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An Example Has Been Made: Pour Encourager les Autres
The now-fired Secretary of the Navy apparently sought to provide cover to senior NCIS, legal weasels, and an admiral over the SEAL teams, as they sought to slap the Commander in Chief in the face and cover up their own alleged criminal wrongdoing (now subject of another IG investigation). No military officer, of any rank, would tolerate such gross insubordination from a subordinate: “Sir, you didn’t put in a written order, so I didn’t have to do it.” Oh, but it was just a tweet, and we don’t like his tweets, and besides… Nonsense! In the words of Justice Scalia: “pure applesauce!”
The first two-star general for whom I directly worked gave me a great lesson in followership. He called attention to the way a staff training team reacted to him. The staff training team existed to exercise and develop staff in support of their commanders. The moment the commanding general opened his mouth, team members all had their notebooks out, pens poised and proceeded to write down every single word he said.
The general explained that that showed the doctrinally correct view of general officers’ words. All the words were to be treated as important guidance to their staff. The trainers now had the general’s words and were checking everything the staff did to see if it conformed, to see if the general’s staff was operating competently and correctly in support of the general.
In other contexts, the general coached me to read into phases and topics raised or not, to see if higher headquarters were reinforcing existing guidance (repetition) or changing direction or emphasis. I was expected to report back promptly every time he sent me out as his deputy, his empowered representative. I was expected to inform him and the senior staff, already anticipating possible shifts in our planning and operations, so that we would be a leading command rather than being dictated to in very small words and short sentences in large bold print.
Conservatives, even TruCons, used to have a basic notion of the inviolable subordination of our military to civilian authority, in the person of the Commander in Chief, the president of the United States. Military officers, way back at the end of the Cold War, when we were wondering what would become of all that fancy equipment, all those formations, all those senior positions, even wrote to themselves about the dangerous lure of military and civilian faith in the military over all other institutions. I strongly suggest you read the then influential, award-winning 1992 article “The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012.”*
Never mind that the author, an Air Force officer, naturally made the Army the center of the villainy; the alternate history, the cautionary tale, still bears consideration today. Duke Law School thought it important enough to republish in 2010, the second year of President Obama’s presidency. Then we were treated to January 2017 musings by one of Obama’s defense officials that the senior officers who had risen to the top under Obama would conduct a coup against the brand new president, whose election had shocked the Washington elite.
3 Ways to Get Rid of President Trump Before 2020
BY ROSA BROOKS | JANUARY 30, 2017, 9:26 AM
…The fourth possibility is one that until recently I would have said was unthinkable in the United States of America: a military coup, or at least a refusal by military leaders to obey certain orders.
But Trump isn’t subtle or sophisticated: He sets policy through rants and late-night tweets, not through quiet hints to aides and lawyers. He’s thin-skinned, erratic, and unconstrained — and his unexpected, self-indulgent pronouncements are reportedly sending shivers through even his closest aides.
What would top U.S. military leaders do if given an order that struck them as not merely ill-advised, but dangerously unhinged? An order that wasn’t along the lines of “Prepare a plan to invade Iraq if Congress authorizes it based on questionable intelligence,” but “Prepare to invade Mexico tomorrow!” or “Start rounding up Muslim Americans and sending them to Guantánamo!” or “I’m going to teach China a lesson — with nukes!”
It’s impossible to say, of course. The prospect of American military leaders responding to a presidential order with open defiance is frightening — but so, too, is the prospect of military obedience to an insane order. After all, military officers swear to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, not the president. For the first time in my life, I can imagine plausible scenarios in which senior military officials might simply tell the president: “No, sir. We’re not doing that,” to thunderous applause from the New York Times editorial board.
We all know perfectly well that “insane” is a standard leftist slur, now embraced by the left’s TruCon lapdogs. We all understand that the whole point was to treat the pesky Electoral College results as illegitimate, to use the full power of the Deep State, including the top state-side military headquarters to incapacitate and remove the Deplorables’ president, treating the man as the symbol of all these weasels hate about us.
Rosa Brooks’ biography is especially relevant and telling now. She wrote those words in January of 2017 to encourage the people left in place in the Pentagon, where she had been the top lawyer for the bureaucrat in charge of policy:
Rosa Brooks is a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, a columnist for Foreign Policy, and a law professor at Georgetown University. She previously worked at the Pentagon as Counselor to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy; in 2011, she was awarded the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service. Brooks has also served as a senior advisor at the US Department of State, a consultant for Human Rights Watch, and a weekly opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times.
Read the Wikipedia entry for Rosa Brooks, intended to be positive, for the rest of the story, the more extreme activities, and associations. Understand that she is outside but still helping influence the government. Note that Georgetown is renowned for producing federal “civil servants” with career and political ambitions. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, a West Point graduate, infantry officer, and combat veteran who served 10 years on active duty and then completed his military career in National Guard and Reserve service, retiring as a lieutenant colonel, has now fired the first shot back from the top of the Department of Defense, in firing the Secretary of the Navy.
