So Defense War Secretary Pete Hegseth has called hundreds of top military brass to an in person meeting all together in Virginia. No mention of what the meeting is about, or why it has to be in person. But it is highly unusual and raises security concerns since a single strike could take out a substantial amount of our leadership.
Now I’m not one to be alarmist, in fact I am usually not alarmist enough, but I can’t help thinking that post Kirk assassination, with Trump using the opportunity to designate his left leaning organizations as violent extremists. This meeting seems to me to be the logical next step if one wanted to administer loyalty oaths and determine which generals would be willing to obey illegal orders to act domestically to suppress Trump’s opposition, and fire those who balk at the idea.
I hope that this isn’t what its about, and would put the likelihood that it is probably below 50% but not enough below to make it easy to sleep at night.
That was my first thought as well. IMHO it’s the only thing that makes any sense. I’m a bit more pessimistic than you. My WAG is the likelihood of this meeting being about administering a personal loyalty oath to Donald Trump as a person to be over 90%.
ETA:
What’s insane is that the second leading hypothesis from the comments I’ve read on other sites, or at least what I judge to be the second most likely reason for the meeting, is to discuss the extrasolar object 3I/ATLAS, which a few scientists like Avi Loeb have speculated as possibly being an alien ship on it’s way to invade Earth.
How we got to point that a meeting of the brass to discuss a possible (extraterrestrial) alien invasion is actually the good alternative shows just how far we’ve fallen.
A goal was to reduce GO head count by up to 100. No pledge, you get purged. The GOs all have to be in on no DEI, getting blacks out using facial hair ban, dumping women because gegsbreath got whacked with a bunch of non-consenting lawsuits.
Also a flex like lil’ Kimmy in North Korea, public humiliation and genuflecting of the officer corps.
I suspect the answer is no, but I think it would be helpful to have it on the record for this thread. Has anything like this ever happened in US history? Maybe with Abraham Lincoln and whoever the secretary of war was in those days in the lead up to the Civil War?
Yes, that’s true. But at this point I’ll take raving loon over loyalty oaths and Stalin style purges. Unfortunately my guess is that the latter is more likely to be what is actually going to happen.
Even if he made everyone take a loyalty oath, what makes that oath binding? Any general can raise their hand “Yes, I pledge to be Trump’s lackey” and then continue to retain his anti-Trump views after he leaves the meeting. And if the general was going to be fired for opposing Trump - Hegseth could have fired him without needing to administer such an oath to him in the first place.
Getting a huge chunk of U.S. generals together at once, for a meeting by civilian leadership? Not really.
Pre-Civil War, the U.S. Army was less than 15,000 strong, mostly assigned in small detachments around the West to keep an eye on the various tribes. Just before the onset of the war, there were five generals - Winfield Scott, the only Major General of the Regular Army, and BGens John Wool, William Harney, David Twiggs, and Joseph Johnston. (Twiggs was cashiered a month before Fort Sumter for surrendering the U.S. Army in Texas to the Confederacy.)
So it certainly would have been possible for all the generals to be gathered together, but I’m not sure it ever actually happened - those stationed near Washington or in the east could probably get together easily, but those on the frontier would have a more difficult journey.
Or were you asking if officers were told to swear an oath of loyalty to the president? Never happened. Those officers who were of dubious loyalty (which included all of the above save Wool, who was older than the Constitution and a northerner to the core) either demonstrated or affirmed their allegiance to the Union (as did Scott) or were moved to less sensitive posts over time (as with Harney). Some of course, like Johnston, resigned to go to the Confederacy. But at no point was there any kind of loyalty oath to the president administered. The very idea of it is anathema.
Staying on topic: any general that swears an oath of loyalty to Trump is of course breaking his oath. But I can’t imagine what this is about, otherwise.
