>What is the role of a general in a democracy? Many of today’s military leaders have a very particular answer: Focus on tactics, carry out orders, and otherwise shut up.
>This is not what America’s top officers have always done. The country’s most senior generals and admirals are expected to provide unvarnished military counsel to the president and swear an oath to defend the Constitution. History is full of examples of officers who also spoke up about the ethics and strategic implications of the president’s choices. But with a commander in chief who has stated that he prefers “the sort of generals that Hitler had,” and a secretary of defense who has fired top officers for exhibiting insufficient loyalty, military leaders during the Trump presidency have defined their advisory role extremely narrowly.
>Dan Caine, the general whom President Trump plucked out of retirement—and obscurity—to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has come to personify that circumspect approach. He presents military options and addresses tactical and force-related matters, but avoids big-picture questions of geopolitics and the probity of the administration’s actions, provided the administration deems them legal. Other top officers have followed his example.
>Caine articulated his stance to the graduates of the National Defense University last month. The future top ranks, he said, must be clear about the limits of their role when they advise senior leaders about the risks and benefits of potential operations. *Can we go do this?* is a military question, Caine told the officers sweltering in their dress uniforms, one “that the joint force answers.” But “the *should we?* question lands at the policy level, and we don’t do that in our business,” he said.
>Seen one way, Caine’s studious deference to civilian authority is an appropriate correction from the generals in charge of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, who were famously strident about what they thought the wars should be about and how they should be run. Top officers such as Caine serve at the pleasure of the president and can be relieved anytime; their jobs are to provide military counsel, not to shape preferred outcomes.
>But looked at another way, Caine and other generals are being overly timid and deferential, in part because Pete Hegseth demands it. The secretary of defense has forced out more than 20 generals and admirals, including some of the most respected career officers in the forces: Caine’s predecessor, Air Force General C. Q. Brown Jr.; two other members of the Joint Chiefs; and, most recently, [Army General C. D. Donahue](https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/06/army-general-pentagon-hegseth/687675/). Meanwhile, Hegseth has promoted less experienced officers. He has offered no explanation for each individual ouster, and the dismissals have fed a sense among his senior commanders that he prizes fealty and acquiescence over competence and experience.
>Assertive generals, too, can offer bad advice. The Afghan and Iraq Wars, led by more outspoken military leaders, dragged on, cost trillions of dollars, and ended far short of victory. Yet the Iran war, led by more reticent brass, hasn’t achieved the administration’s stated objectives, either. Before the conflict started, commanders had crafted a contingency plan for the U.S. military to keep shipping moving through the Strait of Hormuz, which called for additional ships, troops, and other forces in anticipation that Tehran might attempt to close it. But the president chose a different course. Commanders faithfully executed the president’s guidance and were careful not to criticize it publicly, only to see Iran close the strait to commercial traffic, disrupting global commerce and prompting the Trump administration to agree to a tenuous cease-fire and a (thus far futile) return to diplomacy.
>All of which raises the question: How should the American public expect generals to behave?
>The answer is made urgent by how Trump himself views the military. In his first term, Trump berated his Pentagon leaders as “dopes and babies”; after leaving office, he accused his chief military adviser of treason. In his second term, egged on by Hegseth, Trump has sent troops into U.S. cities and used the military for his [legally dubious campaign](https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/07/trump-narcoterrorists-boat-strikes/687763/) against suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean. He has also mused about deploying the military to monitor elections. That makes the balance that military leaders must strike—between deference to civilian leaders and their duty to the Constitution and the force they represent—an even thornier challenge. “If Trump 1.0 was the Olympic Games for these military leaders,” Carrie Lee, a scholar who specializes in civil-military issues at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a think tank, told us, “then Trump 2.0 is *The Hunger Games*.”
