Posting #32: The Story that Serving in the US Military is the Highest Achievement

(This will be my last posting during the holiday period, since I think we all need a rest. I will return on Wednesday, January 15. Happy holidays!)

The story: Americans are told that having been or being a military serviceperson is the peak achievement one can reach. This story appears when we sanctify their service with parades, awards, and solemn gatherings throughout the year, when our recruiting advertisements extol their teamwork, commitment to the nation, and to their own self-discovery, when we are told in the news media that a good deed was done by a serviceperson or veteran or we acquit a veteran who killed someone, and we patronize their businesses because they are military veterans. These stories lead to our assuming that servicepeople are the most patriotic, the most dutiful, the most honorable, the most law-abiding, and the most capable of all American citizens.

My take on the story: This story sounds like fetishization.

Granted, since at least 1973, the All-Volunteer Military has had to recruit rather than draft to populate its ranks, so one can understand—but maybe not accept—the hyperbolic advertising needed to persuade Americans to join. Frequent references to World War II’s “greatest generation” is needed to erase the generations who participated in the disastrous wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

I can admit that my experience as an adult with the military—through ROTC and on active duty—was transactional, since it was made clear to me and my eight siblings from an Army family that we were responsible for funding our college educations—and we WERE expected to get college degrees. As children of a career Army officer, we were advantaged when it came to taxpayers funding our college educations, and we were also expected, I think, to take full advantage of that benefit. My two older sisters went through college on the Walter Reed Army Institute of Nursing where they were paid as commissioned officers, my four-year Army ROTC scholarship paid for my tuition and fees at a very expensive, small liberal arts college plus gave me a large account at the bookstore and a monthly stipend, four of my siblings went to the even more expensive West Point (though one left after two years with no obligation), and all of the other people I encountered while serving on active duty were more concerned about staying in the military long enough to get a pension—not duty, honor, or country.

So I am not persuaded that this story that all servicepeople, current or past, are the most venerable of all Americans. Praise and thanks for service feels patronizing, a kind of thanks that you served and not me. The effusive praise and thanks also, I think, tries to obscure who Americans really admire: those who are paid large amounts of money, regardless of the dishonorable work they do, like military contractors, hedge fund managers, social media influencers, and owners of prison corporations.

But this notion that Americans who have served in the military—especially in war zones—are the ultimate, most capable patriots persists, and I think it is behind two of the most reckless of President-elect Trump’s cabinet nominations: Tulsi Gabbard for the Director of National Intelligence and Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense. Both have served in the Army National Guard (which is a part-time job) and were deployed abroad in war zones, which seems why, in line with the story, they were nominated by Trump. But their very nominations are hazardous to the United States because they are singularly unqualified.

Which may be Trump’s point: to disrupt if not crash the national security institutions. As Heather Cox Richardson says in a December 1, 2024 Substack posting, “His picks seem designed to destroy the institutions of the democratic American state and replace those institutions with an authoritarian government whose officials are all loyal to Trump.”

First, Tulsi Gabbard is Trump’s nominee to be the Director of National Intelligence (DNI).

The DNI oversees 18 US intelligence agencies—two independent agencies (the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency), nine Department of Defense agencies, and seven elements of other agencies. This constitutes about 100K people and a $72B budget. Being the Director requires not only a deep and broad understanding of what intelligence is and how it functions, it also necessitates an ability to coordinate efforts among all these civilian and military intelligence gatherers and analysts—including US allies. To former Republican representative and former Air National Guard officer Adam Kinzinger, “This role, the top job in America’s huge, powerful, world-beating intelligence-gathering and analysis enterprise, requires someone with steadfast integrity, sound judgment, and an unwavering commitment to the security of the United States.” Consequently, the law establishing the DNI says “it is desirable” that either the director or the principal deputy director of national intelligence be an active-duty commissioned officer in the armed forces or have training or experience in military intelligence activities and requirements.

Gabbard’s experience. According to Wikipedia, Gabbard has utterly zero experience in intelligence operations or executive experience in managing an extremely large, multi-faceted group, nor has she served full-time on active duty. While Gabbard acted on behalf of veterans when she served four terms in the House of Representatives, none of those actions had anything to do with intelligence. And since she left the House, she has done nothing more to earn Americans’ trust. As Kinzinger puts it, “What I saw in Gabbard when we were in the House was a politician who seemed more concerned with self-promotion than serious governance.”

But golly, even though she has never had anything to do with intelligence and has never served full-time on active duty, as the law prescribes…at least she’s been in the military!

