I’m not interested in some theoretical poll, but what they’d actually do when ordered. And you’d find plenty willing to do it. As you point out, they don’t want to be partisan. You avoid partisanship by just following orders.
As I recall SCOTUS says they are the only arbiter of what constitutes an “official act” that would give a President immunity from prosecution. Until they rule against DJT, I think it should be assumed anything this President does will be ruled an official act.
What my concern is that SCOTUS will say these are not official acts BUT the judicial branch is powerless to enforce their rulings because that’s what impeachment is for.
Not by following orders that are clearly illegal and at odds with what a hypothetical future administration would regard as a war crime. As I said, ever O-7 and above has served under at least four administrations (most of them five and a few all the way back to George HW Bush) and they way you build that career is by not aligning with a particular administration. Officers of that generation also take their duty to the Constitution seriously because it was drilled into them. More recent junior officers I am not so sure about but again, if you promote a major to general, you’re going to get a ‘leader’ who only has experience commanding a company, which is a very different job than being general staff.
Stranger
Trump: Hold my beer and watch this!
And when the bullets start flying, a lot of people will get killed until all the lessons get relearned.
It seems I forgot my sarcasm tags. I have no illusions that some random level of military experience is sufficient to qualify one to be a general or admiral. Rather, I was highlighting how our Commander in Chief seems to believe.
I’m not sold on that.
This. I’m pretty confident the top brass would resist that kind of action, which is exactly why Trump bypassed all them and went with Hegseth for Sec Def. That’s what has me worried. Hegseth purging the people who hold fealty to the Constitution over any president or politician. Elevating incompetents who have the “right ideology”.
The same could be said of many federal agencies, not just the DoD. There are resisters and nonpartisan career types throughout the civil service and they are being purged in a branch-wide bloodbath.
Trump will be able to find the lackeys he needs to fill the highest echelons of the military. Might take him longer than he’d like, and some might not go quietly into the night, but he will find the generals he wants. I think people underestimate just how pervasive Fox News is in certain chambers of the federal government and the impact it has on minds. There are plenty of people who will take a promotion. Beyond that, I think people underestimate just how scared people in the Senate, House, and in the government are of the possibility that Trump might order his recently-freed legions of insurrectionists (or other goons) to commit acts of violence against those who get in his way. It’s a very real threat.
Will there be a lot of incompetent leadership as a result? Yes, but MAGA isn’t looking that far ahead.
Will this potentially lead to catastrophic divisions and impact on combat-readiness? Yes to that as well.
We are facing a real catastrophe.
On that we can agree. I just think that rather than bombing Canada or invading Greenland, that catastrophe is going to be lobotomizing the US military just as is currently being down with the intelligence, counterintelligence and counterterrorism, nuclear safety, public health, and civil safety establishments.
Stranger
Most Secretaries of Defense weren’t generals, or necessarily even soldiers at all.
Agreed
If I counted correctly, 10 of the 29 Senate-confirmed SecDefs had no military service (including Dick ‘Draft Dodger’ Cheney), and only George C. Marshall, Jim Mattis, and Lloyd Austin reached O-7 or higher. Most with military service did so in wartime (WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf Wars, Afghanistan) with limited service before going into some defense or major production industry such as automotive or electronics.
Pete Hegseth was not highly regarded during his service (Nat’l Guard, Active and Reserve) and was even disciplined for various statements and an an assessment that he represented an insider threat during Biden’s inauguration. Even though the military tends to skew right of center and are heavily indoctrinated by nearly constant playing of Fox News on televisions in military facilities, I can’t imagine many senior brass are very pleased to be reporting to a former talking head from Fox & Friends and barely concealed White Nationalist who has derided senior military leadership from his Murdoch-sponsored pulpit.
Stranger
So?
“The generals will stop any madness” is American exceptionalist nonsense. What fascist takeover has ever been stopped by the generals? When was the last time a fascist country - or any other kind of country - set out on a war of conquest only to have the generals refuse to march?
Nevermind.
I’m aware. Sec Def is a civilian position, and military service isn’t a requirement.
It’s just of you are going to get someone with military experience, maybe get good service record, not bad service record.
Mentioning Hegseth was mostly a dig at Trump’s idea of qualifications.
It happens. It’s called a coup. Of course, those rarely restore a democracy. Typically things go from one really bad situation to another really bad situation.
But the scenario of the Generals all taking a stand on principle and saying, “Sir, that is an unjustfied and reprehensible order and I will not obey it,” and that stops the dictator, that’s a fantasy.