>Questions about how the military and its elected leaders should interact are older than the United States. General George Washington weighed in on policy with the Continental Congress during the Revolutionary War, repeatedly arguing that he did not have sufficient resources to defeat the British. When his pleas were rebuffed, he continued to advise the congress while adapting to what his civilian leaders wanted, with the goal of preserving the Continental Army. After victory, Washington famously resigned his military commission in 1783, before he became president.
>One of the country’s most successful examples of civilian-military partnership came decades later, when President Abraham Lincoln gave General Ulysses S. Grant broad operational latitude to lead Union forces in the Civil War and Grant accepted Lincoln’s authority to set the conflict’s political objectives.
>Perhaps the greatest civilian-military controversy erupted in 1951 when President Harry Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur for publicly challenging the administration’s approach to the Korean War. The president’s decision to remove one of the nation’s most celebrated (if outspoken) generals preserved the chain of command, even though many people believed that MacArthur had legitimate concerns about Truman’s “limited war” strategy, which aimed to prevent escalation. Truman publicly explained his reasons for that decision, letting the rest of the force know what civilian leaders expected of them. (Historians generally agree that MacArthur, venerated battlefield leader though he was, had gone too far.)
>This administration has been unique for its lack of transparency over why generals are ousted. And in the run-up to the war in Iran, there was no chance to hear from the generals and admirals who would lead that war. Americans heard much more forthright rationales from generals involved in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
>Before the 2003 Iraq invasion, General Eric Shinseki told members of Congress that he believed “something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers” would be needed to occupy the country, an assessment that then–Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld rejected. General David Petraeus later made the case for surging forces into Iraq in a bid to take on a burgeoning insurgency. In that era, Petraeus and General Stanley McChrystal were nationally known figures who expounded on grand strategy, held forth with the media, and rallied the public around policies the military supported in ways that some civilian leaders believed was out of line.
ariveklul on
Submission statement: America’s generals are important for making big military decisions so them being timid means they aren’t going to make big military decisions with bravery which is bad because bravery makes them manly
randomnameicantread on
The fact that the current president is Trump does not change the fact that unelected military leaders indeed have no place deciding policy matters.
Obviously they can (and often will) try to sway political decisions, gain political influence, etc. as all “important” people do, but this is not something that should be encouraged. Founding Fathers were completely correct. “Oh but generals could rein in trump, who doesn’t follow political norms anyway” congrats you have traded a borderline undemocratic oligarchy for an unabashed one.
Standard_Ad7704 on
SS:
* Under Trump’s second term, senior military leaders have adopted a narrowly deferential advisory role, weighing in only on tactical feasibility while avoiding judgments on policy wisdom, a departure from generals who historically spoke up on strategy and ethics.
* This caution stems largely from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s dismissal of over 20 generals and admirals seen as insufficiently loyal, fostering a climate that discourages dissent. However, neither today’s cautious commanders nor the outspoken generals of Iraq and Afghanistan produced clearly successful outcomes, as the unresolved Iran conflict shows.
* The tension between civilian control and independent military judgment runs deep historically: Washington’s advocacy before Congress, Grant’s partnership with Lincoln, MacArthur’s firing for openly challenging Truman, and more recent outspoken figures like Petraeus, McChrystal, and Milley, all of whom drew criticism for how far they pushed their influence.
* Current examples illustrate the shift: Caine repeatedly declines to judge the wisdom of major decisions, citing classified information or deferring to elected officials, while Admiral Brad Cooper gave evasive testimony on military law and sharply rebuked a lawmaker questioning the Iran war’s human cost.
* Analysts warn this trend risks suppressing the honest assessments needed to avoid strategic missteps, comparing it to how Putin’s cowed generals contributed to miscalculations in Ukraine, and worry how such deferential leadership might respond during a genuine constitutional crisis, like disputes over deploying troops around future elections.
Kardinal on
I might believe it plausible that Caine is pushing back on the president privately and presenting a unified face to the public if he hadn’t made those comments publicly at the National defense University. That being said, I haven’t read the comments in context, so I am taking the article at its word.
I would like to know of more examples of “good pushback” by high ranking flag officers than just Milley (who is 100% a fucking hero BTW).
