The Dilemma of Duty Under Trump
What His Assault on the U.S. Military Means for America
It might be difficult to remember now, but U.S. President Donald Trump delivered his first blow to American civil-military relations in 2017, when he first started talking about “my generals.” He had appointed a former Marine general, James Mattis, as secretary of defense, which is a position typically reserved for civilians to preserve civilian control of the military. Mattis became the first former general to serve as defense secretary since George Marshall in 1950, and he needed to secure a congressional waiver in order to take the job.
Trump also appointed other high-ranking military officers to civilian posts, including former Marine General John Kelly (who served first as secretary of homeland security and then as White House chief of staff) and his first two national security advisers: Michael Flynn, a retired three-star general, and H. R. McMaster, an active-duty three-star general. Even Vice President Mike Pence’s national security adviser was a retired army lieutenant general: Keith Kellogg (who is now special envoy for Ukraine). Few, if any, previous U.S. presidents had so brazenly tried to benefit from proximity to the U.S. military. Appointing so many generals to such high offices is more typical of a military junta than of a constitutional republic. But Trump reveled in the aura of toughness conveyed by these military men; he delighted, for example, in referring to Mattis as “Mad Dog,” a nickname that the cerebral general hated.
It did not take Trump long to become disenchanted with his generals. Within two years, he fired almost all of them, insulting most on their way out the door. He later said that Army General Mark Milley, his handpicked choice for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (and one of the few Trump kept until the end of his term), should have been executed for treason because he had called his Chinese counterpart to offer reassurances that the United States was not planning to start a war after the storming of the Capitol by Trump’s supporters on January 6, 2021.
When Trump came into office for a second time this past January, he was deeply suspicious of the uniformed military, believing that the retired and active-duty generals he had appointed during his first term had stymied his unilateralist and isolationist instincts. Trump came to see all these generals as part of a “deep state” cabal frustrating his MAGA mandate, and he was determined not to fall into the same trap in his second term.
As a result, Trump went much further down the chain of command to choose his current secretary of defense, selecting Pete Hegseth, a Fox News weekend host who had never risen above the rank of major in the Army National Guard and who had never run any large organization. His chief qualification appears to be unquestioning subservience to Trump, and he has subjected the military to a culture war agenda, highlighted by his recent dressing down of admirals and generals at Quantico, Virginia, in which he promised to purge “woke garbage.”
Among other steps, Hegseth is returning Confederate names to military bases and styling himself as “secretary of war” after Trump issued an executive order to rename the Department of Defense to the less “wokey” Department of War. (Trump does not have the legal authority to rename the Department of Defense with an executive order.) Both Trump and Hegseth have subjected service members—ranging from junior troops to senior generals—to political lectures that are inappropriate in military settings. In an early October speech, for instance, to mark the navy’s 250th birthday, Trump referred to Democrats as a “little gnat that’s on our shoulder” while Hegseth looked on approvingly. Among the steps that Trump and Hegseth have taken to bend the armed forces to their will, the most worrisome include firing more than a dozen respected general officers (many of them women and minorities) for no good reason, imposing their ideology on military classrooms and websites, and deploying the armed forces for legally dubious missions both domestically and internationally as part of its undeclared war on crime.
By being so slavish in serving the president, Hegseth has managed to keep his job despite widespread reports of infighting and dysfunction in his office, as well as his willingness to share highly sensitive details of upcoming airstrikes in an unsecure Signal chat that included a prominent journalist. But his job tenure has come at high cost to the armed forces—and the country.
