Top Military Officers Unload on Trump--even the Brass are speaking out!
Long article but to the point.
Top Military Officers Unload on Trump
The commander in chief is impulsive, disdains expertise, and gets his intelligence briefings from Fox News. What does this mean for those on the front lines?
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/military-officers-trump/598360/
Mark Bowden November 2019 Issue Politics
For most of the past two decades, American troops have been deployed all over the worldto about 150 countries. During that time, hundreds of thousands of young men and women have experienced combat, and a generation of officers have come of age dealing with the practical realities of war. They possess a deep well of knowledge and experience. For the past three years, these highly trained professionals have been commanded by Donald Trump.
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Military officers are sworn to serve whomever voters send to the White House. Cognizant of the special authority they hold, high-level officers epitomize respect for the chain of command, and are extremely reticent about criticizing their civilian overseers. That those I spoke with made an exception in Trumps case is telling, and much of what they told me is deeply disturbing. In 20 years of writing about the military, I have never heard officers in high positions express such alarm about a president. Trumps pronouncements and orders have already risked catastrophic and unnecessary wars in the Middle East and Asia, and have created severe problems for field commanders engaged in combat operations. Frequently caught unawares by Trumps statements, senior military officers have scrambled, in their aftermath, to steer the country away from tragedy. How many times can they successfully do that before faltering?
Amid threats spanning the globe, from nuclear proliferation to mined tankers in the Persian Gulf to terrorist attacks and cyberwarfare, those in command positions monitor the presidents Twitter feed like field officers scanning the horizon for enemy troop movements. A new front line in national defense has become the White House Situation Room, where the military struggles to accommodate a commander in chief who is both ignorant and capricious. In May, after months of threatening Iran, Trump ordered the carrier group led by the USS Abraham Lincoln to shift from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf. On June 20, after an American drone was downed there, he ordered a retaliatory attackand then called it off minutes before it was to be launched. The next day he said he was not looking for war and wanted to talk with Irans leaders, while also promising them obliteration like youve never seen before if they crossed him. He threatened North Korea with fire and fury and dispatched a three-aircraft-carrier flotilla to waters off the Korean peninsulathen he pivoted to friendly summits with Kim Jong Un, with whom he announced he was in love; canceled long-standing U.S. military exercises with South Korea; and dangled the possibility of withdrawing American forces from the country altogether. While the lovefest continues for the cameras, the U.S. has quietly uncanceled the canceled military exercises, and dropped any mention of a troop withdrawal.
Such rudderless captaincy creates the headlines Trump craves. He revels when his tweets take off. (Boom! he says. Like a rocket!) Out in the field, where combat is more than wordplay, his tweets have consequences. He is not a president who thinks through consequencesand this, the generals stressed, is not the way serious nations behave.
The generals I spoke with didnt agree on everything, but they shared the following five characterizations of Trumps military leadership.
I. HE DISDAINS EXPERTISE
Trump has little interest in the details of policy. He makes up his mind about a thing, and those who disagree with himeven those with manifestly more knowledge and experienceare stupid, or slow, or crazy.
As a personal quality, this can be trying; in a president, it is dangerous. Trump rejects the careful process of decision making that has long guided commanders in chief. Disdain for process might be the defining trait of his leadership. Of course, no process can guarantee good decisionshistory makes that clearbut eschewing the tools available to a president is choosing ignorance. What Trumps supporters call the deep state is, in the world of national securityhardly a bastion of progressive politicsa vast reservoir of knowledge and global experience that presidents ignore at their peril. The generals spoke nostalgically of the process followed by previous presidents, who solicited advice from field commanders, foreign-service and intelligence officers, and in some cases key allies before reaching decisions about military action. As different as George W. Bush and Barack Obama were in temperament and policy preferences, one general told me, they were remarkably alike in the Situation Room: Both presidents asked hard questions, wanted prevailing views challenged, insisted on a variety of options to consider, and weighed potential outcomes against broader goals. Trump doesnt do any of that. Despite commanding the most sophisticated intelligence-gathering apparatus in the world, this president prefers to be briefed by Fox News, and then arrives at decisions without input from others.
One prominent example came on December 19, 2018, when Trump announced, via Twitter, that he was ordering all American forces in Syria home.
We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump presidency, he tweeted. Later that day he said, Our boys, our young women, our men, they are all coming back, and they are coming back now.
This satisfied one of Trumps campaign promises, and it appealed to the isolationist convictions of his core supporters. Forget the experts, forget the chain of commandthey were the people who, after all, had kept American forces engaged in that part of the world for 15 bloody years without noticeably improving things. Enough was enough.....................................
dewsgirl
(14,961 posts)is so frightening to me.
Skittles
(153,150 posts)yes
dewsgirl
(14,961 posts)stunt and deploying troops to Saudi Arabia, he will be right there. I know it sounds awful, but I didn't want him to enlist, because of Trump being so unpredictable and then watching the last couple months unfold it has been a real nightmare.
Skittles
(153,150 posts)but.....I'm sure by now the military knows he's a Putin-loving nitwit, and there's a lot of behind the scenes actions going on to protect the troops from his erratic decisions
I'm a USAF vet
dewsgirl
(14,961 posts)your service and replying, you made me feel a little better.
I just moved up here between Eglin and Hurlburt AFB's to be with my son and help take care of my granddaughter and pregnant DIL. I am learning a lot about the Air Force at the moment.
DBoon
(22,357 posts)and conducted a major war at whim and without a plan, crushing any dissent as treasonous?
Could it be the fellow with the funny mustache who killed himself in a Berlin bunker?
RainCaster
(10,869 posts)The number of people in these groups who support DFT is shrinking at a rapid pace:
* Women
* Vets
* Active duty military
* Blacks
* Hispanics
* Farmers
Cartoonist
(7,316 posts)He'll always have the racists. Adolph still does.