Trump’s Pentagon overhaul: Purging woke agendas, restoring readiness

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team drafted an executive order to “create a board to purge generals,” potentially enabling the swift removal of flag and general officers “lacking in requisite leadership qualities.” According to the Journal, this effort “could also create a chilling effect on top military officers” due to Trump’s past vow to fire “woke generals,” referring to officers who place diversity over military readiness.

Trump’s opponents quickly seized on the draft order, accusing him of attempting to “politicize” the military. By using the term “purge,” critics evoke comparisons to Stalin’s elimination of senior Red Army officers before World War II, which led to significant Soviet military failures during the war’s early years.

The greatest challenge facing the U.S. military today is the weakening of the military ethos, which underpins its effectiveness.

The implication is that any attempt to remove flag and general officers from the U.S. military, like Stalin’s purge, is ideologically motivated — intended to eliminate officers deemed insufficiently loyal to Trump and his administration. Although Trump’s relationship with senior U.S. military leaders has always been fraught, the suggestion that he seeks to purge officers based on loyalty is, at best, an overreach and, at worst, a slander.

A more accurate interpretation of such a board would be an effort to restore accountability, which has been lacking in the U.S. military for some time. Recently, a Marine officer was court-martialed after calling for accountability following the deaths of 13 service members in a suicide bombing at Kabul's Hamid Karzai International Airport during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Appearing in uniform on multiple occasions, Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller demanded that political and military leaders be held responsible.

In a 2009 article for World Affairs, Richard Kohn, a prominent American military historian, noted that “nearly twenty years after the end of the Cold War, the American military, financed by more money than the entire rest of the world spends on its armed forces, failed to defeat insurgencies or fully suppress sectarian civil wars in two crucial countries, each with less than a tenth of the U.S. population, after overthrowing those nations’ governments in a matter of weeks.” What, he asked, accounted for this lack of military effectiveness?

Accountability lost

In his 2012 book, “The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today,” Thomas Ricks, formerly of the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, explained our military’s recent failures. He argued that many of these failures stem from a lack of accountability among officers for battlefield losses. During World War II, relief of command was common. Gen. George Marshall, the “architect of victory,” routinely relieved subordinates who fell short.

In the decades following the war, political leaders — not military authorities — handled any officer reliefs. Often, officers were simply “kicked upstairs,” as in the cases of William Westmoreland in Vietnam and George Casey in Iraq. An Army officer during the early stages of Operation Iraqi Freedom noted, “A private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.”

It’s also crucial to remember that while the president needs Senate consent to appoint officers, he has the power to fire them without congressional approval. Presidents have exercised this authority since the early days of the republic. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, appointed officers based on ideological alignment, aiming to replace Federalist-dominated Army leadership with Republicans. Establishing West Point was one way to accomplish this goal.

Clearing the ‘dead wood’

Commissions like the one Trump’s team is considering are not new in American military history. During the Civil War, Congress formed the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, which examined operational and tactical issues along with the performance of officers in the field. Before World War II, Marshall created a board led by retired officers to review officer records and “remove from line promotion any officer for reasons deemed good and sufficient.” The goal was to clear out “dead wood” to make room for younger, more capable officers.

The U.S. military is in trouble. Although still held in relatively high regard by the American public, its esteem has declined in recent years. Military failure likely contributes to this decline, but a more significant factor is what the late political scientist Samuel Huntington called “transmutation.” This term refers to the slow but steady erosion of the military ethos, replaced by priorities such as “diversity,” which now often supersede military effectiveness as a policy goal.

Efforts by the military to address an alleged lack of diversity can sometimes worsen the situation. By promoting “identity politics,” which implies that justice depends on attributes like skin color rather than individual identity, these efforts risk dividing people instead of unifying them.

In my view, the greatest challenge facing the U.S. military today is the weakening of the military ethos, which underpins its effectiveness. If Trump’s proposed board can address this challenge, I fully support it. In fact, I would endorse Voltaire’s satiric quip about the execution of Admiral Byng for his lack of aggressiveness at the Battle of Minorca: "In [England] it is well to shoot an admiral now and then pour encourager les autres." And I am confident that the vast majority of active duty and retired service members would agree with me.