5 Comments
>What is the role of a general in a democracy? Many of today’s military leaders have a very particular answer: Focus on tactics, carry out orders, and otherwise shut up.
>This is not what America’s top officers have always done. The country’s most senior generals and admirals are expected to provide unvarnished military counsel to the president and swear an oath to defend the Constitution. History is full of examples of officers who also spoke up about the ethics and strategic implications of the president’s choices. But with a commander in chief who has stated that he prefers “the sort of generals that Hitler had,” and a secretary of defense who has fired top officers for exhibiting insufficient loyalty, military leaders during the Trump presidency have defined their advisory role extremely narrowly.
>Dan Caine, the general whom President Trump plucked out of retirement—and obscurity—to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has come to personify that circumspect approach. He presents military options and addresses tactical and force-related matters, but avoids big-picture questions of geopolitics and the probity of the administration’s actions, provided the administration deems them legal. Other top officers have followed his example.
>Caine articulated his stance to the graduates of the National Defense University last month. The future top ranks, he said, must be clear about the limits of their role when they advise senior leaders about the risks and benefits of potential operations. *Can we go do this?* is a military question, Caine told the officers sweltering in their dress uniforms, one “that the joint force answers.” But “the *should we?* question lands at the policy level, and we don’t do that in our business,” he said.
>Seen one way, Caine’s studious deference to civilian authority is an appropriate correction from the generals in charge of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, who were famously strident about what they thought the wars should be about and how they should be run. Top officers such as Caine serve at the pleasure of the president and can be relieved anytime; their jobs are to provide military counsel, not to shape preferred outcomes.
>But looked at another way, Caine and other generals are being overly timid and deferential, in part because Pete Hegseth demands it. The secretary of defense has forced out more than 20 generals and admirals, including some of the most respected career officers in the forces: Caine’s predecessor, Air Force General C. Q. Brown Jr.; two other members of the Joint Chiefs; and, most recently, [Army General C. D. Donahue](https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/06/army-general-pentagon-hegseth/687675/). Meanwhile, Hegseth has promoted less experienced officers. He has offered no explanation for each individual ouster, and the dismissals have fed a sense among his senior commanders that he prizes fealty and acquiescence over competence and experience.
>Assertive generals, too, can offer bad advice. The Afghan and Iraq Wars, led by more outspoken military leaders, dragged on, cost trillions of dollars, and ended far short of victory. Yet the Iran war, led by more reticent brass, hasn’t achieved the administration’s stated objectives, either. Before the conflict started, commanders had crafted a contingency plan for the U.S. military to keep shipping moving through the Strait of Hormuz, which called for additional ships, troops, and other forces in anticipation that Tehran might attempt to close it. But the president chose a different course. Commanders faithfully executed the president’s guidance and were careful not to criticize it publicly, only to see Iran close the strait to commercial traffic, disrupting global commerce and prompting the Trump administration to agree to a tenuous cease-fire and a (thus far futile) return to diplomacy.
>All of which raises the question: How should the American public expect generals to behave?
>The answer is made urgent by how Trump himself views the military. In his first term, Trump berated his Pentagon leaders as “dopes and babies”; after leaving office, he accused his chief military adviser of treason. In his second term, egged on by Hegseth, Trump has sent troops into U.S. cities and used the military for his [legally dubious campaign](https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/07/trump-narcoterrorists-boat-strikes/687763/) against suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean. He has also mused about deploying the military to monitor elections. That makes the balance that military leaders must strike—between deference to civilian leaders and their duty to the Constitution and the force they represent—an even thornier challenge. “If Trump 1.0 was the Olympic Games for these military leaders,” Carrie Lee, a scholar who specializes in civil-military issues at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a think tank, told us, “then Trump 2.0 is *The Hunger Games*.”