After high school, Gabbard is reported to have worked for an organization her father founded, Stand Up For America and, from 1998 to 2004, for The Alliance for Traditional Marriage and Values, an anti-gay marriage political action committee. She also is reported to have founded, with her father, Democratic State Senator Mike Gabbard, The Healthy Hawai'i Coalition, which promoted protection of Hawaii's natural environment. In 2002, at the age of 21, Gabbard dropped out of Leeward Community College, where she was studying television production, to run for election to the Hawaii House of Representatives. Most notable about her 2-year term in office was that she successfully opposed a state bill legitimizing same-sex marriage. (It was legalized in 2013.)

Gabbard also enlisted in the Hawaii National Guard in 2002, volunteered to go to Iraq in 2004 with a Medical Company, attended Officer Candidate School in 2007, was commissioned as a Military Police officer, and served in Kuwait from 2008-2009. Sometime between 2007 and 2015, Gabbard was promoted to First Lieutenant and then Captain, and in 2015 she was promoted to Major in the Hawaii National Guard. Also in that period, Gabbard earned a BS in Business Administration from Hawaii Pacific University, served on the Honolulu City Council for a year and, in 2012, won a seat in the US House of Representatives.

In Gabbard’s first two-year term (2013-2015), she worked on behalf of military veterans with the Helping Heroes Fly Act and the Military Justice Improvement Act. In her second term (2015-2017), she successfully pushed through a bill to award the Congressional Gold Medal to Filipinos and Filipino American veterans who had fought in World War II and successfully introduced Talia's Law, which sought to prevent child abuse and neglect on military bases. (She also is notorious in this term for having met secretly with Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian dictator.) In her third term (2017-2019), Gabbard unsuccessfully introduced the Off Fossil Fuels (OFF) Act and the Securing America's Election Act, which required paper ballots. In her fourth term (2019-2021), Gabbard co-sponsored the No More Presidential Wars Act, which tried to reclaim for Congress its constitutional responsibility to declare war and, with then-Representative Matt Gaetz, introduced unsuccessfully a bill to drop criminal charges against Edward Snowdon, the former NSA employee who had leaked classified documents. She also introduced a bill to release Julian Assange from prison in the UK while he waited to be extradited to the US. In all those terms, she did not serve on the primary House committee on intelligence: House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

In 2020, Gabbard announced her candidacy for president, running as a Democrat. By 2022, she had left the Democratic Party and was actively campaigning for Republicans like JD Vance and Kari Lake. She condoned the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, appeared regularly on and often guest-hosted the Tucker Carlson Tonight show until it was canceled, and is a Fox News paid contributor. She joined the Republican Party in 2024.

So, Gabbard has no intelligence work, no full-time active duty, and no executive experience at managing a large and complex institution, none of the skills that would qualify her to be the Director of National Intelligence. Plus, she praised the autocratic moves of Syria’s and Russia’s dictators. It is reported that Putin is “gleeful” about her nomination.

But, golly, she’s been in the military!

For comparison, consider the experience of the current DNI, Avril Haines, who has not served in the military but has an abundance of experience in the intelligence world.

Haines earned a BS in Physics (1992) from the University of Chicago, and, after leaving her PhD program in Physics at Johns Hopkins, earned her JD at Georgetown University Law Center (2001). She began her career in 2001 as a legal officer at the Hague Conference on Private International Law. In 2002, she clerked for Judge Danny Julian Boggs, a US Appeals Court judge. From 2003 until 2006, she worked in the Department of State, first in the Office of Treaty Affairs and then in the Office of Political Military Affairs. From 2007 until 2008, she worked for the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations as Deputy Chief Counsel for the Majority Senate Democrats. From 2008-2010, Haines worked for the Department of State as the assistant legal adviser for treaty affairs, when she was appointed to serve in the office of the White House counsel as Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Counsel to the President for National Security Affairs at the White House from 2010-2013. In 2013, Haines was appointed deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and then, until 2016, the Deputy National Security Advisor.

In the interim between Trump and Biden administrations and before she was nominated to be the Director of National Intelligence, Haines was appointed to multiple posts at Columbia University. She was a senior research scholar and deputy director for the Columbia World Projects, a program designed to bring academic scholarship to some of the most fundamental challenges the world is facing and was designated the program's director in May 2020. Haines was also a fellow at the Human Rights Institute and National Security Law Program at Columbia Law School. Before her nomination as DNI, Haines was a member of the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service and a distinguished fellow at the Institute for Security Policy and Law at Syracuse University. She was confirmed by the Senate 84-10, with ten Republicans voting against her confirmation.

