Top Military Officers
Unload on Trump
The commander in
chief is impulsive, disdains expertise, and gets his intelligence briefings
from Fox News. What does this mean for those on the front lines?
To get a sense of
what serving Trump has been like, I interviewed officers up and down the ranks,
as well as several present and former civilian Pentagon employees. Among the
officers I spoke with were four of the highest ranks—three or four stars—all
recently retired. All but one served Trump directly; the other left the service
shortly before Trump was inaugurated. They come from different branches of the
military, but I’ll simply refer to them as “the generals.” Some spoke only off
the record, some allowed what they said to be quoted without attribution, and
some talked on the record.
Amid threats spanning
the globe, from nuclear proliferation to mined tankers in the Persian Gulf to
terrorist attacks and cyberwarfare, those in command positions monitor the
president’s Twitter feed like field officers scanning the horizon for enemy
troop movements. A new front line in national defense has become the White
House Situation Room, where the military struggles to accommodate a commander
in chief who is both ignorant and capricious. In May, after months of threatening Iran, Trump ordered the
carrier group led by the USS Abraham Lincoln to shift from the Mediterranean
Sea to the Persian Gulf. On June 20, after an American drone was downed there,
he ordered a retaliatory attack—and then called it off minutes before it was to be
launched. The next day he said he was “not looking for war” and
wanted to talk with Iran’s leaders, while also promising them “obliteration
like you’ve never seen before” if they crossed him. He threatened North Korea with “fire and fury” and
dispatched a three-aircraft-carrier flotilla to waters off the Korean
peninsula—then he pivoted to friendly summits with Kim Jong Un,
with whom he announced he was “in love”; canceled
long-standing U.S. military exercises with South Korea; and dangled the possibility of withdrawing American forces
from the country altogether. While the lovefest continues for the
cameras, the U.S. has quietly uncanceled the canceled military exercises, and
dropped any mention of a troop withdrawal.
The generals I spoke
with didn’t agree on everything, but they shared the following five
characterizations of Trump’s military leadership.
I. HE DISDAINS
EXPERTISE
Trump has little
interest in the details of policy. He makes up his mind about a thing, and
those who disagree with him—even those with manifestly more knowledge and
experience—are stupid, or slow, or crazy.
As a personal
quality, this can be trying; in a president, it is dangerous. Trump rejects the
careful process of decision making that has long guided commanders in chief. Disdain for process might be the defining
trait of his leadership. Of course, no process can guarantee good
decisions—history makes that clear—but eschewing the tools available to a
president is choosing ignorance. What Trump’s supporters call “the deep state”
is, in the world of national security—hardly a bastion of progressive
politics—a vast reservoir of knowledge and global experience that presidents
ignore at their peril. The generals spoke nostalgically of the process followed
by previous presidents, who solicited advice from field commanders,
foreign-service and intelligence officers, and in some cases key allies before
reaching decisions about military action. As different as George W. Bush and
Barack Obama were in temperament and policy preferences, one general told me,
they were remarkably alike in the Situation Room: Both presidents asked hard
questions, wanted prevailing views challenged, insisted on a variety of options
to consider, and weighed potential outcomes against broader goals. Trump
doesn’t do any of that. Despite commanding the most sophisticated
intelligence-gathering apparatus in the world, this president prefers to be
briefed by Fox News, and then arrives at decisions without input from others.
“We have defeated
ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump presidency,” he
tweeted. Later that day he said, “Our boys, our young women, our men, they are
all coming back, and they are coming back now.”
This satisfied one of
Trump’s campaign promises, and it appealed to the isolationist convictions of
his core supporters. Forget the experts, forget the chain of command—they were
the people who, after all, had kept American forces engaged in that part of the
world for 15 bloody years without noticeably improving things. Enough was
enough.
At that moment,
however, American troops were in the final stages of crushing the Islamic
State, which, contrary to Trump’s assertion, was collapsing but had not yet
been defeated. Its brutal caliphate, which had briefly stretched from eastern
Iraq to western Syria, had been painstakingly dismantled over the previous five
years by an American-led global coalition, which was close to finishing the
job. Now they were to stop and come home?
Here, several of the
generals felt, was a textbook example of ill-informed decision making. The
downsides of a withdrawal were obvious: It would create a power vacuum that
would effectively cede the fractured Syrian state to Russia and Iran; it would
abandon America’s local allies to an uncertain fate; and it would encourage a
diminished ISIS to keep fighting. The decision—which prompted the immediate
resignations of the secretary of defense, General James Mattis, and the U.S.
special envoy to the mission, Brett McGurk—blindsided not only Congress and
America’s allies but the person charged with actually waging the war, General
Joseph Votel, the commander of U.S. Central Command. He had not been consulted.
