(Premise from a tv show, so…)
Once a soldier rises to the rank of general, can they ever be demoted against their will?
They sure can.
A few recent examples:
Gen. William “Kip” Ward was reduced from full General (four star) to Lieutenant General (three star) upon retirement due to unauthorized spending and possible embezzlement.
Brig. Gen Jeffrey Sinclair (one star) was demoted to Lt. Colonel after a court-martial convicted him of sexual assault.
Relevant question for current election year:
Can the President as commander in chief demote specific generals or force them to resign? As Trump has promised to fire the generals who he believes haven’t been doing a good job against ISIS, could he actually do this if hypothetically he was the President?
The answer is that it depends on the Country and the relevant law, rules and regulations. Meaning sometimes, yes, sometimes no.
In many countries, senior ranks are linked to specific positions; meaning for instance if there are 12 Maj Gen billets, then 12 men/women will be promoted to Maj Gen
If country isn’t specified in a dope question, the default seems to be assume it’s talking about the US. Not saying that’s right, but thats the way it is.
The President as commander-in-chief can remove any officer from their current assignment. A relevant example is Gen. Stanley McChrystal who was removed by President Obama from his position as commander of ISAF forces in Afghanistan. Perhaps more famously, noted maniac Gen. Douglas MacArthur was removed from his command by President Truman for insubordination.
Actually dismissing an officer from the service is a process governed by law, and must proceed through the military justice/disciplinary system. But there’s a good chance that if the President asks a senior officer for their resignation, they would get it.
Yes. This is one thing, perhaps the only thing, that Trump gets right. The President can relieve any officer of his/her command for any reason. In WWII it used to be the norm to fire generals who weren’t achieving strategic goals. Nowadays, generals tend to be bureaucrats who watch each other’s backs.
So, sure, Trump could fire generals if he wished. Based on his public comments, his firings would be based on deeply unsound reasoning. But he has the right to do so.
So when was the last time that the President directly fired a general? WW II or later?
I dunno, that’s not my job. MacArthur was the latest I know of, but I’m sure there were others after that. Here is a very good article explaining why general-level firings tapered off in the Korean era and why this is a bad thing. tl;dr - bureaucracy is generally not characteristic of an effective fighting force.
Patton was demoted to three-star for the slapping incident in WW2.
I can’t think of a time that a President directly fired a general, as the standard practice is for a general to resign. This has happened many, many times. Even the Secretary of the Army has relieved generals in recent history.
How is that different? McChrystal was recalled to Washington and [del]Luca Brasi held a gun to his head, and Obama assured him that either his brains or his signature would be on the contract[/del] was given no choice but to resign. He was fired.
The military goes through the chain of command so when generals are relieved they will be relieved by their boss not the president. The president has direct control of the combatant commanders so if any of them need to be relieved it comes from him or the SECDEF.
There is an impeachment process whereby even the Commander in Chief can be demoted.
Truman’s comment was interesting, after he had fired Gen. Couglas McArthur:
I fired him because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the President. I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.
Well, it’s an old case and the reasons are a little different, but remember that Custer was only a general through a brevet rank (two stars, Major General) and was returned to his permanent rank of Lt. Colonel before he got all his men killed off. But he’s still widely known as “General Custer.”
Just a point about public perception of rank.
I took the question to mean whether a President in recent history has broken with the usual practice of asking for someone’s resignation and then accepting it, by doing something more like having the President announce that a general officer has been literally fired. I totally agree with your point that asking for someone’s resignation is firing them, but I took coremelt’s question to mean whether any President (or civilian military official, I suppose) has fired a general by means other than asking for their resignation (or removing them from command for loss of confidence, which is also quite common).
Forgot to mention this – in the U.S. military, grades above two-star general or admiral are tied to specific jobs. So if someone is nominated, confirmed, and appointed to be, say, Commander of European Command, that officer will have four stars for the duration of his service in that role. It occasionally happens that if someone serves poorly in a three- or four-star general position, they may end up retiring at a two-star (or sometimes lower) grade. There’s a whole complex process behind the retirement grade which I won’t bother to get into at this moment.
Later.
By President Kennedy: Edwin Walker - Wikipedia
By President Carter: John K. Singlaub - Wikipedia
As noted above, by President Obama: Stanley A. McChrystal - Wikipedia
Truman was also quoted as saying, much later, “I fired MacArthur because of the damn insubordination of God’s right-hand man.” See David McCullough’s Truman for a very interesting discussion of the gradually-deteriorating relationship between the CINC and his top general in Korea. By the end, even the Joint Chiefs thought that Mac had to go.
At the time of the Civil War, general officers held different ranks in the regulars (the core U.S. Army) and the volunteers (the much larger uniformed ranks, recruited state by state and scaled up dramatically to win the war). After 1865, when the Army was greatly reduced in size, career officers like Custer reverted to their (typically lower) ranks in the regulars.
Military ID Cards, at least when I was in had specific dates for service ending for enlisted and no date for officers. But also officers are under more pressure to advance than enlisted, although there is some. You have a set number of “billets” at each command by rate and rating/rank
And in the end, it may have been useful in the pour encourager les autres sense - who knows where LeMay might have gone had the recent example of MacArthur not been hanging around the place. Dude be wack… and with nukes.