Dem
47
GOP
53
Today, we will presumably find out why Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth summoned hundreds of general officers to Quantico, VA, at a cost of millions of dollars, and also at the cost of some amount of military readiness.
At this point, it is known that Hegseth will be there, and so too will Donald Trump. There has been much scuttlebutt that the Secretary's plan is to give the audience a 45-minute-or-so talk about the "warrior ethos." It is improbable that Trump would be in a room with all that brass, plus a stage, a podium and a microphone, only to sit on his hands, so one has to assume that he'll speak, too. In general, particularly these days, his speeches are 90% self-congratulation and/or lashing out at his perceived enemies. That includes speeches to the military, such as his recent address to the graduating class at West Point. If Trump does speak, that will surely be the script, then.
If the whole point of this song and dance is to allow the President and his trained monkey to bloviate for a couple of hours while a couple thousand stars' worth of officers look on, this is not going to impress the brass. These are military careerists, and they don't need some pipsqueak retired major with a Napoleon complex lecturing them about the military ethos. They don't need the Trump stump speech, either. And if these folks wasted the better part of a week traveling to see all of this, they are going to be annoyed, and they are going to be left with the sense that the people at the top of the pyramid have no idea what they are doing. And once news leaked out, the Trump administration could well have a mini-scandal on its hands. Or even a full-blown scandal. "You blew tens of millions of dollars, and temporarily undermined America's military readiness for THIS?" people will ask.
It is also entirely possible that the rumors about rah-rah speeches are just a smokescreen, and that there is some other item on the agenda. One possibility that has been frequently bandied about is loyalty oaths. This will not impress the brass, either. First of all, they've already sworn a loyalty oath, and do not need to swear another. Second, they're all educated men and women, and know what it means when a leader starts demanding personal loyalty oaths. If Team Trump were to corner one general and demand an oath be taken, that might work out. But if you have 800 officers in a room together, and they're all leery/irritated? It takes just one case of, say, a full admiral announcing that he's not interested in this kind of bull**it, and it could turn into an act of mass defiance. Military officials do not often stand up to civilian commanders in this way, but sometimes they do. And if the folks in the room all say "Oath? No, thanks," what are Hegseth and Trump going to do? Fire hundreds of high-ranking officers at once? Have them crucified along the Appian Way?
Mass firings have also been suggested as a possibility. If so, well, better to be fired than assassinated, as with Ernst Röhm and all the other generals who bought the farm on the Night of the Long Knives. But again, how can that work, as a practical matter? Are Hegseth and Trump willing to leave 20% of all commands vacant? 30%? 40%? And then, there will be the obvious question: "Why did EVERYONE have to come to the meeting if you knew you were firing only [X]% of them? What kind of performative sadism is this?"
In short, it's hard to see how this doesn't end up as: (1) an embarrassment for the administration, and (2) a giant waste of resources. That said, the military parade was an embarrassment and a waste of resources, and foreseeably so, and that did not stop these two utterly shameless men. (Z)