Dem
47
GOP
53
The one institution that most Americans, and nearly all politicians, revere is the military. Attempts to damage it are about as taboo as anything in politics. But now, Elon Musk is going to go where no man has gone before: He wants to fire 5,400 civilian DoD employees. This is expected to be the first round of 50,000 layoffs in that department. This may or may not go well, especially since the civilian employees of the DoD include a high percentage of retired military.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth welcomed Elon and the Muskrats at the Pentagon, saying: "They're going to have broad access, obviously, with all the safeguards on classification." The president can grant any security clearance he wants to any person to whom he wants to grant it, so most likely Musk already has a top-secret clearance, meaning he has total access to everything in the Pentagon computer systems.
The American Federation of Government Employees, which has 250,000 DoD civilians as members, called the move "a slap in the face to veterans and military families everywhere that will not soon be forgotten." Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said: "It is going to profoundly, and unfortunately, reshape the military into a political tool of the president. You get a military force that will tell the president whatever he wants to hear. Disaster soon follows." If the military is called into action for anything later this year or next and it fails to achieve its mission, during the midterm campaigns Democrats are going to be screaming: "Musk destroyed our armed forces." But even before any future military action, the cuts will affect military bases all over the country, and the voters around them aren't going to like it.
But there is more. Hegseth directed Pentagon officials to cut $50 billion out of the Pentagon budget. That will affect a lot of people, from firees to contractors, and their families. Acting Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Salesses said: "Through our budgets, the Department of Defense will once again resource warfighting [sic] and cease unnecessary spending that set our military back under the previous administration, including through so-called 'climate change' and other woke programs, as well as excessive bureaucracy."
What Salesses is ignoring, either through ignorance or intentionally, is that the military has repeatedly said that climate change is most definitely a military issue. When formerly arable land ceases to be able to produce enough food for its population (due to climate change), the people there probably won't starve to death quietly. They might just get the idea of waging war on their neighbors to slaughter them all and take their (still-productive) land. If the country being attacked is important to the U.S. for strategic reasons (e.g., it has valuable natural resources or plays an important geopolitical role somewhere), the U.S. could get dragged into a war somewhere on account of climate change. The brass fully understands this and has teams of people thinking about how to deal with far-flung wars the U.S. could get dragged into as a result of climate change and how to fight them. Firing all these people now is not going to be a big help when the crunch comes. All it might take is one really big drought and one failed harvest to pull the trigger. (V)