Trump’s tweet put
Votel in a difficult spot. Here was a sudden 180-degree turn in U.S. policy
that severely undercut an ongoing effort. The American contingent of about
2,000 soldiers, most of them Special Forces, was coordinating with the Iraqi
army; the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, consisting primarily of Kurdish
militias and Syrians opposed to President Bashar al-Assad; and representatives
of NATO, the Arab League, and dozens of countries. This alliance had reduced
ISIS’s territory to small pockets of resistance inside Syria. America’s troops
were deep in the Euphrates Valley, a long way from their original bases of
operation. An estimated 10,000 hard-core Islamist soldiers were fighting to the
death. Months of tough combat lay ahead.
For the American
commander, this was a terrible logistical challenge. An orderly withdrawal of
his forces would further stress supply lines, therefore necessitating the SDF’s
help even more. Votel found himself in the position of having to tell his
allies, in effect, We’re screwing you, but we need you now more than
ever.
Field commanders are
often given orders they don’t like. The military must bow to civilian rule. The
generals accept and embrace that. But they also say that no careful
decision-making process would have produced Trump’s abrupt about-face.
Votel decided to take
an exceedingly rare step: He publicly contradicted his commander in chief. In
an interview with CNN he said that no, ISIS was not yet defeated, and now was
not the time to retreat. Given his responsibility to his troops and the
mission, the general didn’t have much choice.
II. HE TRUSTS ONLY
HIS OWN INSTINCTS
Trump believes that
his gut feelings about things are excellent, if not genius. Those around him
encourage that belief, or they are fired. Winning the White House against all
odds may have made it unshakable.
Decisiveness is good,
the generals agreed. But making decisions without considering facts is not.
Trump has, on at
least one occasion, shown the swiftness and resolution commanders respect: On
April 7, 2017, he responded to a chemical-warfare attack by Assad with a
missile strike on Syria’s Shayrat Airbase. But this was not a hard call. It was
a onetime proportional retaliation unlikely to stir international controversy
or wider repercussions. Few international incidents can be cleanly resolved by
an air strike.
A case in point is
the flare-up with Iran in June. The generals said Trump’s handling of it was
perilous, because it could have led to a shooting war. On June 20, Iran’s air
defenses shot down an American RQ-4A Global Hawk, a
high-altitude surveillance drone the Iranians said had violated their airspace.
The U.S. said the drone was in international airspace. (The disputed
coordinates were about 12 miles apart—not a big difference for an aircraft
moving hundreds of miles an hour.) In retaliation, Trump ordered a military strike on Iran—and then abruptly
called it off after, he claimed, he’d been informed that it would kill about 150 Iranians. One general told me
this explanation is highly improbable—any careful discussion of the strike
would have considered potential casualties at the outset. But whatever his
reasoning, the president’s reversal occasioned such relief that it obscured the
gravity of his original decision.
Not only would a
retaliatory strike have failed the litmus test of proportionality, this general
said, but it would have accomplished little, escalated the dispute with Iran,
and risked instigating a broad conflict. In an all-out war, the U.S. would
defeat Iran’s armed forces, but not without enormous bloodshed, and not just in
Iran. Iran and its proxies would launch terrorist strikes on American and
allied targets throughout the Middle East and beyond. If the regime were to
fall, what would come next? Who would step in to govern a Shiite Muslim nation
of 82 million steeped for generations in hatred of America? The mullahs owe
their power to the American overthrow of Iran’s elected government in 1953, an
event widely regarded in Iran (and elsewhere) as an outrage. Conquering
Americans would not be greeted by happy Persian crowds. The generals observed
that those who predicted such parades in Baghdad following the ouster of Saddam
Hussein instead got a decade-long bloodbath. Iran has more than twice Iraq’s
population, and is a far more developed nation. The Iraq War inspired the
creation of ISIS and gave renewed momentum to al‑Qaeda; imagine how war with
Iran might mobilize Hezbollah, the richest and best-trained terrorist
organization in the world.
General Votel, who
commanded American forces in the region until he retired in March, told me that
if the U.S. had carried out a retaliatory strike, “the trick for the military
in this case would be to orchestrate some type of operation that would very
quickly try and get us to an off-ramp—give them an off-ramp or provide us with
an off-ramp—so we can get to some kind of discussion to resolve the situation.”
Trump’s attack might have targeted some of the Iranian navy’s vessels and
systems that threaten shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, Votel said, or it might
have leveled a measured strike against the air defenses that struck the drone.
