By Mike Nelson
Monday, June 29, 2026
In June 2014, Iraq’s second-largest city fell to the
Islamic State of Iraq and Syria in a disastrous rout of the Iraqi army,
condemning the residents of Mosul to three years of brutal occupation. By the
fall of that year, the black banners of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s ISIS fighters
were a mere eight miles from Baghdad after having marched through most of Anbar
province.
Across the border, the last holdouts against the ISIS
conquest in northeastern Syria, the Kurdish Peshmerga that would later form the
core of the Syrian Democratic Forces, had been pushed into a besieged salient
in the city of Kobani.
Things were dark and growing darker—and while a friendly
government in Iraq allowed for a return of U.S. forces to advise there, Syria
was much more complex. In the midst of a bloody civil war, and with an American
enemy in Damascus and a risk-averse administration in Washington, American
options were limited. Time was growing short for the Peshmerga, and with them,
any hopes of an American partner to fight ISIS.
In an urban engagement that raged for longer than the
Battle of Stalingrad, the Kurdish fighters stopped the ISIS advance, held the
line, and fought off the invaders in bloody and brutal block-to block fighting.
While the Peshmerga’s victory in March 2015 was in no small part due to their
valor (the word Peshmerga literally translates as “those who face
death”), it was also the result of ingenuity and determination from an American
special mission unit that found a way to influence the fight despite
substantial limitations and complications. Coordinating airstrikes against an
enemy they couldn’t observe to help a partner they couldn’t accompany, the
special operators saved hundreds of Kurdish lives while taking out thousands of
ISIS fighters. The Kobani breakout was the first bright ray of hope in an
otherwise bleak outlook for the Syrian portion of the fight against ISIS—thanks
to the skill and dedication of a unit commanded by then-Col. C.D. Donahue.
This wasn’t the only time the United States would call on
Donahue, now a general, to respond to a no-fail mission during a national
crisis. When Kabul fell to the Taliban in August 2021, Donahue deployed his
command element of the 82nd Airborne Division for the thankless and
seemingly impossible mission of coordinating the evacuation of Americans and
Afghans with Special Immigrant Visas from the chaos of Hamid Karzai
International Airport. For two sleepless weeks, Donahue coordinated the
operation to evacuate more than 120,000 people from Kabul and, famously, was
the last American soldier to leave, marking the end to America’s longest war.
Just four months later, Donahue, then the commander of
XVIII Airborne Corps, would deploy again to meet another crisis, this time
acting as the point man to lead America’s coordinated response with our allies
to deter further aggression and defend Poland after Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine.
By any measure, Donahue has more practical experience
leading American forces in the most difficult and complicated circumstances
with the greatest strategic impacts to the United States than almost any other
serving officer. Before any of his aforementioned accomplishments, Donahue had
been a company commander in the 2nd Ranger Battalion and served as a
troop, squadron, and unit commander in one of the most secretive and capable
formations in the military—one of the most secretive and capable formations in
the military. He is, by any objective criteria, the embodiment of the
“lethality” upon which Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth places such a high
premium. As the hyperbolic expression goes, “The guy’s killed more people than
cancer.”
It might come as a surprise, then, that a secretary who
has told us, in canned catchphrases delivered ad nauseam over a year and a
half, that he cares so much about “lethality” and “joint warfighting,” has also
ordered the retirement of Donahue just halfway through his time as commander of
Army forces in Europe and Africa.Ironically, the crises Donahue reacted to were
caused by same predecessors to whom Hegseth likes to point when complaining
about the state of the military he inherited. When the Obama administration
turned a blind eye to the rising threat from ISIS after the withdrawal from
Iraq, or when the Biden administration failed to prepare for the evacuation of
Americans and Afghan allies in the lead-up to Kabul’s fall, and fumbled
attempts to deter Russian aggression, Donahue became the poster boy for the
dedication and valor of the American military bearing the brunt of democratic
failures. The missions he deployed to accomplish were prime examples of
American service members reacting to and mitigating the foreign policy failures
and fecklessness of Democratic presidents that Hegseth and his boss like to
rail about.
Hegseth, as the duly appointed and confirmed leader with
constitutional civilian control over the uniformed military, is well within his
legal rights and authorities to fire or relieve the officers within that
military. Typically we've been able to count on defense secretaries to exercise
some kind of reasoning and judgment in such decisions. Hegseth, however, has
exercised that authority at a rapid clip and demonstrated a profound lack of
judgment. From his initial purge of senior leaders starting with the previous
chairman of the Joint Chiefs to the Army Chief of Staff Randy George, Hegseth
seems to be enamored with his power to upend the chain of command based on
nothing more than personal dislike.
Hegseth’s recent personal involvement in removing
names from one-star promotion lists in the Navy and Marine Corps has drawn
accusations of discrimination based on race or gender, given the
disproportionate numbers of women and ethnic minorities removed—something first
suggested after the initial firings of former Chairman Gen. C.Q. Brown, a black
fighter pilot, or former Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Lisa Franchetti.
The small numbers involved—both of general and flag
officers and the minorities represented among them—make it impossible to draw a
conclusion with statistical significance, but the removal of a greater
percentage of minorities or women from these ranks has raised eyebrows.
Hegseth’s defenders have pointed out, to counter these claims, that he has
promoted some African American officers—the military version of the “some of my
best friends are black” defense to accusations of racism.