Which isn’t what I said. What I said was that in the US professional military, general officers tend to be very conservative regarding accepting and following orders that will be seen as partisan or career ending if the political winds change. An order to arbitrarily and unilaterally bomb Canada falls into that category. Invading Greenland without even a pretext of legitimacy is (likely) does as well. Unlike Nazi Germany, in which the military was reconstituted by and in a way that specifically supported authoritarian and fascist politics, the US military has had a strong emphasis upon upholding and protecting the Constitution above all else.
Which isn’t to say that there aren’t orders and political directives that general staff shouldn’t have pushed back on more strongly (i.e. the 2003 invasion of Iraq, or expanded involvement in Vietnam) but it is one thing to be complicit war crimes committed on non-English-speaking brown people in a country halfway around the world that most Americans couldn’t pick from an unlabeled map, and another to go about invading the neighboring country which has never harbored any national ill will or presented as a security threat. Again, I think Trump would have to dismiss a lot of generals and admirals (and likely promote junior staff to fill those roles) before he can constitute enough general staff to actually engage in such foolhardy adventures. He may well do this (or try to) but he’s going to end up trepanning the very forces he needs to effect such an outcome.
Trump’s idea of qualifications is “Will they pledge their undying loyalty to me even if I call their wife ‘fat’ or accuse their father of being a Cuban spy?”
It’s a fantasy in a typical despotic state where there has not been a professional military service (i.e. one in which the general staff isn’t replaced every time there is a change in regime) and an inculcated devotion to support for the rule of law. I’ll point again to General Milley, who is certainly no radical leftie nor a guy who is going to go out of his way to make waves, almost reflexively refusing to comply with Trump’s direction to use the military against protestors or appear in uniform to bolster his political stances. Milley knew that if he did so, it would (at a minimum) be the end of his career. I’m sure that Trump can dismiss generals on down until he finds a cadre of Pete Hegseths, but then, he’s going to have a general staff comprised of Pete Hegseths, falling down drunk and utterly clueless about how to manage a large organization much less do any actual strategic planning or advising him on how to conduct military operations (which Trump doesn’t want anyway because he takes advice from no one).
Stranger
Fair observation.
Only if Dems ever gain control again.
Not advising him, but implementing.
Make no mistake, I think that kind of mass firing would make Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre look like a celebration of restraint. And even if he did come up with a leadership of Hegseths, I wonder if there aren’t plenty of real patriots in the ranks who could find methods of throwing wrenches into the plans.
My fear isn’t that he could get an effective leadership. It’s that his cadre of Hegseth’s would try to implement the goals, and make a bigger cluster fuck in the same way Musk’s blanket firings in other departments have shown.
Firing the people that maintain the nuclear arsenal is crazy stupid. If a novelist had written it, it works have been dismissed as impossible.
I think Harry Harrison could have done a pretty good job of it. What we are living through seems like what you would get if you mashed up “Bill the Galactic Hero” and "The Stainless Steel Rat.
Which, of course, they did, and Milley got heaps of praise for basically doing his job instead of bending the knee to a capricious would-be despot.
I don’t mean to be dismissive of concerns, because a competent aspiring dictator could certainly use the US military in perfectly legal ways to do enormous harm (as we have of course seen time and again by both Republican and Democratic presidents), and one that was more clever than Trump would also look toward changing the military culture and aligning self-organized ‘militia’ movements into a compliant paramilitary that has no inculcation against violating the Constitution and acting against civilian populations, which is actually one of the hallmarks of fascist regimes such as Mussolini and his squadristi or Hitler and the Sturmabteilung.
But I think the likelihood of Trump getting the military to actually engage in an arbitrary attack on Canada or a pointless invasion of Greenland is quite low; I think it is far more likely that he will so destroy all morale, competence, and capacity through a futile attempt to get ‘control’ by picking generals who will accede to whims, and we will end up with an utter lack of defensive capability to protect our own interests much less those of former strategic allies. When despots conquer a country, they first start with their own, and despite all the damage Trump can do to the federal bureaucracy he is going to have his hands full getting control over the states, especially as some of those ‘red states’ decide that while they are just dandy with suppressing peoples rights they don’t really like being under Trump and start chaffing his rule, such as it is, which comes with ever fewer benefits.
Stranger
I agree. I think he’s engaged in ridiculous posturing to make the start of his negotiation way over there, sort of the negotiator’s Overton window.