President Trump fires another general

President Trump is on a mission to clean house and confront the deep state, and the Pentagon is no sanctuary from that mission. This week the U.S. military representative to NATO became the ninth general officer terminated by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ahead of scheduled rotations, joining prior firings of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Chief of Naval Operations (the highest ranking officer for the U.S. Navy), the vice chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force, and a few other top generals. On April 10, the Pentagon canned the colonel in charge of the U.S. Space Force post in Greenland. She had sent a base-wide email contradicting remarks by Vice President Vance on a recent visit to the island. Collectively these were big moves, but they should not be seen as unwelcome.

If one thing has distinguished the American experience from that of other nations, its strong tradition of civilian control of the military must be a top candidate. You could easily name a dozen examples (Argentina and Peron, Egypt and Nasser, Indonesia and Suharto, and Burma’s current junta) where a clique of generals or colonels intervened to take power at a moment of national crisis and set themselves up as the new ruling regime. These coups reflect the simple reality that the generals control the armies and the armies have the guns, and so if the generals order the regiments to seize key buildings or broadcasting stations, they can quickly establish control of the country. Moreover—and this is usually a good thing—the military is generally one of the most trusted and respected institutions in any country.

Yet for 250 years since George Washington, our nation has observed a strict principle of civilian command and control over the armed forces. The president is the commander-in-chief by constitutional decree and the generals and admirals work for him. Though the military recommends its officers through merit-based promotion boards, the president and his secretary of defense makes the final nomination of all general officers subject to the advice and consent of the U.S. Senate.

Presidents have used that prerogative throughout history. Abraham Lincoln fired numerous generals before he finally found his man in Ulysses S. Grant. Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Kennedy fired a general for distributing John Birch Society literature. More recently, George W. Bush made a marked shift in military strategy by choosing Gen. David Petraeus and embracing his counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq over the advice of the Pentagon establishment. And Barack Obama fired Gen. Stanley McChrystal after unhelpful comments in a Rolling Stone profile.

Indeed, some scholars have argued that our military is too soft on underperforming generals. Thomas Ricks in his excellent book The Generals compared our practice in World War II, when commanding generals like Marshall, Eisenhower, and Nimitz were not afraid to demote men who couldn’t perform under pressure, to our modern era of lifetime job security. Others made the same point about the Iraq War, and many Republicans repeated the refrain when no one was held accountable after Biden abandoned Afghanistan haphazardly.

The reality is that the path to promotion in today’s military is too often to reward the smooth talkers, the politicians in uniform, the best players at the bureaucratic game. Today’s military is not built to promote the next George Patton or Bull Halsey, because today’s military incentive structure too often prioritizes keeping a procurement project on time, on budget, and fully funded by Congress, not killing the enemy. And in the Biden administration’s Pentagon, the priorities weren’t even procurement—they were DEI, abortion, transgender inclusion, and climate change.

Trump and his team knew this. Secretary Hegseth wrote a whole book about it. Trump was also deeply shaped by what he perceives as the betrayal by Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley at the end of his last term. So no one should be surprised that once in office, they chose to do something about it.

When the president’s top advisers gather in the Situation Room to decide the most immediate questions of war and peace, how to respond in a moment of global crisis, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs is “in the room where it happened.” Indeed, the worse option is that the chairman isn’t in the room because the president does not trust his senior military adviser. Though presidents should be thoughtful when exercising their prerogatives, and should recognize the respect due Congress and the impact on military morale, they should not hesitate to fire a general when circumstances demand it.