Judging by History, Which Began Ten Minutes Ago, Trump and Hegseth Are Breaking With All the Important American Traditions

Famously, the US Army was quite pissy as it rolled through the transition between the 19th and 20th centuries, being dragged by a series of leaders from a past as a frontier constabulary to a future as a modern army that could engage in sophisticated maneuver warfare. I don’t remember who said that the United States mostly won the Spanish-American War because “the United States fought the war in her sleep, but Spain fought in a trance,” but American political leaders came out of that war believing that army leaders could barely plan to take a sandwich out of a paper sack. From an account of the war and the aftermath:

The public came to learn of troops dispatched to tropical Cuba clad in heavy woolen winter uniforms, to be fed “embalmed beef,” and to receive shockingly inadequate medical care. Ships transporting troops to hostile shores possessed no adequate landing craft. Soldiers were equipped with obsolete weapons, the ammunition for which emitted great clouds of black smoke, while the Spaniards were equipped with Mauser rifles and smokeless powder. The land war was waged virtually without plan. On top of this the Secretary of War and Commanding General were not on speaking terms—the outgrowth of years of divided authority.

So began a series of top-down reforms, starting with those led by Secretary of War Elihu Root, the substance of which were later advanced by Secretary of War Henry Stimson: professionalization, the creation of full-time planning staff, the creation of new military schools, the reorganization of lines of authority within the army. Major General Frederick Ainsworth, the army’s adjutant general, openly fought to obstruct structural and procedural changes in the army. You can sort of see that this gentleman maybe had trouble stepping into the twentieth century:

By 1912, the army had grown tired of Maj. Gen. Ainsworth and his resistance to change — and so, after an especially bruising exchange over Ainsworth’s open opposition to reform, Chief of Staff Leonard Wood offered Ainsworth a deal in which he could either retire immediately, like by the end of the day, or face a court-martial for insubordination. Ainsworth took the more sensible path.

This is normal. This is American military history. These exchanges, get on board or get lost, have happened over and over and over again. As I’ve written before, Thomas Jefferson inherited a politically hostile Federalist army, and very deliberately set about to break the Federalist hold on the officer corps. Similarly, President Dwight Eisenhower found his military leaders — men he obviously knew quite well — to be recalcitrant to a point nearing insubordination, a condition he tolerated not at all. A Republican, Eisenhower inherited a military shaped by a long period of Democratic authority during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. So he started firing people:

As for the military, perhaps due to his familiarity with the current generation of military service leaders, Eisenhower wanted to install a new slate of uniformed heads of the military services, who also comprised the Joint Chiefs, to dramatically alter the nation’s military strategy.

The news media is currently pretending to clutch its pearls over the nomination of a mere lieutenant general to be the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — because lieutenant generals apparently have very little military experience, bless your hearts. On Monday, a reporter asked Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth why the administration had chosen to appoint an “underqualified” JCS chairman; appropriately, Hegseth invited the reporter to pound sand. (I don’t know enough about Dan Caine to have an opinion about the choice, and I’m open to arguments, but he clearly has deep and serious experience.)

Predictably, the Washington Post is treating all of this as the two things all Orange Hitler choices must invariably be: unprecedented, and a huge crisis. The Post has been coughing out a steady stream of headlines like this:

Yeah, no. Normal political leadership, bringing the military into line with civilian policy and policymakers. A story published late Monday by hysterical ninny Dan Lamothe offered these comparisons:

Administration officials have defended the Pentagon firings by noting that other presidents have removed generals, pointing to the dismissals of Gen. Stanley McChrystal by President Barack Obama in 2010 and Gen. Douglas MacArthur in 1951 by President Harry S. Truman. In those cases, however, the presidents had proximate causes — McChrystal was fired after his staff disparaged Obama in an article published by Rolling Stone magazine while MacArthur openly questioned Truman’s strategy during the Korean War.

But these are almost the worst possible examples, compared to the many more substantial efforts to remake the armed forces at a number of points in the American past. New administrations make new policy choices, and they make personnel choices to point the organization in the direction they want it to go. See also this bit from Lamothe’s previous story on the HUGE CRISIS:

Retired Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, a Joint Chiefs chairman under President Barack Obama, wrote online that such trust “should be based on their leadership, their integrity, their performance, the quality of their advice, and their willingness to faithfully execute the orders they are given.”

“To relieve a senior officer not for a lack of one of these qualities, but for a real or perceived disagreement in their beliefs, harmfully politicizes the military profession,” Dempsey posted on LinkedIn.

Military officers don’t get a gimme for disagreement over beliefs with the President of the United States and his Secretary of Defense, and it’s a remarkably bad sign that they think they do. Quite interesting to see retired flag officers treating POTUS as a colleague who they just disagree with — an example of the Fiona Hill premise in operation, with the career employees thinking they’re in charge.

But then again, Frederick Ainsworth thought the same thing. And look how that one turned out.