Ideally it would have been followed by a pause, so diplomatic processes could
kick in. The strike would have demonstrated to Iran that we have the capability
and willingness to strike back if provoked, and made clear that in a serious
fight, it could not prevail. But all of this presumes a sequence that would
unfold in an orderly, rational way—a preposterous notion.
“This is all
completely unpredictable,” Votel said. “It’s hard for me to see how it would
play out. We would be compelled to leave large numbers of forces in the region
as a deterrent. If you don’t have an off-ramp, you’re going to find yourself in
some kind of protracted conflict.” Which is precisely the kind of scenario
Trump has derided in the past. His eagerness to free the U.S. from long-term
military conflicts overseas was why he made his abrupt announcement about
pulling out of Syria. Evidently he didn’t fully consider where a military
strike against Iran was likely to lead.
“I know the chairman
very well,” the general said. “He’s about as fine an officer as I have ever
spent time around. I think if he felt the president was really heading in the
wrong direction, he would let the president know.” He added that Secretary of
State Mike Pompeo may have counseled against an attack as well. “Pompeo’s a
really bright guy. I’m sure he would intervene and give the president his best
advice.”
III. HE RESISTS
COHERENT STRATEGY
If there is any broad
logic to Trump’s behavior, it’s Keep ’em confused. He believes that
unpredictability itself is a virtue.
Keeping an enemy
off-balance can be a good thing, the generals agreed, so long as you are not
off-balance yourself. And it’s a tactic, not a strategy. Consider Trump’s
rhetorical dance with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. No president in
modern times has made progress with North Korea. Capable of destroying Seoul
within minutes of an outbreak of hostilities, Pyongyang has ignored every
effort by the U.S. and its allies to deter it from building a nuclear arsenal.
Trump has gone back
and forth dramatically on Kim. As a candidate in 2016, he said he would get
China to make the North Korean dictator “disappear in one form or another very
quickly.” Once in office, he taunted Kim, calling him “Little Rocket Man,” and
suggested that the U.S. might immolate Pyongyang. Then he switched directions
and orchestrated three personal meetings with Kim.
In the long run,
however, unpredictability is a problem. Without a coherent underlying strategy,
uncertainty creates confusion and increases the chance of miscalculation—and
miscalculation, the generals pointed out, is what starts most wars. John F.
Kennedy famously installed a direct hotline to the Kremlin in order to lower
the odds of blundering into a nuclear exchange. Invading Kuwait, Saddam Hussein
stumbled into a humiliating defeat in the first Gulf War—a conflict that killed
more than 100,000 people—after a cascading series of miscommunications and
miscalculations led to a crushing international response.
Unpredictability
becomes an impediment to success when it interferes with orderly process. “Say
you’re going to have an engagement with North Korea,” a general who served
under multiple presidents told me. “At some point you should have developed a
strategy that says, Here’s what we want the outcome to be. And then
somebody is developing talking points. Those talking points are shared with the
military, with the State Department, with the ambassador. Whatever the issue
might be, before the president ever says anything, everybody should
know what the talking points are going to be.” To avoid confusion and a sense
of aimlessness, “everybody should have at least a general understanding of what
the strategy is and what direction we’re heading in.”
“If the president
says ‘Fire and brimstone’ and then two weeks later says ‘This is my best
friend,’ that’s not necessarily bad—but it’s bad if the rest of the relevant
people in the government responsible for executing the strategy aren’t aware
that that’s the strategy,” the general said. Having a process to figure out the
sequences of steps is essential. “The process tells the president what he
should say. When I was working with Obama and Bush,” he continued, “before we
took action, we would understand what that action was going to be, we’d have
done a Q&A on how we think the international community is going to respond
to that action, and we would have discussed how we’d deal with that response.”
To operate outside of
an organized process, as Trump tends to, is to reel from crisis to
rapprochement to crisis, generating little more than noise. This haphazard
approach could lead somewhere good—but it could just as easily start a very big
fire.
If the president
eschews the process, this general told me, then when a challenging
national-security issue arises, he won’t have information at hand about what
the cascading effects of pursuing different options might be. “He’s kind of
shooting blind.” Military commanders find that disconcerting.
“The process is not a
panacea—Bush and Obama sometimes made bad decisions even with all the options
in front of them—but it does help.”
IV. “HE IS
REFLEXIVELY CONTRARY”
General H. R.
McMaster, who left the White House on reasonably good terms in April 2018 after
only 14 months as national security adviser, is about as can-do a professional
as you will find. He appeared to take Trump seriously, and tailored his
briefings to accommodate the president’s famous impatience, in order to equip
him for the weighty decisions the office demands. But Trump resents advice and
instruction. He likes to be agreed with. Efforts to broaden his understanding
irritate him. McMaster’s tenure was bound to be short. Weeks before accepting
his resignation, the president let it be known that he found McMaster’s
briefings tedious and the man himself “gruff and condescending.”