Since 2005, when the DNI was created as an outcome of the 9/11 Commission, other DNI’s include longstanding members of the Foreign Service, ambassadors, retired senior military officers, former CIA analysts, former senators and representatives and, during the first Trump administration in acting capacities—i.e. not confirmed by the Senate—the former Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, a former public relations consultant, and, for a single day, the chief operating officer of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

So while I might be showing my academic scholar colors, I think we can agree that, by comparison, Tulsi Gabbard is in no way qualified for this position. Trump might as well nominate me for the job!

Second, Pete Hegseth is Trump’s nominee to be the Secretary of Defense.

The Secretary “is responsible for policy development, planning, resource management and program evaluation. [She oversees] the offices of top civilian defense decision-makers with regard to personnel, weapons acquisition, research, intelligence and fiscal policy, as well as offices the Secretary establishes to assist in carrying out assigned responsibilities.” As of November 2022, the Department of Defense is the largest employer in the US and the second largest employer in the world. The Secretary is responsible for over 1.4M active-duty service personnel, over 778K National Guard and reservists, over 747K civilians, and manages a massive budget of nearly $900B. The secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force report to the Secretary, as do four national intelligence services and eight other agencies, including those who conduct research, administer contracts to defense contractors, and manage the joint services schools. The Joint Chiefs of Staff report to and advise the Secretary of Defense, but also advise Homeland Security, the National Security Council, and the President. The Secretary ultimately is responsible for billions of dollars in defense acquisition, treaty alliances across both the Atlantic and the Pacific, a rigid chain-of-command structure that has been decades in the making, and has access to the nuclear command-and-control procedure. Clearly, the job is an immense one, requiring inordinate judgment, diplomatic and collaborative skills, and experience with executive management of vast national security institutions.

Hegseth’s experience. According to Wikipedia, Hegseth has zero executive experience in managing an extremely large, multi-faceted group with a huge budget, and what little executive experience he has was desperately unsuccessful. He led two small veterans’ groups, the first of which—Vets for Freedom (2007-2009)—demoted him after he led the group to insolvency. From 2013-2016, Hegseth was the executive director for the Koch-funded Concerned Veterans for America, but because of his mismanagement and alcohol abuse, he was forced to resign. As of 2014, Hegseth has been a regular contributor to Fox News. In 2019, his primary success was persuading then-President Trump to pardon three men accused or found guilty of being US war criminals.

But, golly, he has military experience so he must be qualified!

After allegedly refusing an appointment to West Point—which would have required he serve five years on full-time active-duty and three years in the Individual Ready Reserve—and completing a BA in Politics at Princeton in 2003, Hegseth was commissioned as an infantry officer in the (part-time) Minnesota National Guard and worked (full-time) for Bear Stearns as an investment banker (preceding its 2008 collapse). In 2004 his unit was sent to Guantanamo, where he was a platoon leader of about 30 people. He volunteered to be sent to Iraq following his time in Cuba, where he served again as a platoon leader and then as a civil-military operations officer, or a staff officer, not a leader. In 2012, after he’d been demoted at Vets for Freedom, he resumed part-time active duty as a captain and was sent to Afghanistan to train Afghan forces. (I gather that he returned in 2013.) In that same year, he completed a two-year Master’s in Public Policy at Harvard (which he vowed to return in 2022) and was hired as the executive director of Concerned Veterans for America. He was forced to resign in early 2016. During that 2013-2016 period, he was promoted to major in the National Guard but joined the Army Individual Ready Reserve, meaning he was less likely to be deployed. (Remember, he was a Fox contributor starting in 2014). In 2019, Hegseth rejoined the Guard but permanently left in 2021 when he was identified by his unit as an “insider threat” and so was prevented from attending Biden’s inauguration with his unit. Since 2016, he has published five books, all of whose publishers publish conservative non-fiction (Broadside, Center Street, Threshold Editions).

So the only experience Hegseth has as a military leader was minimal, as a platoon leader, and his two roles in executive leadership of very small veterans’ organizations ended disastrously. His fuller experience is as a pundit on Fox and in his books. Maybe that is what counts more to Trump.

For comparison, consider the current and 28th Secretary of Defense, Lloyd James Austin, III. According to Wikipedia, he graduated from West Point in 1975 and was commissioned as an infantry officer. As a youngish officer, he served in West Germany, with the 82d Airborne Division in North Carolina, as a company commander in a recruiting role, completed a Master’s in education, and returned to West Point as a Company Commander of cadets. He was the Operations officer for the 10^th Mountain Division (about 32K people) and held a wide range of executive positions in that unit. He returned to the 82d Airborne Division as a battalion commander (about 1200 people) and eventually the Operations officer of the division (about 57K people). Later, he was a brigade commander in the 82d (about 5K people), he served as an Operations officer in the Pentagon, and, in 2003, he led the US invasion of Iraq.