Esper said he had previously advocated for allowing the Navy review to go forward. But when [President] Trump gave him a “verbal instruction” to stop the process, he did so.
Esper did not say explicitly that he disagreed with Trump’s order.
Once Trump gave the order, Esper said he responded, “Roger. I got it.”
He has made clear that further insubordination and coup-like behavior will be punished, will be career-ending. All rational Americans should applaud this action and this message.
* Regrettably, and without explanation, the U.S. Army War College has shoved most of the back issues of Parameters down the memory hole. For many years, you could easily access the back issues in PDF format. Now you can only reach back through 2012. These were important articles, documenting what our Army officer corps was thinking at the time. They were all online, all searchable, no new work needed. Gone, apparently.
Published in Military
What in the world? Why isn’t this treasonous?
Treason has a very specific meaning, involving support for a enemy nation with which we are at war. Now, insubordination is actionable under the UCMJ against any uniformed member of the military, including admirals and generals. For civilians, most of this is just a firing offense. There are allegations that there has been criminal misconduct by those involved in the investigation and prosecution of the now pardoned SEAL. Allegedly, the NCIS has even been illegally using counterintelligence capabilities and authorities against U.S. persons, a bright line violation of federal law that the Army (burned around abuses in the late 1960s-early 1970s) guarded against by separating out that capability into a separate organization from the Criminal Investigation Division.
As a lowly enlisted man during my two year service 1968 through 1970 the concept of the chain of command ending with civilian control was emphasized over and over. Most buildings had pictures of the chain of commanders on a wall with the President at the top. Obama purged many old school leaders from the military and replaced them with SJW.
But it’s a roadmap for an actual military coup d’etat. How can this not be actionable? Who do these people think they are? I know one thing: There is going to be rampant voter fraud in 2020, and it will have to be closely monitored, and we’re going to have to vet the monitors. They’re very determined to make Trump lose. I mean look how they were already talking in 2017 when he’d barely taken his hand off the Bible, so it can’t really be about his performance in office. There’s something deeper.
I remember how upsetting it was to have the Commander in Chief frame sit empty for months after the election of Bill Clinton, signaling his distain, or the distain by his staff, for the military, as he could not be bothered to sit for his photograph, apparently.
Yes, which is why turn out for President Trump must be above the margin of cheating.
Among many, many other things. I respect the post, but you’ve gone a bridge too far here.
I’m so old I remember when a President appointed a retired Marine 4-Star as Secretary of Defense and we were all told that the President didn’t appreciate the importance and tradition of civilian control of the US military.
Now those same people rave that the President shouldn’t exert any control over the Pentagon.
Choose one.
Which needed to be addressed in federal law immediately after the 2017 inauguration. But Paul Ryan and his crew, and Mitch McConnell and his crew had absolutely no desire to stop Democrats cheating or to actually protect actual voters, who had just voted the wrong way, in Ryan and McConnell’s view. And the states, those with Republican control of statehouses since 2010 or so, are fully complicit if they have not fixed their own back yards. The Florida fiasco in 2000 was nearly repeated in 2018 because Republicans failed to fix the state laws they had controlled for many years.
Our Betters know better. Harry Truman could not possibly be elected in today’s world. One has to be groomed for life to assume a position in the Inter-Agencies. There are no Irregulars allowed–things must go according to Long-Standing U.S. Policy….which was made up by those in the Inter-Agencies during the time of the appropriate leaders.
Damn it–Hillary was supposed to win…they cannot get over it.
The election next year is going to be very tricky–I do worry that it can’t possibly be monitored closely enough. This Trump win unnerved them so badly, that I can’t believe that they haven’t been working on how to squelch that type of surprise from happening ever again.
The frightening thing is, prior to Trump, you could probably have done away with the executive, appointed a rotating panel of Democrats and Republicans from the House and Senate in the President’s stead and the bureaucracy would have kept on churning and nobody would have noticed the difference.
No it’s not. It’s institutional obstruction. I don’t know the motive for the Navy brass to be obtuse about this. Although I have some suspicions.
Regardless, the commander’s intent was, no further adverse actions against Gallagher. The Navy apparently didn’t get that message and they forced the President’s hand.
On the plus side, the cheatiest states tend to go full-bore blue anyway. It’s the ‘swing states’ we need to focus on.
I suppose some on the Republican side cheat as well – the left certainly believes we do.
But we don’t tend to discover surprise boxes of 95% red votes after the polls close. I really wish the FBI would start looking those over and making arrests as appropriate.
Good perspective. Thank you.
This holiday season’s theme is pretty clear: President Trump may be President, but he isn’t made of the right stuff, and we in the professional bureaucracy who clearly know better shall, one way or another, try to have our will, and not his, determine how this plays out.
On that basis, professional diplomats decry the President’s failure to comply with intra-agency policy, and members of the military balk at the Command in Chief’s chutzpah.
One wonders how this vulgarian managed to get elected.
Oh, sure, I voted for him. But, come on. What do I, a mere citizen, know about running a country or choosing its leader?
Great post, Clifford.
Where does “I was just following orders” not being a valid excuse fit into this?
