Former Air Force leader urges Pentagon to stand up and 'say no' to Trump

Then-Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall in Washington D.C., March 7, 2024. (U.S. Air Force photo by Eric Dietrich/Wikimedia Commons)

On September 1, the New York Times published an op-ed by Frank Kendall — who served as U.S. Air Force secretary under former President Joe Biden and offered a scathing critique of President Donald Trump's foreign policy and policies at the Pentagon. Kendall hasn't become any less outspoken about the Trump-era Pentagon since then. And during an interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour, he laid out some reasons why he finds Trump's foreign and Pentagon policies so troubling.

Amanpour asked Kendall what he is "most concerned about" that prompted him to writing a public letter "against what's happening in the Pentagon."

Kendall responded, "I'm very concerned about how our military is going to be used. It's already been used in some ways which almost all legal authorities believe is unlawful. The most egregious version of that is the extrajudicial killings of alleged drug dealers in the Pacific and the Caribbean. The campaign has been going on for about a year now."

The former U.S. Air Force secretary went on vehemently criticize Trump's handling of the war with Iran.

According to Kendall, Trump "initiated" a "war with Iran" even though it "was never authorized by Congress."

Kendall told Amanpour, "And so, none of our military leaders that I'm aware of have stood up and said no, this is unacceptable. But the election's coming up. I'm very concerned about how our military might be used in the context of the elections, either leading up the elections, during them or following them if there's unrest."

Kendall continued, "Part of the piece I wrote recently was to let our senior military leaders know that the things they seem to be doing as defense mechanisms, pretending everything is going well — and then kind of portioning off their role in terms of advising and supporting the president to be very narrowly defined of purely defined — is really not appropriate. It's a copout. They have broader responsibilities."

In his New York Times op-ed on September 1, Kendall wrote, "Denial is one of the two approaches the nation's senior military leaders seem to have taken to cope with Donald Trump's presidency. When they aren't ignoring how abnormal things have become, they turn to the other approach, claiming that they have no responsibility for the actions the armed forces have been ordered to take because those orders were 'policy' choices outside the scope of their duties. This is a copout, and it is putting our democracy at risk."

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