Trump Assembling a “Review Board” to Investigate Our Military Generals

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Heh.

This tickles me to death.

I’ve written about Gen Mark Milley a million times. He is only the biggest, ugliest, most obvious public face of what’s wrong with our military and its senior “leadership.”

Former Commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen David Berger, wrote a piece for Proceedings two years ago that identified his candidates as the main reasons in public perception why military recruiting was in the toilet and I included it in that post. 

It is still relevant today.

Gen Berger correctly believed that most of the blame could be laid at the feet of military officers, specifically senior leadership. 

Public Trust and Confidence
Of all the factors affecting young Americans’ propensity to serve, the most alarming is the steady decline of public trust and confidence in the military. According to Gallup’s most recent Honesty and Ethics Survey, Americans’ confidence in military officers has declined to its lowest level since the survey began in 2001. Further, in just the past five years, ten percent fewer Americans believe military officers possess “high ethics.”2Why? Based on my observations and interactions with a broad swath of citizens, I believe there are several reasons, including:

• The character of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan

• A growing perception of the politicization of the military and senior military leaders

• Reports of widespread sexual harassment and assault in the ranks

• A series of preventable mishaps across all the services that suggest a measure of professional incompetence

• Scandals and examples of poor leadership across the joint force

• A perception that the skills developed through military service are less relevant to private sector success than in the past

Generals like Berger (author of the highly controversial Force Design 2030, essentially a redesign of the entire USMC mission) and the perniciously woke Milley are only two names in a general officer cast of hundreds who have systematically moved our once feared and lethal American military from a war-fighting posture to a corporate structure.

Our current commandant, Gen Smith, is as guilty of woke thinking as any Air Force officer. Not only is he holding fast to the reviled Force Design 2030 concept, but he is also adding little flourishes where none need to be.

Marines will no longer buckle down to learn the list of the service’s leadership traits, as an “E” for empathy was added at the end of the famous phrase used to commit them to memory.

The Marine Corps mnemonic JJ DID TIE BUCKLE signifying the 14 characteristics of an ideal leader is now JJ DID TIE BUCKLEE following the Corps’ decision to add a 15th trait.

Announced in mid-August, the change was published in two Marine Corps materials, Sustaining the Transformation and Leading Marines.

The addition of empathy as a leadership trait for the Corps was originally reported by Task & Purpose.

It joins justice, judgment, dependability, initiative, decisiveness, tact, integrity, enthusiasm, bearing, unselfishness, courage, knowledge, loyalty and endurance.

I won’t play favorites when it comes to this.

The Navy, besides drag queens in their recruiting videos and having petty officers do official educational spots in order to help their fellow sailors remember proper pronoun usage for what whoever next to them identifies as (Lord, that was excruciating), is also worried about racial harmony. The Chief of Naval Operations – an admiral – made sure instructional material suitable for learning how to curb such behavior was added to his recommended reading list.

…The Biden administration’s Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Michael Gilday, decided last year to add Ibram X. Kendi’s book, How to Be an Antiracist—one of the leading sourcebooks on critical race theory—to his list of recommended readings. To give an idea of how radical Kendi’s book is, one of its famous (or infamous) arguments is that “Capitalism is essentially racist,” and that “to truly be antiracist, you also have to be truly anticapitalist.” 

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, who has his own leadership issues and is himself a retired Army general officer (Hello), called military-wide stand-downs to search for bogeymen that did not exist.

…Last year, Secretary Austin alarmingly called for a one-day military-wide stand-down to address the so-called problem of “extremism” in the ranks, despite the fact that there has been no evidence presented—including in testimony by senior officials—that there is a problem of extremism in the military. Commanding officers were required to discuss the topic using a PowerPoint presentation that included Ted Talks asking the question, “What is up with us white people?”

The American public has had enough. The first clue came when the Secretary of the Army’s reviled “warrior caste,” which makes up the bulk of any recruiting class in most of the armed services, simply stopped showing up to raise their right hands to enlist.

Panic set in, but instead of pivoting to appreciating the tradition of service these families have going back generations – and yes, they are overwhelmingly middle-class whites – the administration doubled down on DEI approaches and woke ploys to attract the diverse troops they wanted (and whom they actually already had), but in the new and improved 72 gender categories that they could fly rainbow flags over.

Traditional patriotic Hispanic, white, black, and other families with a history of service were diverse, yes, but the cool factor was sadly lacking.

Needless to say, recruiting tanked.

The Marine Corps made their numbers this year by, like, 1.

What happened next was November 6th and a belief that President Trump and whoever his Defense Secretary turned out to be would go in with a firehose to wash the woke stench from the five-sided building and return it to its proper military bearing. This is going to happen and not a minute too soon.

They will be scrutinizing general officers for performance and booting those who do not meet the parameters.

The Wall Street Journal reported today that the Trump transition team is drafting an executive order to “create a board to purge general officers.” Such a board, the article’s subhead warned, “could upend military review process and raise concerns about politicization of military.”

 The Pentagon denizens are shaking in their boots and insisting it will be a catastrophe.

I think they protest too much.

While Pentagon officials are not willing to publicly weigh in on the emerging plans by President-elect Donald Trump to purge the military’s ranks of many top officers, the Defense Department’s spokeswoman says that removing a slew of admirals and generals would have serious impacts on missions and readiness.

“I’m not going to speak for the incoming administration or speak to any hypotheticals on what they will and won’t do,” Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh told reporters Thursday.

However, Singh did say that the idea of a sudden departure of multiple top leaders was something that the Pentagon already faced last year, when Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., held up hundreds of military promotions

It should work out great. It certainly did for Gen Marshall when he did the same thing – and do not let them try to tell you a review board is a Trumpian unprecedented step in history.

…Perhaps the most relevant example here is that of General George C. Marshall and his “plucking” committee. This was the informal name given to a panel, not dissimilar to the one described in today’s Wall Street Journal, that Marshall established in 1940 to reform and modernize the U.S. Army leadership in preparation for entry into World War II. The committee aimed to replace ineffective or outdated senior officers with younger, more dynamic leaders better suited to the quickly evolving demands of modern warfare.

The committee, established by Marshall, identified and “plucked” over 600 senior officers they deemed unfit or too old for command in wartime. Rather than basing their decisions on seniority, the committee focused on competence, leadership ability, and physical fitness. This process allowed Marshall to infuse the Army’s upper ranks with officers who could handle the pace and rigor of large-scale-maneuver warfare. While Marshall was blasted on the floor of Congress and in the press for allegedly gutting U.S. national security, the men who ascended key Army billets are now legend: Eisenhower, Bradley, Patton, and Lightning Joe Collins, to name but a few. It was successful, but not permanent.

Sometimes, it’s necessary to break a few eggs before you get an omelet, and I cannot wait to see who and what cracks.

It’s about time.

I just hope it’s IN time.