President-elect Trump’s selection of retired Marine Gen. John Kelly to be secretary of homeland security brings the number of former generals on his national security team to three. This raises the obvious question: “How many generals are too many.”
Generally speaking, it’s not unusual to have a retired senior military officer serve as national security adviser, an executive position that does not require congressional approval. Retired Army Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn will fill that roll.
Retired Air Force Gen. Brent Scowcroft did the job for George H.W. Bush, and Gen. Jim Jones a former NATO commander and Marine Corps commandant was President Obama’s first national security adviser. Former Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Colin Powell even filled that role when he was only a three-star and still on active duty, for President Ronald Reagan.
It’s the unusual, but not unprecedented, selection of a retired Gen. James Mattis as secretary of defense, along with the Kelly choice, that has tipped the scales and stuffs the Trump Cabinet with former brass.
“I am concerned that so many of the President-Elect’s nominees thus far come from the ranks of recently retired military officers,” Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said in a statement Wednesday evening. “I worry about the signal this sends to emerging democracies that may have a history of greater confidence in their militaries than in the fledgling democratic civilian institutions whose development we, as the world’s leading democracy, have worked so hard to encourage.”
Yet when President Obama assembled his Cabinet in 2009, he also ended up with three retired four-stars in his inner circle: Jones as his national security adviser, retired Army Gen. Eric Shinseki as veterans affairs secretary, and retired Navy Adm. Dennis Blair as director of national intelligence. That’s 12 stars to Trump’s 11.
Even so, former national security officials are still saying that with the addition of Kelly and Mattis to the Trump team, the need for a civilian with diplomatic and policy experience to be secretary of state becomes more critical.
“I think it would be very difficult to have former generals as both secretary of state and defense. I think that is probably too much military influence in the decision-making process,” former Defense Secretary Robert Gates told CBS last month.
“I think we are probably reaching a tipping point,” former Defense Secretary William Cohen said in an interview with the Washington Examiner.
“From a confidence point of view I certainly support more military being involved in government, as they retire. They have enormous talent, but I think given the fact that President-elect Trump has little military experience, in terms of governance, I think its going to create the perception it’s more autocratic and more military dominated, and I think it’s going to raise questions in terms of the level of civilian control.
While four-star military officers have usually risen through the ranks by demonstrating leadership, vision and judgment, they also come from a world that tends to be focused on winning wars by employing a strategic use of force.
“If you have your national security team, which homeland security is part of it, and if you have state and defense and the national security adviser, who would be your non-military point of view at the table?” said Lawrence Korb, an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
“It’s not that there’s anything wrong with military people,” Korb said. “But don’t forget, you spend 40 years of your life in particular profession that’s going to color the way that you see problems.”
In a phone interview with NBC’s “Today Show,” President-elect Trump said former Massachusetts governor and GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney is still in the running for the job as top diplomat.
“Yes he is,” Trump told NBC’s Matt Lauer, insisting he is not stringing Romney along to get even for the highly critical things Romney said about Trump in a speech in April. “No, it’s not about revenge. It’s about what’s good for the country. And I’m able to put this stuff behind us.”
For many former defense secretaries, it comes down to the individual more than the uniform.
“Considering what other options are out there, the ones he’s at least considering are people I’ve worked with and are pretty reputable,” former Defense Secretary and CIA Director Leon Panetta told U.S. News this month. “I wouldn’t be that worried.”
“I would ordinarily have some concerns about civilian military relationships and civilian control and so on, but not with Jim Mattis,” Gates said on CBS. “Jim has a deep sense of history, he’s got a great strategic mind.”
But while Trump’s two most recent military nominees, Mattis and Kelly, draw almost universal praise, the president-elect’s preference for generals does raise concerns about America’s bedrock principle of civilian control of an apolitical military.
“First, the military may begin to become associated with one party over the other, robbing the profession of its historic political impartiality,” writes Alice Hunt Friend, a former Pentagon official and senior affiliate with the Center for a New American Security. In an essay published Wednesday by War on the Rocks, Friend argues an even more insidious result could be a change in the way senior officers think about their duty to the country.
“Active-duty officers may begin to view political appointments as natural addenda to their careers — rather than the rarity it is now — encouraging partisan ambitions prior to retirement,” Friend writes. “If this happened, it would seriously undermine civil-military trust by introducing the specter of political competition into the relationship.”
Already, former Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey has warned his fellow retired officers that by taking sides, even once they are out of uniform, they risk creating the impression they speak for a majority of the military and therefore undermines the idea that military leaders are apolitical and give advice without political bias or personal agenda.
When retired Gen. David Petraeus, who is talked about as a possible secretary of state, was asked by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos if he voted for Trump, Petraeus had an easy answer.
“I don’t vote,” Petraeus said. “I also did not support him nor did I oppose him, nor did I support or oppose any other candidate. I’ve truly tried to be apolitical, non-political.”
