Trump To Purge The Pentagon

The Wall Street Journal reported the first half of this development:

The Trump transition team is considering a draft executive order that establishes a “warrior board” of retired senior military personnel with the power to review three- and four-star officers and to recommend removals of any deemed unfit for leadership.

If Donald Trump approves the order, it could fast-track the removal of generals and admirals found to be “lacking in requisite leadership qualities,” according to a draft of the order reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. But it could also create a chilling effect on top military officers, given the president-elect’s past vow to fire “woke generals,” referring to officers seen as promoting diversity in the ranks at the expense of military readiness.

As commander in chief, Trump can fire any officer at will, but an outside board whose members he appoints would bypass the Pentagon’s regular promotion system, signaling across the military that he intends to purge a number of generals and admirals.

. . . The establishment of the board would be in line with Trump’s calls for purging what he views as failed generals, including those involved in the chaotic 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, according to people familiar with the policy discussions. Trump has said he would ask all generals involved in the withdrawal to resign by “noon on Inauguration Day.”

The New Republic somewhat predictably comments,

The executive order draws on General George C. Marshall’s 1940 creation of a “plucking board” led by retired general officers to “remove from line promotion any officer for reasons deemed good and sufficient.” But that plucking board was to uplift young officers with high potential, not to cull anyone not perfectly aligned with MAGA.

This piece gives more background on Marshall's "plucking board". Marshall, who became Army Chief of Staff in 1939,

devoted himself to preparing the peacetime army “if war came” – a war many Americans still hoped desperately to avoid.

During the First World War, culminating as the First Army’s assistant chief of staff for operations, Marshall had witnessed the problem of field commanders who were past their prime. Marshall’s biographer, noted military historian Forrest Pogue, wrote that in 1939-1941 Marshall “was haunted by recollections of the droves of unfit commanders” that Pershing had sent to reclassification because they “no longer had it.”

. . . To ensure impartiality in the process of eliminating unfit senior officers from consideration for higher-level and combat commands, Marshall appointed six retired officers, headed by his predecessor, General Malin Craig. Marshall’s “plucking board,” as it was called, was “empowered to remove from line promotion any officer for reasons deemed good and sufficient.” Those removed were given one year to retire. As Marshall told the board, “Critical times are upon us.”

The "plucking board" was in fact specifically set up to remove incompetent officers, not to uplift those with high potential. The problem with the admirals and generals, as Trump apparently sees it, is that too many have been prmoted on the basis of political correctness, not military capability. In this, it would simply reflect Marshall's aims.

The other half of Trump's new strategy is the nomination of Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary. This piece at Chronicles refers to Hegseth just before his nomination, quoting from his book The War on Warriors: Beyond the Betrayal of the Men and Women Who Keep Us Free, where he says of the current generals,

No matter how poor their performance, they get that promotion—and especially that sweetheart defense contractor job after retirement—but only if they parrot the social justice liturgies of the moment. GI “Joe” deals with half-baked social theories implemented at the unit level, knowing somewhere a general is getting promoted for doing the foolish bidding of an ignorant and/or ideological politician. Joe also knows that if he loses his rifle, he’ll be demoted immediately. But if a general loses a war—or billions of dollars of military equipment—nothing happens.

According to CBS News,

Hegseth is the author of the recent book "The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free," a New York Times bestseller, in which he denounces what he calls the "warped, woke, and caustic policies of our current military."

In it, he blamed former President Barack Obama and the Pentagon for shortfalls in recruitment, claiming they "embraced the social justice messages of gender equity, racial diversity, climate stupidity, and the LGBTQA+ alphabet soup in their recruiting pushes." He continued: "Only one problem: There just aren't enough lesbians from San Francisco who want to join the 82nd Airborne. Not only do the lesbians not join, but those very same ads turn off the young, patriotic, Christian men who have traditionally filled our ranks."

So Trump's aim is pretty clearly to finish the task of dismantling the Pentagon's DEI program, remove officers promoted on the basis of DEI, as well as those aligned with it politically, and refocus the US military on its core goals. It's hard to disagree with this.