It’s easy to lose sight of how radical the MAGA military agenda is when focusing on each action in isolation. Only by glancing at the entirety of what Trump and Hegseth have wrought can one see what a far-reaching assault they are mounting on the apolitical professionalism that has made the U.S. armed forces one of the most admired institutions in American society—and one of the most emulated and envied militaries around the world. Indeed, the attempt by Trump and Hegseth to roll back military professionalism and to politicize the armed forces is not just a question of degrading military morale and effectiveness, hurting recruiting and retention, and distracting the armed forces from their primary mission (such as countering Russian and Chinese aggression), although those are all real concerns. What Trump and Hegseth are doing also represents a threat to democracy—and a profound test for service members, who do not swear a personal loyalty oath to the president but swear to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
HEADS WILL ROLL
The Trump administration wasted no time stamping the MAGA brand on the U.S. armed forces. On January 21, one day into the new presidency, the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security fired Admiral Linda Fagan, the first female commandant of the Coast Guard, without stating a reason. Administration officials leaked on background that she was relieved for, among other offenses, a supposedly “excessive focus” on diversity and inclusion efforts. Four days later, Trump fired inspectors general at 15 federal agencies, including the Department of Defense. These are the internal watchdogs who are supposed to root out fraud, abuse, inefficiency, and other problems, thereby serving as a check on executive branch leaders. Getting rid of the incumbents signaled that scrutiny of administration actions would not be welcome in the future. Four days after that, Hegseth revoked the security detail protecting Milley, by now retired, even though Tehran had placed a price on his head after the U.S. armed forces killed the commander of Iran’s Quds Force during Trump’s first term.
Less than a month later, on a Friday night in February, Trump fired General C. Q. Brown, the second Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to rise to chief of naval operations. Again, no reason was given, leading to widespread suspicion that Brown’s race and Franchetti’s sex had a lot to do with their fate. (Trump also simultaneously fired General James Slife, a white man who was vice chief of the U.S. Air Force.) Brown, a low-key but widely respected leader, was said to have incurred the administration’s wrath by making a video in 2020, during the George Floyd protests, talking about the discrimination he had faced during his rise through the ranks. Hegseth had also suggested in the past that Brown, who had previously served as chief of staff of the air force, had been promoted because of his skin color.
While the president was personally relieving these senior officers, Hegseth was firing the judge advocates general (JAGs) of the army, air force, and navy. These are the senior officers charged with ensuring that their services comply with the law. Their dismissal was to be expected given Hegseth’s long-standing contempt for “jagoffs,” his derisive nickname for the JAGs. Hegseth has previously defended service members accused of war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, convincing Trump to pardon several of them during his first term. More recently, Hegseth has said that he wants the “War Department” to focus on “maximum lethality, not tepid legality,” thereby issuing a de facto invitation to the troops to engage in unlawful conduct.
Brown’s replacement as chairman of the Joint Chiefs was an unusual choice: Dan “Razin” Caine, a retired air force three-star general who was brought back to active duty and promoted to full general. He did not meet the statutory requirements to be chairman—by law that post is supposed to be filled by a four-star general who was previously vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, a service chief, or a combatant commander. But Trump convinced the Senate to waive the rules and confirm Caine because he was evidently convinced that the general was one of his political supporters. Trump often told the story—which is denied by Caine and those who know him—that the general had donned a MAGA hat and pledged unwavering loyalty when he met with Trump in Iraq in 2018.
In fact, Caine has been careful to act apolitically since being confirmed. For example, at a June 22 press conference about the U.S. airstrikes on the Iranian nuclear program, Hegseth lavished praise on Trump and echoed his unproven assertions about the Iranian nuclear program being “obliterated,” while Caine stuck to praising U.S. military personnel and offered more measured bomb-damage assessments. But Caine’s very selection is a message about how Trump demands political loyalty above all else in his generals—and how little he values diversity.
In the months since the initial round of firings, the Trump purge has claimed two other well-respected female general officers: Navy Vice Admiral Shoshana Chatfield, a former president of the Navy War College, was relieved in April as the U.S. representative to the NATO Military committee, and Vice Admiral Yvette Davis was removed in July as the superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy after only a year in the job. (Superintendents typically serve three to four years.) Apparently, Chatfield’s offense was saying “Our diversity is our strength,” which Hegseth has called “the single dumbest phrase in military history.”
