Trump’s War with “My Generals”
Nov 22 2024With courts-martial in mind, the Trump transition team has developed a list of current and former U.S. military officers involved in the August 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan. A commission would seek to find actionable blame for the chaotic evacuation that led to the death of 13 American service personnel and about 170 Afghans by a suicide bomber, and the later killing of 10 Afghan civilians by an errant allied drone.
But it was President Biden whose failure to plan led to the last-minute crush of panicked Afghans at 
Desperation at Abbey Gate, Hamid Karzai Airport, Kabul, Afghanistan, August 2021.
the Kabul airport. The military, having argued strenuously that the U.S. should keep a force in the country to inhibit the Taliban’s advances, were following the order of their commander-in-chief. They are credited with the largest noncombatant evacuation operation in U.S. military history, with some 123,000 people flown to safety.
The list is not about the military’s failure. This is Trump seeking revenge, part of his promised program of retribution against those he has referred to as “my generals” who he feels betrayed him. For those who have since retired, he would recall them to active duty in order to subject them to courts-martial and criminal charges.
Particularly in his sights is retired four-star Army General and then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, for committing a “treasonous act” that could have led to “A war between China and the U.S.”, as Trump wrote in a September tweet of a year ago. It was ”an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!”
Milley’s act was the opposite of causing a war. In October of 2020 and again two days after the January 6th insurrection, Milley had spoken to his Chinese counterparts to assuage their apprehension about what Trump might do next, considering his erratic conduct and ultimately his
attempted coup. The calls were not surreptitious. A number of officials, including from the State Department and CIA, were listening in on the calls, which had been authorized by two defense secretaries at the time. It is normal, a matter of precaution and prevention, for our top military to talk to the counterpart military commanders of our adversaries. For Trump it was betrayal.
An investigation into the Afghanistan debacle would serve a second purpose for the president-elect: to heap blame on President Biden and deflect blame for the withdrawal away from himself. As this page recounted in this previous story, it was Trump who made the decision to withdraw – even bypassing and undercutting the Afghan government by striking a peace agreement directly with the Taliban in February of 2020. It provided for the removal of all U.S. and other NATO troops by May 1, 2021. The U.S. got nothing in exchange more than a pledge not to harbor al-Qaeda, subsequently broken. Astonishingly, in the final agreement Trump negotiators acceded to the release of 5,000 Taliban from prison in Pakistan, a huge influx of prisoners ready to fight again to bring about the collapse of Afghanistan in 2021 as the Taliban suddenly swept the country. Moreover, Trump drew down the troop count from 13,000 to 8,600 by July 2020 and then, just five days before Biden took office, left the incoming president with a token force of only 2,500 troops, and a little over two months after his inauguration to engineer the May 1 evacuation.
conflictedTrump has a contradictory relationship with the military. He is stirred by it in the abstract – the pomp of parades with jet flyovers and heavy weaponry in review (but exclude anyone maimed by combat because “it doesn’t look good for me”). An article by editor Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic, “Trump: ‘I Need the Kind of Generals That Hitler Had’”, cites his many times denigrating the actual soldier, sailor, Marine as “suckers” and “losers” and memorably saying to four-star Marine general John Kelly at Arlington Cemetery, as they stood before the grave of Kelly’s son, a Marine officer killed in 2010 in Afghanistan, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”. And yet he proudly (if questionably) claims that he rebuilt the U.S. military.
But he doesn’t seem to like his creation, or at least the top tier. After all, both Milley and Kelly have called him a fascist. Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, his onetime national security adviser, has written a book about the chaotic days in the White House. Another Marine four-star, James Mattis, his first secretary of defense, quit in disgust when Trump pulled our troops out of Syria. His second SecDef, Mark Esper, a Westpointer who saw combat during the Gulf War as an infantry officer with the 101st Airborne, must be on the list for pushing back against some of Trump's orders.
In Pete Hegseth Trump has chosen for defense secretary a Fox television personality currently but a 20-year field grade Army officer awarded two bronze stars who came away critical of a Pentagon that he says has become highly politicized. About the choice former War College instructor Tom Nichols says,
"This is Trump firing a shot over the heads of senior officers, telling them that from now on, loyalty to the Constitution is not their oath, that from now on, it's loyalty to him and he won't tolerate the kind of things that happened in his first administration where he had people like General Mark Milley and others refusing and talking him out of doing things like shooting protesters in the streets."
Hegseth rails against the “woke, CRT, DEI things, gender stuff” that has “seeped into” and politicized what he estimates to be roughly a third of the military’s most senior officers. “And so they’ll do any social justice, gender, climate, extremism crap because it gets them checked to the next level,” he said. “Well first of all you’ve got to fire the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs”, General CQ Brown, for being too “woke”, “but any general that was involved — general, admiral, whatever — that was involved in any of the DEI woke s**t has got to go,” is Hegseth’s verdict. If he gets the job, all indicators say that Trump has found his man, that Hegseth would take a scythe to the Pentagon’s top brass to Trump’s retributive relish.
But approval of the military ranks far higher than Congress, the Supreme Court, or Trump himself. A campaign of firing and possibly prosecuting generals and admirals could seriously backfire.
Meanwhile, with Gaetz gone, attention will turn to Hegseth and the accusation by a woman that in 2017 in Monterey, California, he prevented her from leaving his hotel room and sexually assaulted her, according to a detailed police report.
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