Austin subsequently commanded the 10^th Mountain Division in Afghanistan, the 18^th Airborne Corps, the Multi-National Corps in Iraq (about 152K people), the entire US force in Iraq, became Vice Chief of Staff of the US Army, and commanded CENTCOM (which was responsible for 20 countries in the Middle East and Central and South Asia, or about 150K people). Austin retired in 2016 as a four-star general. Between his retirement from 41 years in the full-time, active-duty military and being nominated to be the Secretary of Defense, Austin served on the boards of defense contractors, a healthcare firm, and operated a consulting firm. Austin was confirmed by the Senate with a 93-2 vote.

Other Secretaries of Defense have also spent distinguished careers in the active-duty armed forces, in the defense contractor world, in academia, and in the US government as civil servants and elected officials.

So what?

Much more has been made in the press of the two nominees’ character flaws than of their dismal lack of qualifications for the positions Trump has nominated them to. Gabbard is castigated for having visited and praised the recently-deposed Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad, and having approved Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. She also has been accused by ex-aides of reading and repeating Russian propaganda, of belonging to an anti-LGBTQ+ “cult”, of being childless, and for transactionally flipping her political orientation from Democratic to Republican. Meanwhile, Hegseth is reviled for his extreme alcohol consumption (often on the job), his refusal to wash his hands, his multiple marriages and infidelity, his Islamophobia, homophobia and racism, and his general misogyny: his mistreatment and sexual assault of women, his comments that women do not belong in combat, his Christian Nationalist religious belief that not only expects women to be subservient to men and should not be permitted to vote, it also hopes for theocracy and a Christian crusade against Muslims.

Both Gabbard’s and Hegseth’s character flaws are, to say the least, troublesome for the positions to which they’ve been nominated. I have a hard time imagining that, with these personal obstacles, they’d even be able to get security clearances, the fundaments of both jobs.

But that neither has had anything even approximating the professional experience to hold these roles in the US Government is, I think, the greater concern. Nearly 100 former diplomats, intelligence, and national security officers, appalled at her nomination and her lack of qualifications, urged the Senate to hold closed-door hearings for Gabbard’s case, given the need to protect both American and allies’ intelligence sources. About Hegseth, even his Fox colleague, Gretchen Carlson, wrote on X: “From silly diner interviews on Weekend Fox and Friends to Secretary of Defense? I never thought I’d say I’m stunned about any pick after the election but nominating Pete Hegseth for this incredibly important role? Yes he’s a veteran … and?” Senator Elizabeth Warren also expressed her disgust with the nomination: “A Fox & Friends weekend co-host is not qualified to be the Secretary of Defense.” Adam Kinzinger added on X, “Wow. Trump picking Pete Hegseth is the most hilariously predictably stupid thing.” And former Trump White House aide, Alyssa Farrah Griffin, was most anxious about Hegseth’s lack of experience in the very institution he was being nominated to lead and disrupt: the Pentagon.

Because both nominees are so blatantly and supremely unqualified, one must wonder why Trump is doing this. Why does he want in these critical executive roles two people who show no evidence of being able to do these two massive jobs? Or even reform these institutions? Is it a matter of politicizing these historically apolitical institutions, so that the military and intelligence are answerable to the current political administration and not the Constitution? Or weaponizing them against both Americans and allies, so the institutions act against the so-called “enemies within” or anyone who protests against Trump’s administration? Or commercializing them, so they do the work for businesses like those led by the many billionaires Trump has nominated for Cabinet positions?

Or does Trump, by nominating a pair of people who are incompetent at the jobs in the institutions as they exist currently…just want to wreck the institutions so he can say, “see how government doesn’t work?”

Your guess is as good as mine.

But one thing is certain: Trump’s judgment is reckless.

Trump apparently is no more cautious at picking people to perform these crucial jobs than he was:

· when he bankrupted at least four different companies before he was first elected;

· when, as President, he suggested Americans inject disinfectants to cure them of Covid;

· when he constantly lied—aka a Russian propaganda technique, the “firehose of falsehood”—to the American people;

· when he incited—the riot? the insurrection?—after his failure to win in 2020;

· when he continued to declare he had not lost in 2020;

· and when he performed the most crucial job in the world right now: being the American president.