FALL IN LINE
Hegseth denies that race or gender played a role in these removals—he routinely claims that every move he makes is designed to promote “lethality”—but such claims ring hollow given how much emphasis the defense secretary has placed on removing all traces of diversity, equity, and inclusion from the military, an institution that helped lead the desegregation of American society. Hegseth, for instance, ended celebrations of Black History Month and Women’s History Month and demanded that any “DEI” material be scrubbed from Department of Defense schools, military academies, and websites. This led to the removal of any mention of the Tuskegee Airmen (the Black pilots of World War II), the Navajo Code Talkers (the Native Americans who were integral to Marine Corps operations in the Pacific), and Jackie Robinson (the first Black major league baseball player, who also served in the army). A navy tanker named for Harvey Milk, the slain gay rights leader and navy veteran, was renamed. Some—but not all—of these Orwellian erasures were subsequently rescinded, such as the purging of images, presumably because of the word “gay,” of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan and which was named after the pilot’s mother. Many of the 381 volumes that were initially removed from the shelves of the Naval Academy library were also eventually returned. But not everything was restored, and the pressure on the military to hew to the MAGA agenda remains.
For instance, in July, Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll ordered West Point to rescind an offer of employment to Jen Easterly, an army veteran and West Point alumna who had led the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency during the Biden administration. Then, in September, the West Point alumni group canceled a ceremony to present the actor Tom Hanks with the Sylvanus Thayer Award, conferred annually on an “outstanding citizen” who exemplifies the academy’s devotion to “Duty, Honor, Country.” Hanks—who has made numerous films and TV shows celebrating U.S. military valor and helped raise money for military memorials and veterans—was a supporter of former President Joe Biden and a critic of Trump. Trump, in turn, celebrated the decision on social media, writing, “We don’t need destructive, WOKE recipients getting our cherished American Awards!!!” West Point has also closed down clubs for minority cadets such as the Asian-Pacific Forum Club, the Latin Cultural Club, and the National Society of Black Engineers Club. In May, the philosophy professor Graham Parsons wrote in a New York Times op-ed that he was leaving the faculty because West Point was “eliminating courses, modifying syllabuses and censoring arguments to comport with the ideological tastes of the Trump administration.”
As part of his anti-“woke” agenda, Hegseth has also restored the Confederate names of military bases that were dropped as a result of legislation that Congress passed over Trump’s veto in January 2021. Hegseth is skirting the law by renaming the bases after veterans who have the same last names as the Confederates they were originally named after. Thus, Fort Liberty again becomes Fort Bragg—this time supposedly named not for Confederate General Braxton Bragg but for Private Roland L. Bragg, a hitherto obscure infantryman who fought in the Battle of the Bulge. This legerdemain combines Hegseth’s opposition to “wokeness” with his contempt for the rule of law.
That same impulse is evident in the air force’s decision to grant a funeral with full military honors to Ashli Babbitt, an air force veteran who was killed by police while trying to break into the House chamber during the January 6, 2021, insurrection instigated by Trump. Retired Army Lieutenant General Mark Hertling wrote in The Bulwark that he was “infuriated” by the decision because “she did not die defending the Constitution. She died trying to overturn it.”
After the assassination of the prominent Trump supporter Charlie Kirk on September 10, Hegseth ordered his aides to find and punish any military members or Pentagon civilians who posted anything online that appeared to “celebrate or mock” his death. Online vigilantes joined in by posting on X under the hashtag #RevolutionariesintheRanks to uncover supposed offenders. Many of the highlighted comments did not actually condone the murder but simply took issue with some of Kirk’s controversial statements. As of early October, The Washington Post reported, the Defense Department had investigated nearly 300 employees, both uniformed and civilian, resulting in a number of disciplinary actions, including firings.
Hegseth has also tried to stifle critical press coverage by demanding that all media organizations accredited to cover the Pentagon sign an agreement that they will not report or solicit any information they are not explicitly authorized to have by department leaders. The Pentagon press office threatened to revoke media credentials for any organizations that refused to sign this agreement, which media organizations argue impinges on their First Amendment rights.
