Of all the tasks President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to take on in his new term, reforming and restoring our military may be one of the biggest. The decline of our armed forces has arguably been going on since the end of the Cold War and Bill Clinton's "Peace Dividend," and has been accelerating under Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Donald Trump has the chance to set things aright - and when it comes to the Pentagon, he has the power to do it. The President of the United States has among his constitutionally-defined duties Commander-in-Chief of all the armed forces, and all officers of those armed forces serve at the pleasure of the president.
The question is, how will this president wield that power?
There has been speculation that President-elect Donald Trump could create an outside board to review the performance of senior military leaders, but he doesn’t have to in order to reshape the Pentagon in his image.
Leaders of the U.S. military serve at the pleasure of the president, and once Trump is inaugurated next month, he will have the power to relieve anyone he chooses. He is seemingly prepared to rectify the mistakes of his first administration by putting in place loyalists who are committed to carrying out his decisions without pushback.
“We all serve at the pleasure of the president,” Pentagon deputy spokeswoman Sabrina Singh told reporters in November.
The president has this power, of course. But these decisions shouldn't be made primarily on personal loyalty; the oath every servicemember takes is to the Constitution, first and foremost. But yes, Trump can and should appoint people who are going to restore our armed services to what they are supposed to be - warfighters.
Pete Hegseth, Trump's choice for Secretary of Defense, points out one of the problems, the Washington Examiner reported (linked above):
Warning: coarse language
Pete Hegseth, Trump’s selection to lead the Pentagon, specifically said Brown should get fired due to his support of diversity initiatives, which Hegseth and other conservatives argue have come at the expense of the military’s lethality.
“First of all, you gotta fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs,” Hegseth said on the Shawn Ryan podcast shortly before Trump nominated him to be the next secretary of defense. “Any general that was involved, general, admiral, whatever, that was involved in any of the DEI woke s***, has got to go. Either you’re in for warfighting, and that’s it. That’s the only litmus test we care about.”
This is key. The military is not a jobs program. It's not a social laboratory to see if any person with the neurosis du jour can somehow wear the uniform, even though they are non-deployable and essentially useless in a fight. The military is essential to the survival of a nation, and if maintaining a military that can fight and win, there can be no considerations other than warfighting. Every military member, from the newest privates just out of their initial entry training to the Joint Chiefs, should be evaluated on their ability to carry out their functions under fire.
We don't need an outside board for that.
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In (probably) the 5th century BC, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus wrote:
Out of every one hundred men, ten shouldn’t even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior and he will bring the others back.
We need warriors. We need fighters. We need to find the men who can be that one, the one that is a warrior, and encourage and promote them. We need our military to be trained and equipped to handle any threat. While we should only engage our military when there is a compelling United States interest involved, when we do deploy, the bad guys should be wetting themselves in abject terror from the moment the first American private steps off the first airplane. The only focus of our military must be to close with and destroy the enemy by fire, maneuver, and shock effect.
That should be Donald Trump's focus as Commander in Chief.
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