Small Wars Journal

What Trump May Not Know About the Generals He’s Eyeing for Top Positions

Wed, 11/23/2016 - 1:54pm

What Trump May Not Know About the Generals He’s Eyeing for Top Positions by Greg Jaffe, Washington Post

On the campaign trail he complained that they had been “reduced to rubble.” At other moments he suggested that he might have to fire them all.

Now that Donald Trump is president-elect, a parade of retired four-star generals has been making its way through Trump Tower and the mogul’s New Jersey golf course.

Trump’s sudden infatuation with the military’s top brass is part theater, part necessity and possibly a view into how he will govern. But it also raises a bigger question: What does Trump, whose military experience consists of military boarding school and multiple draft deferments, understand about the country’s general officer corps?

At least six former generals are being considered for as many as four top positions in a Trump administration -  a concentration of military brass that foreign policy experts said is unprecedented in the recent history of the United States. In their charcoal-gray suits and short haircuts, they look like any other business executives. But these former officers, most of whom have spent their adult lives in the military and much of the past 15 years at war, are unlike the people Trump has encountered in corporate boardrooms. They are also unlike the politicians and political operatives who have dominated his life since he declared his intention to run for the White House more than a year ago…

Read on.