GROUPTHINK
Meanwhile, Hegseth has continued purging senior officers for blatantly political reasons. On April 3, he fired General Timothy Haugh, the head of Cyber Command and the National Security Agency, along with the civilian deputy director at the NSA, Wendy Noble. No explanation was offered, but Laura Loomer, a Trump supporter and avid conspiracy theorist, claimed credit by saying that she had denounced the two senior officials during a meeting with Trump. Loomer argued they were both “disloyal” to the president because Haugh was supposedly “handpicked” by Mark Milley in 2023, when Milley was still chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. There is no accusation that Haugh and Noble were not doing a good job and no evidence that they were subverting the president.
A few months later, in August, Hegseth got rid of more senior officers, firing Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency; Vice Admiral Nancy Lacore, the chief of the Navy Reserve; Rear Admiral Milton Sands, a Navy SEAL officer who oversees Naval Special Warfare Command; and General David Allvin, the chief of staff of the air force, who will be retiring two years into a four-year term. It wasn’t clear why all these leaders were cashiered, beyond the obvious fact that Lacore is a woman and Kruse presided over an agency that issued a preliminary intelligence estimate that found that Iran’s nuclear facilities were not “obliterated” by a U.S. airstrike, as Trump had claimed. That Kruse was fired for having his agency offer a good-faith intelligence estimate strongly signals that truth telling from either the armed forces or the intelligence community is not welcome in this administration—at least not when the truth conflicts with the president’s spin.
Presidents, of course, have the right to fire general officers and have done so in the past. Harry Truman relieved General Douglas MacArthur for defying his decision not to extend the Korean War to China, and Barack Obama relieved General Stanley McChrystal after his staff members were quoted in a magazine article disparaging Obama and Biden, his vice president. But there is no precedent for the rapid dismissal of so many senior officers without any real explanation, evidence of failings, or misconduct. This looks like an attempt by Trump and Hegseth to install compliant general officers who will do the president’s bidding, no matter what, even if the president is demanding actions that are unwise, unethical, or illegal—or all three. The message they are sending is that any officers who question the president’s whims will find themselves in civilian clothes in short order.
The purge of honest and independent officials will have serious repercussions for U.S. foreign policy. In the future, when the president and his top aides are making vital national security decisions, they are less likely to have access to a full range of intelligence and opinions about the merits of various courses of action, because the professionals at the Defense Department and in the intelligence community will know they are only supposed to tell the president what he wants to hear. It is a recipe for the kind of groupthink that got the United States into the Vietnam and Iraq wars.
DUBIOUS DEPLOYMENTS
The worrisome impact of such moves can already be seen in the administration’s dubious deployments of the military both domestically and internationally for missions far removed from traditional warfighting. One wonders, for instance, if senior military officials raised concerns about Trump’s decision to send the armed forces into what the president calls “Democrat-run” cities. Since the start of his term, Trump has ordered National Guard troops into Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Memphis, and Portland, while also proposing deployments in Louisiana. In his September speech to generals and admirals, Trump said, “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.” Trump cites as a rationale supposed crime “emergencies,” even though crime rates have been falling across the country and there is no indication that local law enforcement has lost control. In June, for instance, Trump federalized the California National Guard over the objections of Governor Gavin Newsom and deployed 4,000 National Guard troops, along with 700 active-duty marines, to Los Angeles in response to protests caused by the administration’s massive immigration roundups. This was the first time since 1965 that a president had federalized the National Guard over the objections of a governor.
