President Donald Trump’s “harebrained” approach to the American armed forces is in the process of destroying the military, an Army veteran explained on a conservative website on Thursday.
“You know, you get somebody like Secretary Hegseth in charge of the Department of Defense, and that's what you get,” Margaret Donovan, a lawyer and Army JAG veteran, told The Bulwark’s William Kristol on Thursday. Donovan was describing how the military in Iran killed 120 schoolgirls during a botched bombing. “You get this harebrained operation, and the very first strike, something that, nearly every former military lawyer, probably current military lawyers, if they could speak freely would consider a war crime, or otherwise unauthorized under the law of armed conflict. You have that, and lest you thought that was a fluke, that sort of rushing into an operation ill-prepared and not fully thought out in terms of your legal basis. We have February 28th, and so that's the opening of the Iran War.”
Donovan later elaborated on how Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has blatantly politicized the military at Trump’s behest. Among other things, she said it is eroding the military’s revered meritocracy by rewarding soldiers based on their political preferences.
“It is completely unusual for the Secretary of Defense to go by name down a list of potential promotions and decide I'm just going to pick a few people that maybe he read about on his X feed or God knows what else, and pull them off,” Donovan told Kristol. “It undermines the entire system that the military is built on, which is that you are promoted based on merit, based on your experience, and based on your capabilities. And not because, who knows what's informing Secretary Hegseth’s men and most of the rest of the cabinet, it's whatever they see on their ex-feed that day.”
She concluded, “So it is very disruptive, I think, all the way down the line, because particularly when you see these officers that people owe their lives to, excuse me, quite literally, who have been to combat with these men and women, and seeing them get sort of picked off because the strong implication is that the secretary has deemed them politically dislikable. And there's just virtually no evidence of that in their military careers. It's extremely disruptive.”
When Kristol asked Donovan about the broader impact on the military, Donovan said that she is “extremely” worried.
“I'm as worried as any other military veteran who's looking at this and is just kind of horrified by what is going on and hoping that everybody that is still in uniform is holding the line,” Donovan explained. “And standing up for the principles and remembering the oath they took, whether they were an officer or enlisted.”
She added, “I mean, the other troubling piece to that, and I know we don't have to go into detail about this now, but I worry about the promotions. I also worry about the military justice. When I wasn't overseas doing strike cell stuff, I was a military prosecutor back in the United States when I was domestic. You know, what I have seen especially with the sort of aviation misconduct over the past couple months, is if you are doing something that is deemed MAGA, or you are doing a flyover past Kid Rock's house, then you're fine. You're not going to get in trouble, and there's no military discipline for you. But there's a different standard for everybody else.”
In a separate report in July, The Daily Mail reported that the military is so politicized that top officials, including Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, are accused of not relaying troops’ observations to the president.
“Two MAGA-connected Republican lawmakers, who were granted anonymity to speak candidly, have shared their concerns about Trump's military leaders,” the Mail reported.
Also in July, macroeconomist Dean Baker deduced that the military’s request for $1.5 trillion to prosecute the Iran war will cost every household an average of $4,600 each. In February Joseph Bosco, who served for President George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, warned that the military is losing its greatness under Trump. For him, it was how Trump’s transactional attitude toward foreign policy has led to betrayals of longtime allies like Ukraine and Taiwan.
“History will brand the U.S. failure to ensure Ukraine’s victory and prevent Taiwan’s fall as the time when America fell from greatness and her ‘cunning’ but miscalculating enemies plunged the world into a new global conflict,” Bosco wrote in The Hill.
