There is a cancer in America’s military ranks, and it must be expunged before it’s too late. That cancer lies in uniformed service members’ widespread rejection of the uniquely American concept of civilian control of the military and disregard for the absolute necessity that America’s military officers remain apolitical in the face of the constitutional will of the electorate.
Recent events reveal this cancer, and they include the relief for cause of Navy Vice Adm. Shoshana Chatfield after she reportedly refused to hang photos of President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on her headquarters’ customary “Chain of Command” board and reportedly told her subordinates in a town hall that she would “wait [the Trump administration] out” the next four years. They also include the relief for cause of Col. Sussanah Meyers, commander of the U.S. Space Force’s base in Greenland, after she openly questioned (to all of her subordinates via email) Vice President J.D. Vance’s official pronouncements regarding the United States, Greenland, and Denmark.
Since Trump’s inauguration, numerous other senior generals and admirals have been relieved by President Trump for various publicly unspecified reasons, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown; Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti; Adm. Linda Lee Fagan, the commandant of the Coast Guard; and Air Force Gen. Timothy D. Haugh, director of the National Security Agency and commander of U.S. Cyber Command. Each of these four-star firings is publicly shrouded in a certain degree of mystery, but rumors abound that so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) played a part in one way or another.
Admittedly, a president firing his senior generals is not a new thing. Barack Obama fired his senior general in Afghanistan, Army Gen. Stan McChrystal, after a Rolling Stone article revealed derisive comments by McChrystal and his staff regarding Obama’s leadership. Harry S. Truman fired one of America’s most famous and revered military leaders, Army Gen. Douglas MacArthur, after MacArthur repeatedly disobeyed Truman’s orders regarding the Korean War. And Abraham Lincoln famously had no problem firing his senior Army generals in the heat of the Civil War. What made these firings so noteworthy, however, is that they were rare exceptions that proved the rule of America’s senior generals and admirals wholly respecting civilian control of the military.
What we see now is not Obama and McChrystal, Truman and MacArthur, or Lincoln and his failed generals. The widespread nature of the current problem looks and feels like something completely new in the American experience and appears to be pervasive across the force.
I am a retired U.S. Army colonel. My service record runs a typical gamut for an old colonel, with tours in tactical units (including service in Afghanistan and Iraq) interspersed with service at high-level military headquarters in and around Washington, D.C. Nowadays, I run an account on X with a little more than 200,000 followers. I offer commentary on political and social issues, with a particular emphasis on the military. As a result, I have many military followers, including some still on active duty. I offer active-duty service members a conduit to anonymously share disturbing military trends.
Since Trump’s inauguration, I have been flooded with reports of insubordination in the ranks toward Trump and Hegseth. Those reports range from fairly senior officers in the Pentagon showing open disrespect around the E-Ring coffee maker, all the way down to junior enlisted disrespecting their president and secretary of defense in the ship’s galley or the chow hall.
As one active-duty Army officer recently described to me regarding the experiences of a female Army officer colleague:
Women across the unit are coming to [her] asking about what happens to them. It’s in their minds that SECDEF is going to pull them from combat arms and reclass them. Zero evidence of that but doesn’t stop the rumor mill anyway. Those rumors are playing the telephone game across all soldiers, men and women alike. So they are all on this “f*** Trump f*** Hegseth” train.
For over 235 years, the idea of a civilian commander-in-chief has been a sacred premise guiding our military, enlisted and officer alike. I grew up around the Army, joined as a young man, served for 22 years, and have kept my finger on the pulse of the defense establishment since I retired from active duty. I can honestly say that never once in that time was I ever made aware of the political leanings of any officer superior to me.
Rarely would I even hear political thoughts from my peers or subordinates. In fact, I recall that early in my career, senior officers advised me not to vote in elections, as such an act might suggest I was a political partisan. The duty to remain apolitical was simply that important to officers of that bygone age. We saw ourselves as a sort of band of violent monks, bound by sacred oaths.
To me, that bygone commitment was never more evident than when Bill Clinton became president. During Clinton’s 1992 campaign, it came out that as a young man he had avoided the draft, in part because he “loath[ed]” the military. Vietnam was still a raw wound in the minds of many senior officers and senior enlisted, yet despite Clinton being arguably the most anti-military president in U.S. history, he was respected as the duly elected commander-in-chief, and signs of “resistance” in the uniformed ranks were impossible to detect. We honored our oaths.
