In a blunt, substantive, and articulate Defense One oped, two retired military officers — both with strong credentials in influencing military thinking over the past several decades — have called on the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS), General Mark A. Milley, U.S. Army, to be prepared to order military forces to remove Trump from the White House if he refuses to abide by the election results and a House certification of the election results.
At this moment of Constitutional crisis, only two options remain. Under the first, U.S. military forces escort the former president from the White House grounds. Trump’s little green men, so intimidating to lightly armed federal law enforcement agents, step aside and fade away, realizing they would not constitute a good morning’s work for a brigade of the 82nd Airborne. Under the second, the U.S. military remains inert while the Constitution dies. The succession of government is determined by extralegal violence between Trump’s private army and street protesters; Black Lives Matter Plaza becomes Tahrir Square.
The authors are two retired Army Lieutenant Colonels:
- John Nagl whose PhD dissertation/book Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam about the challenges of fighting insurgencies became near required reading across the U.S. military in the 2000s amid the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. With that in hand, Nagl played important roles in helping develop (outright writing) new doctrines and in operations in Iraq. Since retirement, Nagl served as the President of the Center for New American Security, on the Defense Policy Board, and has influenced defense thinking in other ways.
- Paul Yingling authored a searing critique of U.S. military leadership published in Armed Forces Journal. A failure of generalship blew up across defense circles and signaled a strong divide between the younger officers fighting wars in the field and the flag officers above them.
To paraphrase E.F. Hutton,
When Nagl and Yingling write,
military strategists listen …
Nagl and Yingling lay out clearly how Trump’s actions threaten that “America’s greatest Constitutional crisis since the Civil War will come about by a president who simply refuses to leave office”.
Faced with grim prospects [of losing the election], Mr. Trump has engaged in a systemic disinformation campaign to undermine public confidence in our elections. He has falsely claimed that mail-in voting is “inaccurate and fraudulent.” He is actively sabotaging the U.S. Postal Service in an effort to delay and discredit mail-in votes. He has suggested delaying the 2020 election, despite lacking the authority to do so. The stakes of the 2020 election are especially high for Mr. Trump; in defeat, he will likely face criminal prosecution.
Even as they perhaps understate the case (as for understating, recognizing that one can’t cover everything, here are two examples: they discuss Trump’s ‘army’ of unidentified DHS agents without discussing how/whether private contractors are part of those attacking lawful protesters; and, they fail to lay down how the GOP has been increasingly willing to subvert the voters’ will through legislative or other tricks — including preparations in Florida in 2000 to flip the electoral votes if the Supreme Court ruled the wrong way), their discussion is chilling as to the potential that our Democracy and the future of the Republic might come down to decision making of one man, one Army officer.
As the senior military officer of the United States, the choice between these two options lies with you. In the Constitutional crisis described above, your duty is to give unambiguous orders directing U.S. military forces to support the Constitutional transfer of power. Should you remain silent, you will be complicit in a coup d’état. You were rightly criticized for your prior active complicity in the president’s use of force against peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square. Your passive complicity in an extralegal seizure of political power would be far worse.
We have reached the point, in our nation, where reasoned military thought leaders are openly calling on the nation’s most senior military officer to be prepared to order soldiers to the White House to defend Democracy … to assure that Trump and his “little green men” don’t put the nail in the coffin of our now 244 year experiment.
Nagl’s and Yingling’s words are thoughtful, powerful, and merit reading, consideration, and sharing.
Thursday, Aug 13, 2020 · 2:23:39 PM +00:00
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A Siegel
In Slate, Fred Kaplan provides a useful perspective with Trump Can’t Just Refuse to Leave Office We have a lot of things to worry about in the next eight months. This isn’t one of them.
In other words, Trump could hole himself up in the Oval Office, but the Oval Office would very soon be cut off from all power. He would have no choice but to give up. It is hard to imagine, even in this time of hard-to-imagine things happening, that a single Supreme Court justice or more than a handful of congressional Republicans—and probably not a single member of the GOP leadership, not even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (who, depending on how Election Day had gone, might be downgraded to minority leader on Inauguration Day)—would stand up for Trump’s blatantly unconstitutional ploy to stay in power.