Newsom filed a lawsuit, and U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer, in San Francisco, ruled in September that the deployment was a violation of the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids the use of the military for domestic law enforcement in most situations. “There were indeed protests in Los Angeles, and some individuals engaged in violence,” the judge wrote. “Yet there was no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protests and enforce the law.” Trump’s efforts to deploy the guard to Portland and Chicago have also run into legal difficulty. When Trump tried to nationalize Oregon’s guard, U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut—whom Trump himself appointed—slapped the effort down as an illegal federal power grab. When Trump then tried to send in the California guard as a workaround, Immergut issued another injunction. In the case of Chicago, U.S. District Judge April Perry issued an injunction to prevent the deployment of the National Guard—an action upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Both Immergut and Perry suggested that the administration was being less than truthful about the reasons for the deployments, with Perry citing a “potential lack of candor” among officials.
Trump, however, is undeterred. The administration is appealing all these decisions. And his Defense Department is transparently trying to find excuses to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act, which allows the White House to use the military if there is a rebellion, or if civilian law enforcement cannot enforce the law. The president, it seems, will stop at nothing to get his way with American troops. Randy Manner, a retired army two-star general and former acting vice chief of the National Guard, told The Washington Post that the moves were “absolutely nothing more than a political grab of power” by Trump.
“THE HIGHEST AND BEST USE OF OUR MILITARY”
Just as worrisome as these domestic deployments is the use of the military in Trump’s undeclared war against drug cartels. On September 3, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that U.S. forces had blown up a speedboat in the Caribbean that was allegedly full of Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang members and illicit drugs. Eleven people on board died. The administration claimed to have ordered the lethal strike under the president’s Article 2 authority as commander in chief, with Rubio arguing that “the president has a right to eliminate immediate threats to the United States.” But it is not clear how the boat posed an “immediate threat,” even if it was full of drugs. Rubio even said that the boat was actually headed for Trinidad, and it subsequently emerged that the boat had already turned back toward Venezuela by the time it was attacked. The military sank it anyway, with a military aircraft—apparently a drone—launching multiple attacks until no one was left alive.
The administration did not provide much more information about the incident, leading some veterans of counternarcotics operations to speculate that the boat might have been carrying migrants rather than drugs. Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, said after his staff received an administration briefing on the attack: “They have offered no positive identification that the boat was Venezuelan, nor that its crew were members of Tren de Aragua or any other cartel.”
Since that initial strike, the Defense Department has announced that it has blown up four more vessels that were allegedly smuggling drugs, killing 16 more people. The administration has not offered much information about any of these incidents and has not publicly released any evidence that the boats were actually full of illicit narcotics or where they were heading.
The Trump administration has designated Tren de Aragua and other drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, but that doesn’t give the president permission to kill its members on sight. That would be akin to telling military personnel to shoot suspected drug dealers without benefit of trial—a crime for which former Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte is now on trial before the International Criminal Court. Trump has expressed his admiration for Duterte and advocated the death penalty for drug dealers, but Congress has not passed any authorization for the use of military force that would allow such an attack.
If this was not a lawful use of force, as many experts have concluded, then it was an extrajudicial killing—a potential war crime. Yet some senior officials are celebrating it regardless. Vice President JD Vance, posting on X, called the attack on the alleged drug smuggling boat “the highest and best use of our military.” When an online critic argued that “killing the citizens of another nation who are civilians without any due process is called a war crime,” Vance replied, “I don’t give a shit what you call it.”
Vance may not care, but the service members involved and their civilian superiors should. The Supreme Court has granted presidents immunity from prosecution for official acts, but that immunity does not extend to anyone else involved in the operation—or in subsequent such attacks that the president is threatening to carry out.
A MAGA MILITIA?
It is disturbing to see the U.S. military employed in such a potentially unlawful fashion. But it is also disturbing to note that, so far, there has been no public protest from anyone in uniform.
On the one hand, this is to be expected: the U.S. military is supposed to be apolitical and does not make a habit of criticizing commanders in chief. Attempts by senior officers to fight back against improper and illegal commands may lead to an even bigger civil-military crisis and potentially draw the armed forces deeper into the political mire—the last place they want to be. The good news is that the U.S. armed forces have a long, deeply inculcated tradition of protecting and defending the Constitution, and that the military is a vast institution, most of it based mercifully far from Washington. It will be impossible for Trump and Hegseth to undo in one presidential term the principles that have been inculcated in the armed forces for centuries.