“When you lose these
diplomats and ambassadors that have all this experience, this language
capability, this cultural understanding, that makes things very, very difficult
for us,” one of the generals said. “And it leads to poor decisions down the
line.”
Trump so resists
being led that his instinct is nearly always to upend prevailing opinion.
“He is reflexively
contrary,” another of the generals told me.
According to those
who worked with him, McMaster avoided giving the president a single consensus
option, even when one existed. He has said that he always tried to give the
president room to choose. After leaving the White House, he criticized others
in the national-security community for taking a different approach, accusing
them of withholding information in hopes of steering Trump in the direction
they preferred. McMaster has not named names, but he was most likely talking
about Mattis and General John Kelly, who, after serving as Trump’s
homeland-security secretary, became the president’s second chief of staff.
McMaster has said that he considered such an approach tantamount to subverting
the Constitution—but if his allegation is true, it shows how poorly equipped
those people felt Trump was for the job. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s
report records numerous instances of civilian advisers trying to manage the
president, or simply ignoring presidential directives they deemed ill-advised
or illegal.
He hasn’t. Like its
author, the document has been dismissed. Those who were involved in writing it
remain convinced, somewhat hopefully, that it is still helping guide policy,
but John Bolton, McMaster’s successor, said scornfully—a few months before he,
too, was ousted by Trump—that it is filed away somewhere, consulted by no one.
Trump is no more
likely to have read the thing than he is to have written his own books. (Years
ago, after he published The Art of the Deal, he asked me if I was interested
in writing his next book. I declined.) Trying to shape this president’s
approach to the world into a cogent philosophy is a fool’s errand. For those
commanding America’s armed forces, it’s best to keep binoculars trained on his
Twitter feed.
V. HE HAS A
SIMPLISTIC AND ANTIQUATED NOTION OF SOLDIERING
Though he disdains
expert advice, Trump reveres—perhaps fetishizes—the military. He began his
presidency by stacking his administration with generals: Mattis, McMaster,
Kelly, and, briefly, Michael Flynn, his first national security adviser.
Appointing them so soon after their retirement from the military was a mistake,
according to Don Bolduc, a retired brigadier general who is currently running
as a Republican for the U.S. Senate in New Hampshire. Early on, the biggest
difference Bolduc saw between the Trump administration and its predecessors,
and one he felt was “going to be disruptive in the long term,” was “the
significant reliance, in the Pentagon at least, on senior military leadership
overriding and making less relevant our civilian oversight. That was going to
be a huge problem. The secretary of defense pretty much surrounded himself with
his former Marine comrades, and there was, at least from that group, a distrust
of civilians that really negatively affected the Pentagon in terms of policy
and strategy in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq, by following the same old failed
operational approaches.” Trump’s reliance on military solutions is problematic
because “there are limits to what the military can solve. I think initially the
Trump administration held this idea that general officers somehow have all the
answers to everything. I think the president discovered in short order that
that’s really not the case.”
The problems posed by
Trump’s skewed understanding of the military extend beyond bad decision making
to the very culture of our armed forces: He apparently doesn’t think American
soldiers accused of war crimes should be prosecuted and punished. In early May,
he pardoned former Army Lieutenant Michael Behenna, who had been convicted of
murdering an Iraqi prisoner. Two weeks later, he asked the Justice Department
to prepare pardon materials for a number of American servicemen and contractors
who were charged with murder and desecration of corpses, including Special
Operations Chief Edward Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who stood accused by his own
team members of fatally stabbing a teenage ISIS prisoner and shooting unarmed
civilians. (He was ultimately acquitted of the murders but convicted of posing
for photos with the boy’s body.) Trump subsequently chastised the military attorneys
who had prosecuted Gallagher, and directed that medals awarded to them be
rescinded. All of the generals agreed that interfering with the military’s
efforts to police itself badly undermines command and control. When thousands
of young Americans are deployed overseas with heavy weaponry, crimes and
atrocities will sometimes occur. Failing to prosecute those who commit them
invites behavior that shames everyone in uniform and the nation they serve.
Having never served
or been near a battlefield, several of the generals said, Trump exhibits a
simplistic, badly outdated notion of soldiers as supremely “tough”—hard men
asked to perform hard and sometimes ugly jobs. He also buys into a severely
outdated concept of leadership. The generals, all of whom have led troops in
combat, know better than most that war is hard and ugly, but their
understanding of “toughness” goes well beyond the gruff stoicism of a John Wayne
movie. Good judgment counts more than toughness.