Indeed, for the last four years, the nation’s most decorated retired officers have consistently attacked their commander-in-chief in the most personal and venomous invectives that make General Douglas MacArthur’s ridicule of the unpopular Truman Administration look tame in comparison. The only precedent after the adoption of the UCMJ for such slurs is the checkered career of General Edwin Walker (he had earlier called President Truman “pink”). Under pressure, Walker was the only general to have resigned his commission, left the army, and reentered civilian life in the 20th century.


The recent spate of public disparagement has been truly as astonishing as it was frightening. Our esteemed retired officer corps have variously called a president a Mussolini-like character, a liar, crazy, Nazi-like, comparing his border policy to the death camps at Birkenau-Auschwitz. Milley himself was said to have compared his commander-in-chief to insider journalists to the Nazis under Adolf Hitler. A retired four-star general, Michael Hayden, just retweeted a crazy suggestion to deport any unvaccinated supporters of the former president to Afghanistan with one-way tickets—a jest perhaps, but one implying a death sentence as well.


And all this is not mere rhetoric, but an amplification of insurrectionary prompts without precedent in recent history. Former Defense Department officials such as Rosa Brooks, in print, had raised the issue of military intervention in the first weeks of the Trump Administration by suggesting that the military might have to stage a coup to expel him from office.


Admiral William H. McRaven wrote an op-ed in which he attacked the president in terms clearly in violation of UCMJ. He stated, just months before a scheduled election, that Trump should be removed from office: “[I]t is time for a new person in the Oval Office—Republican, Democrat or independent—the sooner, the better. The fate of our Republic depends upon it.”


Since when in an election year does a retired admiral determine that a president should be removed apparently “sooner”? And is it reckless for such an esteemed officer to advocate such action when many of his former subordinates still serve in the military?


Two retired officers in late 2020 urged Chairman Milley to use force if necessary to remove Donald Trump from office if he felt that Trump had improperly questioned the election results and might not leave office on January 20, despite there being no evidence that Trump ever even considered such a step. When did military officers assume the roles of psychiatrists, professors, constitutional lawyers, inspector generals, and clergy?


The legacy of our retired top brass is that now military officers feel they can appeal to their own sense of justice rather than fealty to the law to consider either removing an elected president or to so damage him by slurs and smears they render him ineffective. For all their talk of the Constitution, the law, and the republic, they have shown that they regard the UCMJ simply as a mere construct to be ignored.

Social Justice Warriors

Third, this selective politicization of the military has now reached dangerous levels. After various officers wrote vociferously about the dangers of using military troops to restore order during 120-days of continuous rioting, violence, and arson during the summer 2020, they went absolutely quiet when Joe Biden ordered tens of thousands of federal troops, barriers, and barbed wire to militarize Washington, D.C. in winter 2021—the greatest militarization of our nation’s capital since the Civil War.


The retired officer corps apparently were entirely ignorant of the long history of presidents employing troops to restore order when police seemed overwhelmed. That was an odd amnesia given that former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell once made it clear to then President George H. W. Bush that he was happy to send in the Marines to Los Angeles during the Rodney King riots. And he did so with Biden-like “dispatch.”


Note that former members of the Joint Chiefs blasted Trump for a purported photo-op in conjunction with a supposed order to use military personnel to clear Lafayette square with tear gas. Yet their melodramatic public outrage was based on a media-concocted lie, as revealed by a later careful investigation by the inspector general of the Department of the Interior.


Yet the untruth was never corrected by any of the retired generals who whipped it up in June 2020 and did their own part to fan a national hysteria.


As a result, in June 2020 Joe Biden boasted that former top-ranking generals would help to remove Trump from office if he contested the election: “I’m absolutely convinced they will escort him from the White House with great dispatch.” One wonders what would have happened had Trump boasted that if Biden should not accept a contested verdict of a 2020 defeat, the military would prevent him from entering the White House?


Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Mike Mullen, claimed that Trump was essentially treasonous by giving aid to our enemies by his actions. “[He] gave succor to the leaders of other countries who take comfort in our domestic strife,” Mullen said. Note that the same General Mullen defended the Milley call to the communist Chinese military leadership.


Former four-star General James Clapper called Donald Trump a veritable traitor (a “Russian asset”), despite the failure of the 22-month, $40 million Mueller investigation to find any truth in the Russian collusion hoax.


Again, none of these officers offered corrections following either the inspector general’s report of the June 2020 violence or the end of the Mueller investigation.


Too many of our officers, retired and active, lecture the country on controversial issues from “white rage” to the need for women in front-line combat units to transgender policies. Thereby, the Pentagon has cultivated and won the support of the politicos traditionally deeply suspicious of the U.S. military. In such a novel quid pro quo understanding, the Left has gone strangely quiet as retired military officers revolve into defense contractor boards and as weapons procurement lobbyists.

Victory or What?

Four, these types of politicization and violation of a variety of laws do come at a price, either in distracting the military command from its primary mission of defeating the enemy and securing victory in American conflicts or contextualizing such failure through embrace of social activism.


Since the Korean War, and with the exception of the first Gulf War, the military’s record has not been especially stellar, given a chronic inability to achieve a military victory in a cost-benefit sense acceptable to the American people: optional interventions in Lebanon, Somalia, and Libya, the defeat in and retreat from the Afghanistan war, and strategic stalemate and withdrawal from Iraq.


Many of these setbacks were due to political loss of will, but the military might have prevented such fickle and fluid civilian policies had it been able to present a strategy for victory, one that justified to the American people the resulting costs in blood and treasure.


The above pessimistic appraisal is not mine nor conservatives. It is now likely the consensus of our enemies from Afghanistan to Russia to Iran and other parts of the Middle East to North Korea. Our enemies hope that the once most powerful military in the history of civilization is going through a sort of people’s liberation army internal revolution, one in which ideological purity, not battlefield competence, is deemed the better measurement of today’s high-ranking officer corps.


How strange that in the midst of a humiliating defeat and withdrawal from Afghanistan our military still assured us that culturally sensitive food was awaiting refugees upon landing in the United States—a group, we were told, flown out with acceptable gender ratios and unvaccinated, but shepherded by soldiers who will shortly be discharged if they likewise remain unvaccinated.


https://victorhanson.com/what-happened-to-the-beloved-military/