President Donald Trump’s Friday night firing of the nation’s highest-ranking military official, coupled with U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s sweeping purge of senior military leaders and top military attorneys—removing a total of six of the Defense Department’s most experienced officials—has sparked serious concern among experts.
On Friday night, Trump terminated the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Charles Q. Brown, from his four-year appointed term. No reason was given.
Immediately after, Secretary Hegseth dismissed Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the chief of the Navy, and Air Force Vice-Chief General James Slife.
He also fired all three of the Judge Advocates General (JAGs, or TJAGs), the top attorneys for the Army, Navy, and Air Force — a move some experts say should be the greatest cause for concern.
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On “Fox News Sunday,” Secretary Hegseth explained his reasoning for the JAG firings.
“We want lawyers who give sound constitutional advice,” Hegseth told host Shannon Bream. “And don’t exist to attempt to be roadblocks to anything that happens in their spots.”
As Law & Crime reports, “Bream brought up an X post, specifically, from Georgetown Law professor Rosa Brooks, which said: ‘In some ways that’s even more chilling than firing the four stars. It’s what you do when you’re planning to break the law: you get rid of any lawyers who might try to slow you down.'”
Indeed, The New York Times calls the firings “an opening salvo” in Hegseth’s “push to remake the military into a force that is more aggressive on the battlefield and potentially less hindered by the laws of armed conflict.”
“Mr. Hegseth, in the Pentagon and during his meetings with troops last week in Europe, has spoken repeatedly about the need to restore a ‘warrior ethos’ to a military that he insists has become soft, social-justice obsessed and more bureaucratic over the past two decades.”
Experts on the law, the military, and authoritarianism and democracy are raising the alarm.
“The purge of senior officers at DOD is deeply troubling, but purging JAG officers worries me the most,” warned U.S. Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO), a former Army Captain who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. “JAG officers interpret law for our commanders. They help determine what’s lawful and constitutional. Replacing these military lawyers with [Trump] loyalists is so dangerous.”
Professor of history Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a scholar of fascism and authoritarian leaders, responded to Hegseth’s “roadblocks” remark:
“Well that is the truth. All of this is a process of rearranging government for an accelerated transition from democracy to autocracy. That includes a new domestic role for the military and new autocratic allies abroad.”
U.S. Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), a former CIA analyst and Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, called the firings a “purge of senior officers who have served with distinction on the battlefield and off,” and said it “should send a shiver down the spine of any American who cares about an apolitical military.”
“No matter how they try and spin it,” she added, Trump and Hegseth “have brought their political retribution to the very warfighters they claim to care about. And we are no safer for it.”
Describing the firings as “an unprecedented shakeup of senior military leadership,” Associate Professor of Law Mark Nevitt—a former Distinguished Military Professor of Leadership and Law at the U.S. Naval Academy—warns at Just Security of “Trump’s purge of apolitical career officers.”
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“Make no mistake,” Nevitt writes in a lengthy and detailed explainer, “these firings are extraordinary and destabilize a longstanding norm of separating uniformed military members from politics. It is not an overstatement to characterize these firings as unprecedented and dangerous. What’s more, this purge is occurring against a backdrop of massively complex national security challenges in Ukraine, the Middle East, and beyond.”
On Trump’s firing of the JAG lawyers, Kevin Barron, the founding executive editor of Defense One writes: “Trump is also replacing the military’s top lawyers, who swear to defend the Constitution, with loyalists who will defend him. That’s Hegseth building in pure cover fire for ‘King’ Trump. If Trump has automatic SCOTUS immunity, so could his retribution orders to the military.”
Fred Wellman is a graduate of West Point and the Harvard Kennedy School, an Army veteran of 22 years who served four combat tours, and is now a political consultant and the host of the podcast and Substack newsletter, “On Democracy.”
“They fired the top lawyers of all three service branches. That’s the really dark part,” Wellman declared, referring to the JAG firings. “This is the most dangerous move yet,” he wrote, calling it a “Friday Night Massacre.”
“When I was the Public Affairs Officer for six different general officers in the latter part of my career in the Army, my best friend was always the Judge Advocate General of the command,” Wellman explained. “The good JAGs are unafraid to speak truth to power and ensure the law is followed to the letter. Pete Hegseth hates those JAGs. This is a man that openly supported and campaigned for the pardons of multiple war criminals who were justifiably prosecuted and convicted based on evidence from fellow service members for the torture and murder of civilians in combat.”
Wellman appears to suggest that firing the JAG attorneys could precede possible enactment of the Insurrection Act.
“When you run out the reasons to fire the lawyers by a SecDef and President who do not respect the rule of law, it is clear that the intent is to remove barriers from breaking the laws and military regulations,” he said. “The obvious reason is usually the right one.”
“We know that Project 2025 and Agenda 47 both included references to enacting the Insurrection Act and using military forces to put down public protest and assist in mass deportations and interments. Lawyers with a loose relationship with the law would happily approve actions that skirt the letter of the law and provide legal cover for outrageous uses of our apolitical military against our own people.”
And he suggests those three fired JAG lawyers could have been the “guardrails” to stop a possible invasion of Mexico, Canada, Greenland, or Panama — or the use of the military against American citizens, should Trump choose to do so.
“Who do you think are the people that would have interpreted international law, military regulations, and treaty obligations when the military is ordered to carry out air strikes and raids in Mexico against the newly designated ‘international terrorist’ drug cartels?” Wellman posits. “Who do you think will be advising the service chiefs on use of their forces for seizing the Panama Canal, Greenland, or the utterly comical, but entirely real chance of an invasion of Canada?”
“What about looking at the law and military regulations on the use of force against civilians? Remember, the former SecDef refused to order troops to shoot protestors in the legs under Trump’s first regime. I have no doubt that Hegseth with the right lawyers won’t share that restraint next time.”
Watch the video above or at this link.