Assuming Hegseth’s choices are made out of some kind of
racial animus, especially without proof, is a distraction. What we can conclude
is that Hegseth is on a mission to remove those who he believes don’t belong—in
his words: the woke, those who were not promoted through merit (as he defines
it), or those who were too willing to fulfill the orders of the Biden
administration (something that would have been, quite literally, their duty at
the time).
But if Hegseth’s sole focus is just clearing away the
woke distractions (“no more dudes in dresses,” he repeats in case any audience
hadn’t heard any of his previous 20 utterances of the phrase) and returning the
military to the lethality he craves, why is he eliminating the former special
mission unit commander who was reforming the Army in Europe to meet the threats
of the next war (Donahue), or a man who was a key leader in the last combat parachute jump
by conventional paratroopers (Randy George), or the former 2nd Ranger
Battalion commander who led from the front to the point he was
gravely wounded in a booby-trapped house in Afghanistan (David Hodne), or the
former long-range surveillance commander who was also wounded in a suicide attack as a
brigade commander (James Mingus)?
Hegseth is literally firing the men who represent what he
wishes to portray himself as, who have the experiences (in far greater measure)
he likes to exaggerate from his own biography, and who bring the vision,
skills, and excellence he claims are a priority.
He is not, as he claims, elevating excellence and merit
focused on warfighting but rather attempting to reshape senior military
leadership into a cadre of pliant sycophants. He is doing the very thing he
claims occurred under the Biden DOD—trying to create a military leadership
structure whose primary criteria are devotion to and willingness to implement a
cultural and political vision. And these criteria are of greater importance
than the readiness and lethality he claims to value.
While the general and flag officer removals and
promotions have received a great deal of attention, Hegseth’s vision of
reshaping officership in the Trump era extends beyond generals. He has hired
senior advisers and empaneled task forces charged with purging the senior
service colleges of wrongthink and reviewing how officers are promoted and
selected for command. The people hand-selected to run these initiatives run the
gamut from officers previously relieved
with an ax to grind to social media influencers who demonstrate ignorance about
the topics in which they claim expertise and sycophants who spend their days
posting slavish defenses of the secretary and partisan attacks against anyone
who criticizes him. One can see anecdotal examples of the impacts already, with
active-duty officers praising
Hegseth on social media in what seem to be desperate attempts for attention and
demonstration that they are exactly the kinds of yes-men Hegseth can trust.
A secretary of defense can and should ensure that
military commanders are capable, competent, and prepared to lead American
service members in the highest of stakes. Several of Hegseth’s defenders have
pointed to Gen. George C. Marshall’s wide-ranging leadership changes in the
Army prior to and during World War II. But Marshall used objective criteria,
measured against the coming threat, and explained his rationale. Hegseth
removes the very leaders trying to adapt the military to better address the
changing face of warfare, including David Hodne, the general who had been
leading the Army’s command charged with transformation. He has never explained
the rationale for firing these leaders, neither to the public, to leaders in
Congress trying to exercise oversight, nor, lacking the masculine directness he
likes to portray, to the officers themselves.
I see no reason to give Hegseth the benefit of the doubt
that these decisions are being made for legitimate reasons. Hanlon’s razor
suggests one should avoid ascribing to malice what can be explained by
incompetence. But in Hegseth’s case, I’m not sure it’s important to determine
which is the cause of his decisions. While either could be the root of most of
Hegseth’s actions, neither is a trait we should want in a leader, let alone one
trusted with America’s warfighting might. And Hegseth is a walking brew of both
incompetence and malice.
The whole effort is indicative of the broader Trumpist
play at faux masculinity. Actual war heroes are degraded by has-beens and
never-weres as woke or Marxists or traitors simply because Hegseth either
doesn’t like them or because they represent a threat to his frail ego.
I never served with Donahue directly, but I did see the
very real effects of what he accomplished when I was the future operations
director of the interagency task force for Syria during the same period he and
his operators were America’s only effective effort to stall the ISIS onslaught
in that country. And since his announced retirement, my phone has been blowing
up with texts, emails, and posts from friends who did serve with him, some of
them huge fans of Trump and generally supportive of Hegseth, expressing shock
and outrage at the sudden ouster of one of the greatest leaders of the
generation that fought the global war on terror. As a friend of three decades
who served in combat with Donahue in a special operations task force told me,
“Gen. Donahue represents the very best of our profession. His record speaks for
itself, but in the years I’ve known him, his defining characteristic has always
been his unwavering commitment to people. Despite catch phrases to the
contrary, leaders of his caliber are effectively irreplaceable.”
While our military is designed to absorb and adapt to the
sudden loss of leaders—a grim reality of the business of warfare—these
preparations are done to mitigate the risk of complete collapse after an enemy
action. The fact that we are willingly choosing to remove many of the best
leaders among us is only doing our enemies a favor and making our military less
effective, all to meet the delicate sensitivities of a man playing at machismo.
And while we can absorb the loss of a few leaders, the widespread reshaping of
the military’s leadership, across the breadth of the services and reaching down
to echelons within the next generation of emerging commanders, does have the
ability to reshape the military—not as something more agile and lethal, as
Hegseth claims, but as a hollow shell of the force that defeated the Nazis,
deterred communism, and crushed the ISIS caliphate, motivated primarily by
sycophancy, patronage, and toadyism. That is exactly what a small, petty,
insecure, sensitive, and paranoid cosplay warrior would want. Hegseth’s designs
have the potential to do generational damage to our warfighting capabilities at
the very time storm clouds gather around the globe.
No comments:
Post a Comment