White House fires Pentagon advisory board members, installs loyalists

[ancianita]

This discussion thread was locked as off-topic by DonViejo (a host of the Latest Breaking News forum).

Source: Politico

The White House removed nine members of the Pentagon's Defense Business Board on Friday and installed people loyal to President Donald Trump in their place, including presidential allies Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie.

Besides Lewandowski and Bossie, the other new members are Henry Dreifus, Robert McMahon, Cory Mills, Bill Bruner, Christopher Shank, Joseph Schmidt, Keary Miller, Allen Weh and Earl Matthews.

The Defense Business Board is made up of more than a dozen industry and academic leaders who volunteer to provide independent business advice to Pentagon leadership and are appointed by top Pentagon leaders.

The board has completed reviews of defense agencies and field activities, along with a study of using data analytics in the private sector and how it applies to DoD. The group also recommended disestablishing the position of chief management officer and putting a new alternative in place, which this week was voted into the final National Defense Authorization Act.



Read more: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/04/pentagon-fires-business-advisory-board-members-442892

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By LARA SELIGMAN, DANIEL LIPPMAN and JACQUELINE FELDSCHER
12/04/2020 12:49 PM EST
Updated: 12/04/2020 03:20 PM EST

[sakabatou]

1. Ugh....

[RockRaven]

2. It's easy to oust them and replace them, so there really are only two plausible motives...

One is just CV boosting for these loyalists. Fancy titles for his friends on their way out the door.

The other is much darker -- to undermine the willingness of highly qualified people to participate on this type of generally useful, generally underappreciated roles. For instance, say this sets a precedent of behavior.... would you sign up to be treated like Trump just treated the people he ousted?

[OAITW r.2.0]

3. "would you sign up to be treated like Trump just treated the people he ousted?"

But. you'd be thinking like Trump, not like a sane, normal, highly intelligent American who speaks for me.

[ancianita]

5. Maybe others...

Something as dark as showing the world how to shift toward greater corporate power, since the military opened the door to outsourcing mostly after Vietnam, and furthered outsourcing in the Bush/Cheney years.

To turn this military into the arm of a corporate captured government would rearrange its relationship to the very human American people. It could change American history.

As part of the current NDAA just touched on in the article -- NDAA's have harbored all kinds of constitutional erosions that place humans in a nation labeled a "battleground" (NDAA 2011 and The Patriot Act that it sits in tandem with) -- to go from "disestablishment" into some unrevealed other arrangement worries me. One never knows whether these are driven by background private military companies who can be loosely tied with civilian militias that we've seen, or whether this military will itself soon become a privatized entity.

Trump might be doing this, but Trump isn't the only one doing this. It behooves us pattern seeking humans to look into the whole list of his replacements, because someone has. Unless they were pulled out of a hat, which also says something.

This kind of move isn't ever just about a slouch like the current occupant.

[dhill926]

4. this is worrisome to me....

[ancianita]

6. Me, too.

Last edited Sat Dec 5, 2020, 01:48 AM - Edit history (1)

We have paramilitarized police all over the nation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militarization_of_police

We have become non-governmentally paramilitarized.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_paramilitary_organizations#List_of_non-governmental_paramilitary_units

We have corporate military.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_military_company

And we have had admissions in recent years that the Pentagon has "lost" upwards of a trillion dollars a year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States

None of the existence of these is ever examined in media beyond mass shootings or marching fascists and Nazi gun humpers.

[napi21]

7. Why the hell do this with only 50+ days to go? Wy did they even take the job when

they have to know they'll be gone in less than 2 months?

[ancianita]

8. That's what we're talking about. What this means.

I think it's part of a longer process of changing the substance of the US military, and now a civilian board comes in to show, maybe, what they will do with it. I don't claim to know. But I've tried to read as much as possible about militarization, our NDAA's, Trump's recalling troops from Somalia -- but then again, corporate military companies are still staying there. Now what is that about, one might want to know.

Anyway. There's a lot, much more, about the militarizing context of this nation that we Democrats should be aware of, imo.

And while we wait for a new CiC, we could be spending time looking into what a military is in America. It's not grandpa's military anymore.

[PSPS]

9. Already posted in LBN earlier

https://www.democraticunderground.com/10142641502

[ancianita]

10. Sorry. I looked on the LBN list and didn't see it.

I did my best to check to see if it was already up. But if it gets locked, it gets locked.

[bucolic_frolic]

11. Brewing a coup?

It's a head-scratcher only in the sense of being suspicious of what's up, and what's going down.

[DonViejo]

12. Locking...

This is a duplicate of https://www.democraticunderground.com/10142641502