But by trying to politicize the military, the Trump administration is breaking trust with the men and women in uniform and driving talented leaders out of the force. The dearth of military pushback, then, begs the question of how effectively Trump and Hegseth have cleaned house, rooting out those who might disagree with them. It is unclear if there are senior officers still objecting behind closed doors, or if everyone is keeping silent in order to save their jobs. This uncertainty will have profound effects on the public’s confidence in the nation’s armed forces. Going forward, even perfectly appropriate and legal military actions may be viewed through the prism of the administration’s attempts to turn the armed forces into a MAGA militia.
That is not fair to the troops, and it tampers with the fundamental principles that have made the American military such a successful fighting force for so long. Moreover, Trump’s actions threaten to set off a chain reaction that will damage the armed forces long after he leaves office. If today’s military leaders are perceived as “MAGA” generals, then a future Democratic administration will be tempted to appoint its own stalwarts, who in turn will be dismissed by the next Republican president. Generals and admirals may become known as political partisans, and the U.S. military could be subjected to high leadership turnover.
The most generous explanation of the silence of the general officers is that they are hoping to keep their heads down for now, hedging that they will be in a position to serve as a check on presidential overreach if and when the situation gets truly dire. And some officers may, indeed, find themselves in that position. Trump is an aspiring authoritarian who has already done much to undermine the rule of law and democracy. He is likely to up the pressure in the months and years ahead. In 2020, he asked the military to shoot peaceful protesters, according to then Defense Secretary Mark Esper. Esper and Milley refused, and the idea was abandoned. Later, after Trump lost the November election, the disgraced former general Michael Flynn reportedly advocated using troops to seize ballot boxes and overturn the election results. Even if Trump had tried to implement this idea (and there is no evidence that he did), it’s extremely unlikely that Esper or Milley would have gone along.
But it is unclear if Caine and other top military officials will say no if Trump makes similar requests. Will senior leaders handpicked by Trump resist, or will they salute and obey? On that question could hang the fate of the republic.
CLEAN HONOR
In figuring out whether they should follow commands that undermine U.S. democracy, senior officers should consider an open letter published in 2022 by a group of eight former secretaries of defense and five former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, including Mattis and Esper. Although Trump’s name was never mentioned, his first term clearly informed every sentence.
The first paragraph noted: “Military professionals confront an extremely adverse environment characterized by the divisiveness of affective polarization that culminated in the first election in over a century when the peaceful transfer of political power was disrupted and in doubt.” The letter went on to lay out the “the core principles and best practices” that should govern “healthy American civil-military relations.” The first of these, naturally, was “civilian control of the military,” but the former officials emphasized that this control must be exercised “within a constitutional framework under the rule of law” and that both the legislative and judicial branches had an important role to play. Although the letter noted that “military officials are required to carry out legal orders the wisdom of which they doubt,” it also said that “civilian officials should provide the military ample opportunity to express their doubts in appropriate venues.”
In other words, if military leaders are being ordered to do things they should not be doing, they need to let the people and their elected representatives know. “Appropriate venues” can include not only internal executive branch deliberations but also congressional testimony or even media interviews. Although this option was not mentioned in the open letter, in the worst case, senior officers could threaten to resign in protest.
There is, admittedly, no tradition in U.S. history of military leaders resigning in protest, but there is also little precedent for the kinds of orders that Trump and Hegseth are now issuing. Ideally, Congress and the courts, the press, and the public will ultimately mobilize to protect the professionalism of the armed forces, but so far, the Republican-controlled Congress has been MIA in overseeing administration misconduct. In the short run, therefore, the troops will have to fend for themselves as best as they can. They should recall what Mattis used to tell his marines: “Carry out your mission and keep your honor clean.”