Unlawful orders. The answer every single E-1, the entry rank, knows before they complete basic entry training.
Yes but it’s arguably subjective:
None of that applies in this situation. Trump didn’t order the Secretary of the Navy to kill an elderly man, nor prepare an invasion of Mexico tomorrow. He told the Navy to stand down on persecuting a decorated war hero.
This Gallagher business is like everything else: a Rorschach test. The usual suspects are calling Gallagher a war criminal, and Trump of course is as well for intervening on his behalf. Jonah Goldberg (a man for whom I am continuing to lose respect) calls Trump’s actions in the matter “grotesque.” As I said in my post on this subject, I have not been a big fan of Trump, but his standing up for our fighting men and women endears me to him.
This incident appears to be part of a broader breakdown. We seem to have lost a shared belief in an objective moral order, the idea of something real that is larger than ourselves (other than mere convention). That encourages both an attitude of non serviam –nothing and no one really has the moral authority to overrule my preferences and a search for a functional replacement of the missing referents which is usually membership in the club, the cool kids, the enlightened, whatever seems personally elevating.
Donald Trump has been a kind of national enema–he has not added moral content so much has shown us how much interior detritus needs to be flushed out. The moral and intellectual rot and raging egoism in what used to be the honored professions of journalism, academia and government service is now on full display. Every movie courtroom scene in which the miscreant’s own ego causes him to reveal his true nature on the witness stand is playing out in real life in which the illusion of moral and intellectual superiority to the caricatured Trump tricks the witness into boasting of his own malfeasance.
Thank you for this excellent post, Clifford. It’s so disheartening to know the extent to which the Deep State has infiltrated even the military. Even as a civilian, I couldn’t believe what Spencer did, and then after he was fired, how he tried to defend himself. Good for Esper who stepped right in and fired Spencer.
“Where was their outrage when the Naval Criminal Investigative Service agents dragged my brother’s kids in the street at gunpoint in their underwear? (A fact NCIS denied to this very publication until under oath admitted that, yes, they did drag my nephews nearly naked into the streets of San Diego when Ed wasn’t home).” – Sean Gallagher
Indeed.
It is actionable, but it is not treasonous. Even those creating and fighting for the Confederacy were not behaving treasonously. That is because in the United States treason is defined as aiding a separate nation during a period when we are at war with that country. Sedition and insubordination are crimes, but they are not treason. A military coup would be sedition and insubordination.
I don’t think vote fraud will have much effect on the 2020 Presidential election because it will be a minimal factor in the states that went for Trump in 2016, plus many of the purple states. Vote fraud is most easily perpetrated in a one-party county in a state where the governor belongs to that party. Because we have 51 different elections (due to the electoral college), it really does not matter how many fraudulent votes are ginned up in deep blue states like California, Illinois, Washington, and New York
FIFY
When I was in the desert of Kuwait, we were trying to determine the proper number of security forces necessary to put reduce the violence of insurrection as ISIS was reduced from a overt government to an insurrection. There was a great article in Parameters (Winter 2009-10) regarding a study that took into account the ratio of local levies and foreign troops and then compared to the current population of an area and also included the number of security troops killed in the previous time period. It was a much better algorithm than the RAND studies that the Army was using.
I brought up the study to the Army officers I was working with, as well as the foreign officers with recent experience with non-islamic terrorism. They liked the study and the new method for determining force levels.
We got the Center for Army Analysis on the telecon to ask about it. They disavowed the study, but could not tell us why. They did not dispute the methodology, assumptions, facts or conclusions. We asked about academic integrity – nope. So we (in my organization) agreed it had to be political of some nature and decided to use it anyway.
So we decided to compare the proposed force levels to at least see if it fit either the RAND methodology or the Goode (the author of the study) methodology.
It is a shame that they memory holed the online versions. Those articles are indispensable for furthering the art.
Arizona had significant vote fraud in 2018. The vote registrar in Maricopa County was a Democrat who changed and violated rules to add mail in ballots. George Soros has been funding these down ballot offices for several years. Secretaries of State, in particular, are low budget operations to fix. Soros spent $600,000 to elect the Sheriff of Maricopa County after a left wing judge charged Sheriff Arpaio with a felony for ignoring a court order on his “tent camp” prisons for illegals.
It’s not just blue states.
SecDef Esper has a memo out to the Navy and SEAL community. I don’t have the letter, but here is a link to an article describing it.
UPDATED:
Here is the relevant portion.
7 Days in May
Turns out, it is lefty generals though
I don’t get why the higher-ups decided to hitch their wagons to prosecutors who were way, way over the line and incompetent. They could have opted for principle which involves the inconvenience of some messy admissions and some bureaucratic skill to detach from those below them taking the fall–wrap that anchor chain tightly around their necks and pretend to look regretful when they go over the side. But to go all-in on a cover-up that required the destruction of Gallagher (who had already attracted influential public support and media and congressional interest) was a poor decision. Bureaucrats who are both unprincipled and incompetent gotta go, especially bureaucrats in uniform.