WELL GENERAL, WHAT ARE YOU THINKING?

IT IS FAIR AND REASONABLE TO WONDER ABOUT THE STATE OF WORRY AMONG OUR SENIOR OFFICER CORPS, AND WHERE THEY THINK THE COUNTRY IS HEADED.

It is not my purpose to dwell on a future scenario that involves the generals and admirals of the US Military.  But I confess that I am puzzling with what is going through their minds today, and not just in the wake of Secretary Hegseth’s half-time locker room address to them a month ago.  I am thinking of what might be the combined effect of those alarming remarks (cities as training grounds for the enemy within, etc.) and what is occurring in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific now.  It is relevant to the discussion that there are many lawyers, politicians, academics and journalists making the case that the strikes on alleged narcotics carrying cigarette boats and the nearly sixty deaths are technically illegal.  Yet, the military is carrying out those orders faithfully and without question.  Somewhere along the continuum there could come the time when the orders of the president or his secretary become so egregiously illegal that the generals and admirals pointedly stop obeying.  Hard to know where or if, of course, that point might be because we’ve never, ever been there before.

And one would never expect a tectonic act from the American military that would shatter the supremacy of civilian rule because of a few questions over what could be illegal orders, minor legal infractions or simply batty behavior by the president or his secretary of defense.

For how wrongs are sometimes righted we’ll take a page out of history.  Recall the two or three years of Joe McCarthy’s charges of communists in government.  McCarthy’s attacks happened in the midst of the “Red scare” of the late forties and early fifties, so they landed on a public that was listening and ready to believe some if not a lot of McCarthy’s manufactured allegations.  It was not until Joe had been on his relentless rant for nearly three years before Joe Welch, not a member of congress but the lead counsel for the US Army, called him out with the famous “have you no decency” quote.  History turned on a dime.  It would take a few  months for the Senate to fall in line and censure McCarthy.  The point—evil when done is rarely evil punished on cue, it takes an accretion of transgressions before even proud and cautious men and women step up.

At this stage it is an evolving American non-fiction novel of unauthorized actions by the president, moves which The Financial Times’ Ed Luce describes as playing out “at the speed of light” and thus overwhelming many people, who are increasingly frightened.  They are watching closely, speaking and writing.  We must assume that our senior officer corps, both within the Pentagon and the combatant commanders who hold awesome power when unleashed, are observing all the same things that we are, and that they are reacting with at least as much angst and concern as we.  And none of them would be anywhere within miles of thinking of speaking out at this stage.

Why would they?  Former government seniors are being hunted down, investigated, charged and indicted as the vindictive administration seeks to even scores.  Any general in retirement who broke ranks with silence can be called up and put before a court martial.  For the military, minding one’s business bears the added weight of historically and culturally never questioning civilian command authority.  They will not break faith with those norms except in extremis, and by the same lights of recalcitrance and temperance that shone on Joe McCarthy for so long and abided his antics, shine still today, giving similar respite.   So they’ll hold their counsel, up to a point.

And this is a very long way of getting around to the central question that drives this post: what are they thinking?  I think there can be only one answer, the generals and admirals are watching, just as we are, perhaps from the edges of their chairs, as they are invested as much if not more than the rest of us in the course of government and American survival.  They are, to a man and a woman, bright, perceptive and not easily duped.  Under this commander- in-chief they must understand with great clarity the profound peril at the door. 

It is the absence of any effort by our president to comfort us with some information on how they can be confident about what they know or to make an effort to  collaborate with congressional committees.   It is the arrogance of the president to act unchecked—an imperious attitude this country is very familiar and very uncomfortable with, particularly when taken against a background of presidential threats to order the active duty military into America’s streets, false claims about Venezuela being a major supplier of fentanyl, or a collective sense among our people that the president is breezily playing with his military toys.  He is  increasingly transparent in his hunger for the unchallenged exercise of pure, raw power.   If that drive is not fixed or tempered he is likely to run hard into a proud military ethos.