Why It Matters: Pentagon's Friday Night Massacre; and Trump Pushes Putin's War

From Bad to Worse

This video post, for paid subscribers, evaluates the disastrous Pentagon firings, politicization of the military, filling the ranks with Trump loyalists, and Trump’s Russia policy delaying the end of the Russia-Ukraine war and nurturing Putin’s wars. Further below, is a transcript for all subscribers. You pick your preferred mode tuning in!

Hey, welcome back to Why It Matters.

Seem to be doing a number of these kind of emergency video posts.

But I think this one is warranted.

It's been a very chaotic week.

Closing out the first month of Trump back in office.

A lot of things were expected.

But again, the sum total... of these changes is still shocking.

It doesn't fail to shock, even though there was an expectation of mass firings.

I'm going to start with what went on with the Pentagon over the past 24 hours, and then maybe touch a little bit on Ukraine and peace and war.

So what happened yesterday can be considered a Friday night massacre in the kind of the— it sounds like a term that's been used a lot, lots of firings on a habitual basis on Fridays. That's when Trump likes to do that. So it ends up being the talk of the weekend.

But this one is really truly unprecedented. What the Secretary of Defense announced yesterday was the firing of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, C.Q. Brown, a 41-year Air Force veteran.

Um, the chief of naval operations, Admiral Franchetti, who I worked with— an awesome officer I had a chance to interact with extensively— worked with her when she was the vice for the Joint Staff J5, the strategy, plans and policy shop, basically all the big picture stuff. The chief of staff of the Army, I know him mainly by reputation, had some brief interactions with him, another superstar kind of fast riser.

But to be clear, this is another individual that has 30 plus, probably approaching 40 years of military service.

The vice chief of staff of the Air Force— all these folks have been fired and there was more, and I won't fail to talk about the firing of the JAGs and what that means.

But this is an unprecedented amount of turnover. It should be clear that the military in particular attempts to stagger presidential elections so that when a new secretary of defense comes in, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs sticks around for a couple of years.

The reason for that is continuity of operations. The reason for that is you want a situation in which when you have a new, experienced, well-versed Secretary of Defense coming in, you still want a chairman of the Joint Chiefs who's up on everything that's going on within the military, within defense. And you have a seamless transition.

To a certain extent, you have all those ongoing operations— troops in harm's way in the Middle East, North Africa, counterterrorism operations on the front lines of freedom in Europe, defending against Russian aggression— that somebody is extremely well-versed in what is going on around the globe.

What we have here is the chairman being fired, his vice chair still being in position and stepping up, but you have an inexperienced, really completely unqualified secretary of defense that's been on the job for a month.

We could afford to have... positions probably swap out at times. The military is designed around something called fallout drills. Somebody leaves, the next person in the chain of command steps up, and we have deputies and vices for this role.

But this is a massive and totally unprecedented turnover that's being driven by this completely partisan political agenda of DEI.

CQ Brown was a black man.

Lisa Franchetti was the first female chief of naval operations, one of the first four stars, the first chief to serve on the Joint Chiefs.

And this is an attack on what is being called DEI hires—a bunch of fucking BS. These are awesome public servants, awesome officers that did not deserve this.

I'm not really all that familiar with the vice chief of staff of the Air Force. I'm sure [he's] super qualified.

What we have coming in now, though, is what looks like a political appointment. There are dozens of four stars. We have the chief of staff. We have the vice chief of staff. Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. We have four stars that serve for each of the services—Army, Air Force, Navy, Space Force. We have a four star and a deputy. All total, that's more than a score of four stars.

They're being set aside. All the active serving three stars, they're being set aside.

The combatant commanders— so we have our geographic combatant commanders like European Command, Indo-Pacific Command, AFRICOM. Those four stars are being set aside.

The functional commanders, folks that are like Cyber Command, Strategic Command— that is a lot of four stars, a lot of active duty three stars— all those folks are being passed over for what seems, I don't know him, but what seems to be a political appointment. This three star, who retired not too long ago, spent the bulk of his career in the National Guard. So not an active duty officer, uh, a part-time airman that had a separate business career, but that has somehow proven himself to be a Trump loyalist.

