How MAGA Undermined the Military

Ideology, bigotry and cronyism have endangered national security

When Donald Trump promised to make America great again, he clearly wanted among other things to start throwing our military weight around. As Timothy Snyder says,

The attack on Iran began with a longing -- a subjective sense that violence is pleasurable and can bring a utopia in which desires become reality. In the statements of President Trump and Defense Secretary Hegseth, such a utopia of violence is palpable.

Such a longing is always destructive even when, like Trump and Hegseth, one has inherited control of a powerful military. That military may not have been as powerful as many people imagined: Phillips O’Brien argues that what he calls the “rot” in America’s armed forces began before Trump II. Still, America’s military was an impressive institution.

And under Trump that institution is suffering rapid degradation.

Hegseth, reflecting attitudes widely held on the far right, came in asserting that wokeness had made the military weak, that the pursuit of diversity had led to the promotion of incompetent officers and that concern for liberal pieties had undermined the “warrior spirit” and focus on “lethality” that, he imagined, bring strength.

With these people, however, every accusation is a confession. The Trumpists, it turns out, have prioritized their “anti-woke” ideology over military effectiveness. They have given free rein to bigotry, rejecting distinguished, highly regarded Black and female officers in favor of politically loyal white men. Cronyism has also played a destructive role, as I’ll explain shortly.

Let’s look at the three axes of military degradation: Ideology, bigotry and corruption/cronyism.

Ideology: Last week the New York Times reported a major health crisis at an Air Force base:

A major flu outbreak has sickened nearly 160 troops at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas less than two months after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that U.S. troops would no longer be required to be vaccinated for the flu, defense officials said.

I wrote about the end of the vaccination requirement when it was announced. It was obviously terrible policy: Vaccination shouldn’t be a matter of individual choice when spreading infections can impair military effectiveness. And you know who understood that? George Washington, who made smallpox inoculations mandatory in the Continental Army during the American Revolution.

Vaccination, however, has become a front in the culture war. And Hegseth evidently considered being politically correct, MAGA style, more important than national security.

Bigotry: Harry Truman desegregated the U.S. military in 1948. Over the years the military has come to be seen as a model for overcoming racial barriers, arguably one of our greatest national success stories in that regard. Three years ago the Pentagon commemorated the 75^th anniversary of Truman’s decision. The press release was titled “U.S. military integration spawned peerless fighting force.”

Hegseth, however, judges officers not by the content of their character but by the color of their skin or their gender.

As the Times has reported, Hegseth has fired or sidelined more than two dozen generals and admirals, disproportionately Black or female. As the Times reports, these high-profile actions are part of a larger story. Decisions about promotions within the military are normally made by serving officers:

By law, one-star and two-star officers are chosen by promotion selection boards made up of senior military officers. The meetings are so confidential that board members are not permitted to tell others that they are part of the process.

But Hegseth has been intervening in the promotion process. He has claimed that his new promotion system is focused on “warfighting ability,” but as the Times notes,

In practice, though, his approach has made it harder for Black and female officers to get promoted to senior ranks, even when their records are exemplary.

Furthermore, promotions have been denied to officers who have spoken favorably about diversity or vaccines, even though those comments were made as part of then-current military policy.

How much has this environment pushed competent officers out of the military? To what extent has it turned the officers that remain into yes-men — and I do mean men — unwilling to offer critical feedback on politically motivated decisions?

Cronyism: On Monday the Pentagon’s artificial intelligence chief claimed that Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot “enabled U.S. forces to deploy over 2,000 munitions to 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours during Operation Epic Fury.” Did that include the missile strikes that killed 120 schoolchildren on the first day of the war?

The Pentagon made this statement as the Trump administration is trying to protect xAI, which runs Grok (and has now been folded into SpaceX) from a lawsuit alleging that its Memphis datacenter is illegally polluting the air.

So wait: Grok is running the war? By all accounts, Grok is greatly inferior to rival large language models operated by Anthropic and OpenAI. Indeed, federal agencies, when given a choice, have overwhelmingly rejected Grok. Reuters reports that of more than 400 reported government uses of AI that named a vendor, only 3 involved xAI or Grok.

Not incidentally, Musk has made great efforts to train Grok not to give what he considers woke answers — efforts that led the model to spew racist and antisemitic content.

So why is the U.S. military using Grok — not just in some ordinary application, but to run a war? Officials claim that Grok has unique capabilities, but this surely looks like an attempt to promote the business of a Trump supporter and comrade in bigotry. And if Grok is inferior to available alternatives, which it probably is, this favoritism is directly endangering national security.

Not surprisingly, a war that both Trump and Hegseth declared would last a few short weeks has now turned into a military disaster with no clear end in sight other than a humiliating retreat. They ignored clear indicators that such a war was unwinnable because there was no plausible way to keep the Strait of Hormuz open, let alone force regime change in Iran. But even if we account for the epic idiocy of this war, U.S. forces have performed far worse than expected. Despite plenty of advance warning of the perils of drone warfare from the war in Ukraine, the U.S. military was caught flatfooted by the Iranian drone menace. As a result, it suffered massive destruction at our bases and heavy aircraft losses.

The American military needs to have a reckoning with what has gone so badly wrong in the Iran war. But that won’t happen under the current commander-in-chief. Trump and Hegseth, who call themselves patriots, have subordinated national security to their personal prejudice, egoism and corruption. And from their point of view the loss of military professionalism, meritocracy and honor, along with the devastating loss of America’s reputation, is acceptable collateral damage.

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