Trump’s America Is Celebrating a Worrying Veterans Day

It’s Veterans Day today, a time to reflect on how the role the military plays in American society has changed for the worse. On a day when we honor those who have served and sacrificed for the country, the Trump administration’s policies toward uniformed forces threaten to undermine the competence and capabilities of the armed forces and end the long-standing American tradition of military professionalism and political neutrality.

last week, New York Times He devoted a lengthy article to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s ongoing efforts to purge the upper ranks of the regular forces. It does not hold senior officers accountable for poor performance or remove men and women who are not good at their jobs; He fires them because they are female or black, or show signs of independence, or worst of all, because President Donald Trump endorses them for purely personal reasons. Case in point: He delayed or canceled the promotions of four senior officers whose only crime appears to be that they worked closely with retired Gen. Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff with whom Trump has a particular animosity.

It’s Veterans Day today, a time to reflect on how the role the military plays in American society has changed for the worse. On a day when we honor those who have served and sacrificed for the country, the Trump administration’s policies toward uniformed forces threaten to undermine the competence and capabilities of the armed forces and end the long-standing American tradition of military professionalism and political neutrality.

last week, New York Times He devoted a lengthy article to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s ongoing efforts to purge the upper ranks of the regular forces. It does not hold senior officers accountable for poor performance or remove men and women who are not good at their jobs; He fires them because they are female or black, or show signs of independence, or worst of all, because President Donald Trump endorses them for purely personal reasons. Case in point: He delayed or canceled the promotions of four senior officers whose only crime appears to be that they worked closely with retired Gen. Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff with whom Trump has a particular animosity.

If you want to know why Hegseth’s actions are so alarming, I suggest you read two important books on civil-military relations. The first is Samuel Huntington’s classic book The soldier and the statewhich is arguably the most influential book on the subject ever written by an American. Writing when the idea of ​​a large, permanent peacetime military was still somewhat controversial in the United States, Huntington argued that this would not pose a threat to democracy provided that the military was largely “professional,” meaning that its members understood that their mission was to master the military arts and not to interfere in politics. I think Huntington downplayed the indirect and often damaging effects of the emerging “military-industrial complex”—threat inflation, excessive spending, and the tendency to overestimate the utility of military force—but he was right that a fully professional military sworn to uphold the Constitution, and whose leaders are chosen and promoted primarily on the basis of their competence, is the best insurance against any military coup or president trying to use the armed forces to consolidate his hold on power.

The second book you should read is the fascinating study by MIT professor Caitlin Tallmadge The Dictator’s Army: Battlefield Effectiveness in Authoritarian Regimes. Tallmadge argues that authoritarian armies tend to be terrible at fighting wars when the dictator is primarily concerned about internal threats, especially the possibility of being overthrown in a coup. In countries like South Vietnam or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, this focus leads authoritarian leaders to select and promote leaders based on their loyalty rather than their competence, focus training efforts on internal dangers rather than external enemies, sow divisions within the military and control the flow of information so that it becomes difficult for leaders to threaten the dictator’s grip on power. These practices are all detrimental to performance on the battlefield. By contrast, authoritarian governments less concerned about internal enemies—such as North Vietnam—could focus on building effective military organizations and maximizing their military power. Tallmadge also shows that autocrats who find themselves facing a severe external threat—as Iraq did in its long war with Iran or as the Soviet Union did when Nazi Germany invaded—will be forced to abandon their dysfunctional practices to avoid defeat.

Taken together, these two books go a long way toward explaining why Hegseth’s actions (which should have had Trump’s full approval) are so troubling. Although I doubt that Trump and Hegseth are concerned about a military coup, they are clearly concerned about domestic opposition to their ambitious and illegal efforts to consolidate power in the executive branch, disenfranchise millions of voters, and retain power indefinitely. Why else would Trump direct the military to focus on the “enemy within”? Gradually transforming the US military into an organization that does not oppose a repeat of the failed January 6, 2021 attempt to overturn the 2020 election, or even into an organization that could be used to support such action, poses a potentially deadly threat to American democracy. Remember: Trump fired his first-term Defense Secretary, Mark Esper, because the latter opposed Trump’s proposal to use the military against domestic protesters in June 2020, and his anger with Milley also stems in part from a similar disagreement before the attack on Capitol Hill.

If this trend continues, what are the possible consequences? First, selecting senior officers based on their loyalty rather than their competence means that American troops, sailors, and airmen will not necessarily be led by the most knowledgeable, experienced, and capable commanders. This is not good on its face. Second, many national officers will not want to serve in an increasingly politicized and unprofessional environment, and some will choose to end their careers prematurely, thus depriving the armed forces of more talented leaders and tilting the officer corps in a more partisan direction. (This may in fact be what Hegseth is seeking to do.) Third, the more the military is assigned to local tasks – such as patrolling the streets of US cities falsely portrayed as full of dangerous criminals – the less prepared it becomes to confront a dangerous enemy. Blowing up unarmed boats or launching cruise missiles at weak opponents is one thing, but if you are trying to deter a dangerous peer competitor and defeat it if necessary, purging some of your best leaders and shifting the organization toward unnecessary local missions is the epitome of a self-inflicted wound.

But wait a minute. Doesn’t America’s recent record in battle indicate that a change in senior military leadership is long overdue? Although US leaders like to brag about having the most powerful military force in the world, this well-financed force has suffered embarrassing defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan and numerous other setbacks and embarrassing incidents in recent years. Hegseth may be a poorly groomed fashionista, but perhaps letting some heads inspire others.

If only. If Hegseth were purging the ranks by removing leaders who were clearly corrupt or incompetent—as George Marshall did in World War II—and carefully laying out the justifications for these decisions, one might view that as a perfectly desirable form of accountability. But clearly that is not what is happening. Instead, officers are being relieved and denied promotions for no apparent reason, or because they do not fit Trump and Hegseth’s image of what military officers should look like or believe.

Moreover, the US military’s recent failures are primarily due to its being assigned nearly impossible tasks by the country’s civilian leaders, most notably the futile “state-building” efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as ill-advised efforts at regime change in Libya or Somalia. The US military has been extremely skilled at deterring aggression in key areas, and, as it demonstrated in the first Gulf War, it is also capable of being extraordinarily effective in defeating weaker armies and reversing conventional aggression. What it is not good at is occupying and converting poor, multi-ethnic countries with no previous history of such democratic rule, but no army has ever been good at that task. We might blame some former American military leaders for failing to warn their civilian counterparts that they were being sent on a fool’s errand, or for making optimistic assessments of progress that they knew to be untrue, but Hegseth’s machinations will solve neither problem, and there is no evidence that the generals and admirals he purged were not good at their jobs.

So, on this Veterans Day, I invite you to reflect on the vital role(s) that the US military plays in American society and the need to insulate it as much as possible from partisan politics and the efforts of the current administration to consolidate power. It would be a tragedy not easy to reverse if this Veterans Day was the last day that Americans had a military of which they could be rightfully proud, and which did not pose a threat to their freedoms here at home.