Trump’s Pentagon Sheds No-Politics Image in a Major Reversal
(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump failed in his first term to bend the Pentagon to his will, facing delays and defiance from a group of military leaders who were determined to uphold its reputation for staying out of politics.
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Ten days into his second term, that barrier has washed away.
In a break with his predecessors, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has become a major driver in Trump’s agenda with leaders carrying out actions that were seen as unthinkable in the first term, including deploying military planes to deport migrants and studying whether to detain as many as 30,000 of them at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
In a news conference on Thursday, Hegseth followed Trump in trying to draw a link between his push to abolish diversity, equity and inclusion programs and the Wednesday night midair collision between an American Airlines jetliner and an Army Black Hawk helicopter that left no survivors.
The Pentagon “is colorblind and merit-based, the best leaders possible, whether it’s flying Black Hawks and flying airplanes, leading platoons, or in government” Hegseth said alongside Trump and Vice President JD Vance, who had suggested, without evidence, that hiring practices at the Federal Aviation Administration may have somehow played a role in the crash.
“The era of DEI is gone at the Defense Department, and we need the best and brightest, whether it’s in our air traffic control or whether it’s in our generals or whether it’s throughout government,” Hegseth said.
It was a comment that would have been unlikely at best for previous Pentagon leaders, especially with so much still unknown about the circumstances of the crash. And there was no indication that inexperienced pilots were flying the helicopter involved in the crash over the Potomac River, with the two main pilots — a man and a woman — having 1,500 flight hours between them.
Yet it indicated how the Pentagon, with former Fox News host Hegseth in charge, has become a major instrument of Trump’s political agenda, rather than independent of it.
The evidence of that shift ranges from the most serious to the petty. Even before Hegseth took office, a portrait of the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley — who was appointed by Trump in his previous term but later broke with him — was removed from a Pentagon corridor.
Trump also revoked Milley’s security detail and ordered a review into his conduct while he served, raising the possibility of a loss of rank. In the meantime, Hegseth ordered the removal of a second Milley portrait as well one of Trump’s later defense secretaries, Mark Esper, who had also criticized the president. The Esper portrait was of him as Army secretary.
“I can’t think of an historical precedent for an American president or secretary of defense using this kind of threat,” said Kori Schake, a defense analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
The moves have been so dramatic that even some of Trump’s staunchest defenders urged him to reconsider the revocation of Milley’s detail. The general, who retired in 2023, received heightened protection over threats from Iran given his involvement in the US killing of Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani in 2020.
“I would encourage the president to revisit this,” Senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told Fox Business this week. “It’s possible that these people could be targeted by Iranian assassins in public where innocent bystanders could be injured.”
The anti-DEI policy threatens decades-long campaigns to integrate the armed forces dating to President Harry S Truman’s desegregation order in 1948. Implementation of Trump’s policy already led to the suspension of a class that featured videos celebrating the Tuskegee Airmen, a mostly Black Army Air Forces unit in World War II. The Air Force later told the Air Force Times that the class would be reinstated with materials on the Tuskegee Airmen and other prominent African Americans in the military but without DEI elements.
‘My Generals’
Trump’s attitude toward the military soured over his first term. Although he initially liked to boast of “my generals,” he soon clashed with his first Defense secretary, James Mattis, a former Marine general, who eventually resigned over Trump’s desire to withdraw troops from Syria. And one of his chiefs of staff, John Kelly, another former Marine general, later called for Trump to be removed.
“The military itself is not a partisan institution, and individuals in the military are not supposed to act in partisan ways,” Katherine Kuzminski, deputy director of studies and the director of the Military, Veterans, and Society Program at the Center for a New American Security, said in an interview.
“And then when we see the administrative actions that are coming out, it seems that they’re rooted in this belief that the military is fundamentally acting as a partisan tool, when that is not, in my assessment, accurate,” she added.
Some analysts contend that the notion of an apolitical military was always a myth. President Barack Obama tangled with his generals, famously firing Stanley McChrystal after a Rolling Stone article quoted his staff mocking the president. In 1990, Dick Cheney, then the Defense secretary, fired the Air Force chief of staff over remarks he made about US military plans regarding Iraq.
That reputation, grounded largely in norms rather than law or policy, has been harmed in recent years by retired senior officers signing on to political statements in support of candidates on both sides of the aisle, she said.
This time around, Trump and his supporters argue it was former President Joe Biden, not them, who politicized the military by firing service members who refused the Covid vaccine, implementing diversity programs and recognizing transgender and gender non-conforming people in the force.
“Those norms had been eroding for some time, and much of the blame can be laid at the feet of the military,” said Mackubin Thomas Owens, Foreign Policy Research Institute non-resident senior fellow, who backed Hegseth for Defense secretary.
Owens said Milley’s criticism of Trump violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Milley “has routinely accused Trump of being a ‘fascist,’ an unprecedented — and dangerous — partisan attack against the president,” Owens said.
Now, Hegseth and his top Pentagon staff are making it clear that they will back the president’s agenda. The use of military planes to deport undocumented migrants — an act past Pentagon chiefs had resisted — was a striking and symbolic example of how far the institution had moved.
It may be challenged. US armed forces are restricted from engaging in law-enforcement activity on US soil, according to a law from 1878.
So far, though, Pentagon leaders are willing to test the limits of that precedent.
“This is a shift,” Hegseth said in his first day on the job. “It’s not the way business has been done in the past.”
--With assistance from Tony Capaccio.
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