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Trump's shot at top brass rankles military circles
Any attempt to sideline top officers in one fell swoop is viewed by some retired officers and longtime Pentagon officials as undermining tradition.
By Bryan Bender, September 8, 2016
Donald Trump's broadside against the top military brass is drawing warnings of a crisis in civilian-military relations should he become commander in chief and begin bypassing generals and admirals now serving under President Barack Obama.
"It would be unprecedented," said Mackubin Thomas Owens, a retired Marine colonel and former instructor at the Naval War College. "This would be making the military into a partisan prize. The idea you are going to come in and fire all the generals and admirals would be nearly impossible for a variety of reasons, but would also be stupid."
Wednesday night, the Republican presidential nominee charged the top rungs of the officer corps have been "reduced to rubble," referring to claims that a number of senior commanders have been cowed by administration officials or removed for disagreeing with them. It's a state of affairs Trump called "embarrassing to our country."
He also said that, in drawing up a new strategy to defeat the Islamic State, he would rely on "different generals" — a position Trump's surrogates underscored on Thursday.
"Mr. Trump never said he’d fire generals," the campaign emailed POLITICO. "He said he’d have different generals advising him."
Nonetheless, any attempt to sideline top officers in one fell swoop — while the prerogative of the president — is viewed by some retired officers and longtime Pentagon officials as undermining a tradition of keeping the active-duty military out of politics as much as possible. Unfairly painting a number of generals and admirals as lackeys of Obama would erode the perception that as an institution they are independent, they said.
Those are fears that top uniformed officers themselves have expressed privately for months as they have sought — not always successfully — to deflect questions from reporters about controversial proposals put forward by Trump, including his calls to torture terrorism suspects and his questioning of the relevance of the NATO military alliance.
Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joe Dunford has also reminded all troops to stay out of the political debate.
Dunford's spokesman reiterated that position on Thursday. "We will not be commenting on any political discourse, period, regardless of where/how it was made," Navy Captain Gregory Hicks said in an email.
Others with close ties to top military leaders were far less muted about Trump's pronouncements.
"The real danger is if he starts relieving people to put his own people in right away," Peter Mansoor, a retired Army colonel who teaches military history at Ohio State University, said of Trump's comments at a Commander-in-Chief Forum hosted by NBC News Wednesday night in New York City. "You get into much more treacherous waters if the president were to relive [i.e., relieve] the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — who has political clout of his own and a national platform — or perhaps a combatant commander, just because he wants to put his own person in."
"I think that would be very dangerous to civil-military relations in the United States going forward," he added.
Presidents actually have little influence over who becomes a general or admiral. The one and two-stars — brigadier or major generals or rear admirals — are selected in a process guided by law and overseen by military promotion boards.
However, those who rise to three-star lieutenant generals and vice admirals or four-star generals and admirals — the highest current ranks — are heavily influenced by the president, whose choices must be confirmed by the Senate.
Civilian control of the military is a bedrock of American democracy, designed to inoculate the country against military rule.
That means presidents have a long history of replacing generals for misconduct or for lack of confidence — perhaps most famously when Harry Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War for disobeying orders or Abraham Lincoln's sacking of numerous battlefield commanders during the American Civil War.
Sour relations between the new president and the top military brass has been fairly common in recent times, said a recently retired lieutenant general who asked that he not be named.
He noted, for example, that "the Clinton administration was deeply suspicious of military advice. That changed as the administration matured."
"It was a very rocky beginning. That was true in spades in the Bush administration," he added. "We were portrayed as Clinton's generals."
He recalled that then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld simply "stopped meeting with his senior military leaders" and even bypassed the active-duty Army to pluck out of retirement a retired general to recommend as chief of staff. "He didn't respect their advice and didn't want to hear it," the retired three-star said.
The Obama administration also has been criticized for its relationship with the top ranks and for the removal of a number of officers — including retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, one of Trump's top surrogates who was head of the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2012 to 2014.
Flynn said Thursday that Trump is "absolutely right" about how the Obama administration has treated officers like him.
"There's a severe disconnect between this White House and frankly the president and our military,” Flynn told Fox News’ Fox and Friends. “I mean, there's a lot of frustration within the ranks and there's a lot of frustration I know in the senior leadership about what we're not able to do.”
Others who were removed include retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, then the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, after he gave an interview openly critical of the White House, and Marine Gen. James Mattis, who was retired early as the top commander in the Middle East after reportedly raising repeated concerns about the threat posed by Iran.
"It would be a fair comment to say they are also deeply suspicious of military advice," the retired three-star said of the Obama team, "most especially to independent advice, unless it just parries the administration's party line."
But any attempt by a new president to clean house would be seen as wholly different.
Such a move would "do serious damage to morale and effectiveness," a longtime Pentagon official told POLITICO. "It would certainly be within a president's legal authority but would be a massive blow to the professional model of civil-military relations. I would expect a significant exodus across the officer corps."
Owens added of Trump's comments: "It is bombast on the one hand but also ignorance of the system."
The retired general, however, predicted that the criticism is unlikely to sway the GOP nominee should be get elected.
"My instincts tell me that he would be quick to act if he thought he was getting very poor advice."
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