Trump tells the story of visiting with this guy and, uh, General Cain putting on a MAGA hat. So somebody that's proven to be a political loyalist coming into the chairman's role. This is a politicization of the military. It's an effort to put in a loyalist that will follow the president's orders.

But I think there's another layer to this that's really quite troubling. In the same announcement as the firing of these four stars and the nomination of this three star, you have a removal of the judge advocate generals. These are three stars for the various services—Army, Navy. I believe it was the Air Force was fired also.

The reason this is deeply troubling, and my friend Congressman Crowe from Colorado was one of the first people to mention this, is because these judge advocate generals are the principal advisors to the four stars, to the chiefs on interpreting what is legal and what is not legal. And what it seems to be the case is that they're firing these folks so they could be replaced by political leaders— judge advocate generals that would interpret any orders coming from the secretary of defense and the president as legal orders.

Deeply, deeply troubling. These are the folks that are supposed to interpret the law, interpret the orders and advise their four stars. This is a very, very troubling turn of events.

What could be done? Strangely enough, some of the power shifts back to the Senate for confirmations. These four-star appointments, these three-star appointments have to be confirmed by the Senate. And I urge the Senate—and I urge you listeners, followers, and readers—to contact your senators and tell them that you do not want a simple up-and-down vote. You don't want a voice vote on these individuals. You want each one of these individuals to be screened for their qualifications, for their fidelity to the Constitution, and to ensure that they will do their jobs and serve their oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Now, the House—correction—the Senate has a Republican majority. They could ram through these appointments, but by avoiding a simple up-and-down vote on each and all of these in total, you really put some sand in the gears, you slow this down. There's a limited calendar of different things that the Senate could take up. This is the same thing that played out when Tommy Tuberville put a hold on hundreds of general officer promotions. By forcing the Senate to take these nominations to committee, to vote on every single one of these, it really slows down the process of other political appointments, of other harmful actors going into place, of potentially judges.

Take a page out of the Republican playbook and slow down these appointments. Slow down Republican Republicans' ability to confirm folks that will do damage to our democracy, to do damage to our institutions. Do not let the wolf into the house. Keep the wolf at bay and don't have some wishful thinking about it. This is an opportunity to slow down, grind down, obstruct.

Very, very quickly on the Ukraine front—there's so much to say there. What I would just offer is that if the very pleasant-sounding effort is to achieve peace, the Trump administration is going about it all wrong. Um, the reason we have this war is because Putin has been appeased. He's been catered to. And putting pressure on Ukraine that's willing to compromise, attempting to extort Ukraine when it's willing to compromise, putting pressure on Europe— it doesn't yield results. Pressure needs to be on Putin. That is the way that you achieve an end to this war by compelling Putin to negotiate, who's being obstructive.

Trump going to the Kremlin—as there are some reports of him agreeing to visit Russia—is the exact opposite of achieving a peace deal. It's talking just to talk. It doesn't actually advance the efforts of peace. You don't want to necessarily break all communications with Russia, but you do not reward Russia with a visit to the Kremlin and normalizing relationships. It does not advance the effort. It's appeasement. And it's in the worst tradition of the mistakes that we've made over the course of the past 30-plus years.

And something that you could read about if you're interested in my book that comes out on Tuesday, where I detail these efforts. The right approach, the approach that I advocate for, is something called neo-idealism—an effort to have values drive our, um, or be a focal point for our interests so that we don't focus on bright, shiny objects in front of us, a meeting for meeting's sake that looks good on camera, maybe to some portion of the constituents—but something that actually achieves peace, something that, that, um, that really pushes back on Russia's use of military aggression in the long term.

Anyway, that's a quick take on both those issues.

Really looking forward to keeping this conversation going.

Thank you for listening in and see you again soon on Why It Matters.