist. The skills he acquired as a special operator, moreover, are the antithesis of what the most senior military officer in the country needs. The United States armed forces, composed of millions of men and women on active and reserve duty, operates fleets and divisions and air wings. Its leaders need the ability to handle military movements and the political skills to deal with coalition partners in large-scale operations, skills that are acquired on the conventional side of the house, not in shadow warfare.

Caine, in other words, is not qualified for the job. If he indeed told President Trump that ISIS could be wiped out in a week or four if only the military were unleashed—as Trump has claimed—he has, moreover, exceptionally poor military judgment. If the Israel Defense Forces, deploying substantial air power and five divisions of mechanized infantry, could not wipe out Hamas in a year-long campaign in the tiny area the group controlled, the United States Air Force could not, and cannot, do the same thing to a wily jihadist military organization spread over several large Middle Eastern countries in less than a month.

When confronted with civilian superiors behaving outrageously, the response of the American soldier, sailor, airman or Marine is to stiffen, look rigidly ahead, and follow lawful orders. But they reflect. And what they are assuredly thinking today is that the Trump administration is determined to purge the military’s leadership; that it has no respect for the rule of law, including the law of armed conflict; and that it is willing to put them under the command of political generals of doubtful caliber. To say that they will find this demoralizing is an understatement.

Worse yet, a minority will applaud this. I have spent my entire career in the company of soldiers, including senior officers, and I have never encountered a group of more honorable men and women. Most of them. There are, however, in all ranks, as in the rest of humanity, a certain proportion of toadies, opportunists, zealots, and fools. These will now be encouraged to curry favor with political authority, and if there is one thing that the Trump administration has shown itself desirous of, it is brown-nosing. That will in turn undermine military performance. Promote the suck-ups, sow distrust among the decent ones, and military disaster awaits.

This episode tells us a great deal, none of it too surprising, about the secretary of defense, beginning with the firing itself, conducted on a Friday night, and without the courtesy of personal meetings. Pete Hegseth may think of himself as a warrior type, but that was the corporate behavior of a coward. He did not publish his reasons for the firings other than mouthing a platitude or two about the public service of his victims. It was the behavior of a leader who is desperately weak.

He may not yet understand the damage that he has done to himself. It will escape no one’s notice that his two most prominent victims were a black man and a woman, and that he has raged against women in the military. His unwillingness to explain himself means that the worst construction will be put on his actions. Whereas in a normal administration one should give some benefit of the doubt to leaders making hard calls, he deserves, and will receive none.

That goes for his tattoos, too. On one bicep is “Deus Vult,” “God wills it,” a motto embraced by some white nationalist groups (which is why he was removed from duty after January 6). His defense is that it is merely a celebration of the Christian warrior ethic, a slogan attributed to the Crusaders by contemporary chroniclers.

When the Crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099, they spent two days killing the Muslim and Jewish inhabitants. Thomas Asbridge writes in his history of the Crusades that the city was “awash with blood and littered with corpses. In the midsummer heat the stench soon became intolerable, and the dead were dragged out beyond the walls, ‘piled up in mounds as big as houses’ and burned.” Six months later Jerusalem still stank of death.

If celebration of that kind of thing is not what he means, he should make that clear, but of course he will not. A man as petty, thoughtless, and cruel as his boss, he will both feel aggrieved by reactions to his cruelties and ignorant of their likely consequences.

The firings coincided with other assaults on both the American government—the announced firing of over 50,000 probationary workers in the Pentagon—and on Ukraine, where the United States leaned on Kyiv to withdraw a motion in the UN that would denounce Russia in favor of one, introduced by the United States, that would make no mention of invasion, atrocities, or aggression. In both cases, tremendous self-harm, to the civil service on the one hand, and to American foreign policy on the other, as Russia gets consequential gifts without paying for them.

What is to be done? To some extent the administration is setting up the conditions for its own failures, as it causes chaos, alienates constituencies, and cripples critical governmental functions. Some of these actions will be illegal, and must be confronted in the courts and beyond; others, like Hegseth’s, will be lawful but still enormously destructive, to which other responses are warranted.

At the very least, the public deserves to know the names of the members of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, whose staffers have cut a swath through governmental departments but hide their identities from view. A sense of accountability in courts of opinion as well as law, and  if not now then in the future when, inevitably, the wheel turns and they are no longer in positions of power, may help temper some of their worst excesses.

Unlike Donald Trump, Elon Musk, or J. D. Vance, I have had children serve in uniform in wartime. The parent of a service member looks with a particularly keen eye at who is in command. C. Q. Brown is the kind of general I would have been proud to have led them, confident in his professional abilities, and his moral compass. To understand the fury that many of us who know him feel at this moment, look at the video of his message following the George Floyd murders. At a time of racial tension unlike anything since the civil-rights movement, he spoke with dignity, restraint, and the deepest kind of patriotism—the patriotism of a Martin Luther King Jr., or more to the point, a General Dan “Chappie” James Jr., the first black four-star general, one of the World War II Tuskegee airmen.

The worst of the MAGA movement are the neo-Confederates, ignoramuses (to be charitable) about this country’s history—hence their outrage at the renaming of forts called after traitor generals from the Civil War—and in many cases, tapping into deep veins of bigotry. With this move, Pete Hegseth will henceforth labor under the presumption that he is among their number, a man unfit to lead anybody, much less the Department of Defense. Meanwhile, it is a consolation to know that this country produced C. Q. Brown—and that there are many more like him out there.