>Questions about how the military and its elected leaders should interact are older than the United States. General George Washington weighed in on policy with the Continental Congress during the Revolutionary War, repeatedly arguing that he did not have sufficient resources to defeat the British. When his pleas were rebuffed, he continued to advise the congress while adapting to what his civilian leaders wanted, with the goal of preserving the Continental Army. After victory, Washington famously resigned his military commission in 1783, before he became president.
>One of the country’s most successful examples of civilian-military partnership came decades later, when President Abraham Lincoln gave General Ulysses S. Grant broad operational latitude to lead Union forces in the Civil War and Grant accepted Lincoln’s authority to set the conflict’s political objectives.
>Perhaps the greatest civilian-military controversy erupted in 1951 when President Harry Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur for publicly challenging the administration’s approach to the Korean War. The president’s decision to remove one of the nation’s most celebrated (if outspoken) generals preserved the chain of command, even though many people believed that MacArthur had legitimate concerns about Truman’s “limited war” strategy, which aimed to prevent escalation. Truman publicly explained his reasons for that decision, letting the rest of the force know what civilian leaders expected of them. (Historians generally agree that MacArthur, venerated battlefield leader though he was, had gone too far.)
>This administration has been unique for its lack of transparency over why generals are ousted. And in the run-up to the war in Iran, there was no chance to hear from the generals and admirals who would lead that war. Americans heard much more forthright rationales from generals involved in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
>Before the 2003 Iraq invasion, General Eric Shinseki told members of Congress that he believed “something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers” would be needed to occupy the country, an assessment that then–Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld rejected. General David Petraeus later made the case for surging forces into Iraq in a bid to take on a burgeoning insurgency. In that era, Petraeus and General Stanley McChrystal were nationally known figures who expounded on grand strategy, held forth with the media, and rallied the public around policies the military supported in ways that some civilian leaders believed was out of line.
Submission statement: America’s generals are important for making big military decisions so them being timid means they aren’t going to make big military decisions with bravery which is bad because bravery makes them manly
The fact that the current president is Trump does not change the fact that unelected military leaders indeed have no place deciding policy matters.
Obviously they can (and often will) try to sway political decisions, gain political influence, etc. as all “important” people do, but this is not something that should be encouraged. Founding Fathers were completely correct. “Oh but generals could rein in trump, who doesn’t follow political norms anyway” congrats you have traded a borderline undemocratic oligarchy for an unabashed one.
SS:
* Under Trump’s second term, senior military leaders have adopted a narrowly deferential advisory role, weighing in only on tactical feasibility while avoiding judgments on policy wisdom, a departure from generals who historically spoke up on strategy and ethics.
* This caution stems largely from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s dismissal of over 20 generals and admirals seen as insufficiently loyal, fostering a climate that discourages dissent. However, neither today’s cautious commanders nor the outspoken generals of Iraq and Afghanistan produced clearly successful outcomes, as the unresolved Iran conflict shows.
* The tension between civilian control and independent military judgment runs deep historically: Washington’s advocacy before Congress, Grant’s partnership with Lincoln, MacArthur’s firing for openly challenging Truman, and more recent outspoken figures like Petraeus, McChrystal, and Milley, all of whom drew criticism for how far they pushed their influence.
* Current examples illustrate the shift: Caine repeatedly declines to judge the wisdom of major decisions, citing classified information or deferring to elected officials, while Admiral Brad Cooper gave evasive testimony on military law and sharply rebuked a lawmaker questioning the Iran war’s human cost.
* Analysts warn this trend risks suppressing the honest assessments needed to avoid strategic missteps, comparing it to how Putin’s cowed generals contributed to miscalculations in Ukraine, and worry how such deferential leadership might respond during a genuine constitutional crisis, like disputes over deploying troops around future elections.
I might believe it plausible that Caine is pushing back on the president privately and presenting a unified face to the public if he hadn’t made those comments publicly at the National defense University. That being said, I haven’t read the comments in context, so I am taking the article at its word.
I would like to know of more examples of “good pushback” by high ranking flag officers than just Milley (who is 100% a fucking hero BTW).