Trump has little interest in the details of policy. The generals I spoke with didn’t agree on everything, but they shared the following five characterizations of Trump’s military leadership. He is not a president who thinks through consequences-and this, the generals stressed, is not the way serious nations behave. “Like a rocket!”) Out in the field, where combat is more than wordplay, his tweets have consequences. Such rudderless captaincy creates the headlines Trump craves. has quietly uncanceled the canceled military exercises, and dropped any mention of a troop withdrawal. While the lovefest continues for the cameras, the U.S. military exercises with South Korea and dangled the possibility of withdrawing American forces from the country altogether. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. How many times can they successfully do that before faltering?Īmid 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. Frequently caught unawares by Trump’s statements, senior military officers have scrambled, in their aftermath, to steer the country away from tragedy. Trump’s pronouncements and orders have already risked catastrophic and unnecessary wars in the Middle East and Asia, and have created severe problems for field commanders engaged in combat operations. In 20 years of writing about the military, I have never heard officers in high positions express such alarm about a president. That those I spoke with made an exception in Trump’s case is telling, and much of what they told me is deeply disturbing. Cognizant of the special authority they hold, high-level officers epitomize respect for the chain of command, and are extremely reticent about criticizing their civilian overseers. Military officers are sworn to serve whomever voters send to the White House. 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. All but one served Trump directly the other left the service shortly before Trump was inaugurated. Among the officers I spoke with were four of the highest ranks-three or four stars-all recently retired. 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. To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app.
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