Somewhere along the way, something changed. I believe that change has taken place within the senior ranks and, by way of example, has spread throughout the force. We must once again make senior officers loyal to their oath, and the rest of the force will follow.
I have heard from some anti-Trump officers that it is acceptable for them to challenge Trump and be “disloyal” to him on political matters because while the enlisted oath of office includes the phrase “that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States,” no such words regarding the president appear in the officer oath of office. This idea is highly disturbing.
It suggests that officers are not bound to follow the lawful orders of the president if they disagree politically. Not only is this contrary to the sacred officer tradition of being apolitical, but it is also contrary to the part of the officers’ oath that requires officers to “support and defend the Constitution” (after all, the president’s military role arises in the Constitution). Finally, it is contrary to the actual commission of all U.S. military officers, which states in part: “And this officer is to observe and follow such orders and directions from time to time as may be given by the President of the United States of America.”
The trends we are seeing feel dangerously close to an embrace of 1970s South American-style military juntas. Think about Gen. Mark Milley telling China he would warn them about U.S. military activity. Think about Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman using his position on the National Security Council as a springboard for impeaching a president because he did not like the way that president was lawfully discharging his duties. These are not the marks of healthy civilian control of the military. They are instead marks of a military approaching the rationalization of a coup.
I have heard numerous theories as to how we got here, ranging from “Obama purged all the good generals” to “Gen Z are too narcissistic for selfless sacrifice,” but I attribute the breakdown quite directly to DEI policies and practices. I do not mean that the advancement of officers for DEI reasons is the cause. Rather, the inculcation of DEI policies as a core ethos of military service has been monstrously destructive. Our military has always been driven by core values, such as, “Don’t give up the ship,” “Duty, Honor, Country,” and “Always Faithful.” Traditionally, those values have been apolitical and solely revolved around the military’s fundamental mission of defeating America’s battlefield enemies.
Somewhere in these early years of the 21st century, however, DEI also became a central ethos. One need only read the policy pronouncements of the likes of C.Q. Brown and Lisa Franchetti to see that they embraced so-called diversity for diversity’s sake and that DEI policies became a core ethos of America’s military — a new “warrior ethos” grounded not in warfighting but in a purely political and public policy doctrine.
So on the one hand you have a president elected to purge the political doctrine of DEI from America’s government, and on the other hand you have a generation of senior generals and admirals who mistakenly view DEI as an apolitical military ethos, every bit as essential to the military’s lineage and traditions as Audie Murphy, the Medal of Honor, and the USS Constitution. Thus, when Donald Trump seeks to exercise his constitutional powers to purge a purely political doctrine, the generals and admirals mistakenly see this as an effort to purge a fundamental, essential, and apolitical military ethos. This gives them license to feel justified in “resisting” the lawful orders of their commander-in-chief and engaging in insubordination as they falsely imagine they are protecting a core competency of our nation’s defense.
Fortunately, fixing this problem is not that hard. It merely requires some extreme intestinal fortitude by Trump, Hegseth, and the military department secretaries in the face of a media determined to discredit their every move. The solution lies in two parts: education and example-setting.
Education will involve reinvigorated training, in every service and at every level, regarding the military’s duty of loyalty to elected civilian leaders and their lawful orders. A standard curriculum must be developed in the Department of Defense regarding those constitutional duties, and that curriculum must be taught in great detail at every level and in every professional development course, from basic training for every recruit up to the “charm school” for new generals and admirals.
Example-setting will mean more of what we have already seen: the relief for cause of senior officers for insubordinate behavior. But that’s not enough. Vice Adm. Chatfield and Col. Meyers will no doubt soon be on MSNBC regaling us all with tales of the illegality of the Trump administration. Trump and Hegseth must take a more drastic approach, and the answer to that approach lies in Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which reads as follows:
Contempt toward officials: Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Homeland Security, or the Governor or legislature of any State, Commonwealth, or possession in which he is on duty or present shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.
This is the tool by which senior insubordinate officers must be made an example. While I doubt any generals or admirals will soon be breaking rocks at Leavenworth, the mere act of initiating a few well-publicized courts martial will drive home the message: Politics is the domain of the president, not the oath-bearing members of the uniformed services.
Good order and discipline must be restored. There is a cancer in the ranks of America’s military, and it must be expunged before it’s too late.
