>>9530908 VDH: Not-So-Retiring Retired Military Leaders
Part of the article below, good read anons
In February, McRaven channeled Edmund Burke’s purported warning about “the triumph of evil” in connection with President Trump: “When presidential ego and self-preservation are more important than national security — then there is nothing left to stop the triumph of evil.” This admonitory quote was often revived during the 1930s, concerning the rise of Nazi Germany. What are active, younger officers to think of such invidious comparisons?
Surely if the best and brightest of their profession warn that the current president is evil, is a traitor, or requires Fascist or Nazi similes to convey critics’ disdain, then would not constitutionally loyal officers on duty take it upon themselves to “save” the republic from such an existential threat, and remove an elected president? Is not that the logical trajectory of these often-shrill warnings?
Or, as an earlier incarnation of General Dempsey wisely put it in 2016: “And by the way, you’re making life much more difficult for those who continue to serve, who actually are accountable for the actions of the United States military as they deploy them across the land in response to elected officials.”
In 2017, just ten days after Trump’s inauguration, former Obama state department official Rosa Brooks authored an essay in the prestigious journal Foreign Policy, with the unfortunate insurrectionary title “Three Ways to Get Rid of President Trump Before 2020
Among her three options was a quite scary discussion of a military coup, akin to the takeover in the thriller Seven Days in May
Brooks urged high-ranking officers, if faced with an order they believed unconstitutional, to deliberately, collectively disobey the commander in chief and presumably “get rid of” him by force:
[This] 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. . . . I can imagine plausible scenarios in which senior military officials might simply tell the president: “No, sir. We’re not doing that.”
Oddly, earlier in 2016, when some were worried that Trump and Clinton were marshaling retired officers to sign competing endorsements, Rosa Brooks warned that retired military leaders were not the sorts to guide presidential policies (e.g., “Just because you’ve worn a uniform doesn’t make you uniquely qualified to offer political judgment on matters of state.”) But that was then, before Trump’s victory.