[Salon] AMATEUR HOUR

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AMATEUR HOUR

The rookies will soon be taking the field

A battalion of Trump administration appointees will begin assuming their roles in defense of the nation in two weeks. There’s been a fair amount of skepticism, including here at The Bunker, about defense-secretary nominee Pete Hegseth’s lack of major-league military experience and his apparently unmoored morality (which he denies).

Other Trump national-security picks with scant martial backgrounds include Stephen Feinberg, a billionaire financier tapped to be deputy defense secretary. While the defense secretary is generally the Pentagon’s public face, it’s the deputy who usually runs the Defense Department day-to-day. Feinberg also donated to Trump’s presidential campaigns. John Phelan, Trump’s Navy secretary choice, also lacks military experience, but did raise more than $900,000 for Trump’s re-election. And Andrew McKenna, a private pilot and top candidate for Air Force secretary, also is such a two-fer: he lacks military experience but is a Trump donor.

Yet overlooking this Pentagon-pay-to-play for a moment, the lack of service isn’t necessarily a problem. After all, it was beribboned traditionalists and civilian national-security heavyweights who got us into Afghanistan— for 20 years — before ignobly losing. It has been the revolving door of generals, retired generals, and companies like General Dynamics that have procured disasters like the F-35 fighter, the V-22 tilt-rotor (PDF), and the Zumwalt-class destroyer.

So what’s to lose?

It's worth recalling a pair of defense secretaries The Bunker covered closely back in the day. One, Dick Cheney, had no military experience when he became Pentagon chief under President George H.W. Bush. Yet he played a key role in the U.S. winning 1991’s Persian Gulf War, killed the Navy’s A-12 stealth fighter boondoggle (miss it much?), and almost succeeded in killing the V-22. His successor, Les Aspin, seemed bespoke for the job. He had served as one of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s “whiz kids” as an Army officer. He spent decades in and around the military, ending up as chairman of the House Armed Services Committee before being tapped to run the Pentagon. But he stumbled badly in that job, and served for only a year before President Bill Clinton showed him the door. Experience, it turns out, is no panacea when it comes to running something as dysfunctional as the U.S. military. Fingers crossed!

SHOOTDOWN SNAFUS

They’re more common than you might think

If you were surprised when a U.S. Navy warship “mistakenly” — that’s the Navy’s word — recently shot down a U.S. Navy fighter over the Red Sea, you haven’t been paying attention. Too often — whether due to sloppiness, lousy intelligence, or a jittery trigger finger — the good guys hit the wrong target. The most recent episode happened December 21 when the USS Gettysburg shot down an F/A-18F fighter flying from the carrier USS Harry S. Truman. Thankfully, both crew members survived.

The screwup echoes the 1987 shootdown of a U.S. Air Force RF-4C by a U.S. Navy F-14. A year later, the USS Vincennes blew an Iranian airliner from the sky, killing 290. In 1994, a pair of U.S. Air Force F-15 pilots shot down two U.S. Army UH-60 Black Hawks over Iraq, killing 26. In 1999, an Air Force B-2 bomber killed three when it erroneously bombed the Chinese embassy in the then-Yugoslavian capital of Belgrade.

None occurred in the heat of battle. One additional check, often required by regulation but ignored in reality, could have averted catastrophe. The hardware designed to kill performs flawlessly. Too often the weakest link in the kill chain is the human brain.

“SHOW ’EM THE GOLDEN EXIT DOOR”

A new role for the U.S. military?

Almost half of Republican voters believe the U.S. military should round up undocumented immigrants in internment camps until they can be deported. “Republican voters (46%) are more than twice as likely as independent voters (19%) and more than five times as likely as Democratic voters (8%) to agree with this policy,” according to a post-election survey conducted by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute.

Trump has confirmed plans to declare a national emergency the day he is sworn into office. His advisers believe he could then divert dollars from the Pentagon to pay for border-wall construction (which he’s done before), use military bases to detain immigrants, and military planes to send them home. While U.S. troops generally can’t apprehend people within the U.S., Trump has suggested he’d invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. That could give him more latitude to send some of the estimated 11.7 million undocumented immigrants believed to be in the U.S. packing (the total peaked at about 12.2 million in 2007, 18 years ago, and evidence suggests the decline will continue).

Trump’s mass-deportation pledge — like his failed 2016 vow to build a wall along the southern U.S. border and have Mexico pay for it — faces headwinds. Honduras has threatened to end its cooperation with the U.S. military, and kick out U.S. troops based there, if Trump follows through. The U.S. Navy will likely face challenges building new ships if undocumented immigrants are forced to leave the country.

While the porous U.S. border is a serious matter, Trump and his allies have exaggerated its impact. In an effort to boost his campaign, Trump derailed congressional action that would have curbed the problem. Following the January 1 terror attack in New Orleans that killed 14, he suggested a border-crossing intruder was to blame before authorities identified the suspect as a U.S. citizen and U.S. Army veteran.

Deploying the U.S. military to grapple with an issue that should be handled by Congress and law enforcement is the ultimate in buck-passing. It’s what the U.S. military calls “mission creep” — expanding the armed forces’ role to deal with whatever assignment its civilian leaders have ordered them to do. Tasking the U.S. military for this assignment is especially rich given that it has been those civilian leaders — The Bunker’s looking at you, lawmakers — who have allowed the problem to fester for decades.

It’s also a pretty damn creepy mission to assign to the U.S. military.