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TRUMP DOWNGRADES THE US MILITARY
The firing of Joint Chiefs Chairman Charles Brown is 'appalling'
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Last week, Eliot A. Cohen, one of America’s preeminent defense intellectuals, a conservative with whom I had major disagreements after 9/11, surprised me by publishing a bitter critique of President Donald Trump’s purge of the Pentagon’s leadership in the Atlantic. He was especially incensed that Trump fired Air Force General Charles Brown as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, America’s highest military post, and replaced him with an unqualified lieutenant general who had no experience running a senior joint command.
Trump’s “sacking” of Brown, Eliot wrote, “was completely legal—and appalling.”
I wrote to Eliot and asked him if he knew of Brown’s work over the past year personally engaging with military and political leaders in Israel, Iran, and Russia to keep Israel, after its bombing successes in Lebanon and Syria, from taking its air war to Iran. The broad scope of Brown’s personal interventions were not known to the world’s media and were not always shared in detail, I have been told by one of his close associates, with President Biden and his senior foreign policy advisers.
Cohen responded that he did not know of any specific “things of this kind”—background meetings with world military and civilian leaders—but that he had had “multiple conversations” with Chairman Brown “about the nature of our strategic challenges, particularly in the Indo-Pacific.” “Unlike many generals I have known,” he said, Brown was “an exceptionally keen and inquisitive listener.”
Cohen’s comments echoed what I have been hearing about the general since his appointment by Biden in May of 2023 and his Senate confirmation that September. Once confirmed, Brown had no substantive meetings about his activities with the president or his two senior foreign policy advisers, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.
He was a lone wolf in a dysfunctional White House with an ailing president and a senior staff committed to hiding the extent of the president’s disarray. I was told at the time by a senior American official that the new chairman chose “to play a major role in settling down” the foreign policy issues confronting the White House “in Syria, Iran, Russia, and Yemen.” He mastered the details of the Ukraine War by learning the history of the devastating World War II tank battles between Germany and Russia that took place in familiar sites today, such as Kursk.
“Brown was a superb fighter pilot,” the official told me, “and learned to ask questions. ‘What is the mission? What’s the weather? What’s my fuel status? We got the job done. Now what are we doing next week in Israel?’” He also learned to share information among his excellent staff in the Pentagon and those allies who needed to know, the official said, about the progress of the Russian war in Ukraine and the chance of a ceasefire and settlement. He learned how “different militaries worked” and the limits of American power.
He was not surprised when word of his end came from Trump. “He knew he was on the way out” as Trump came in. “He understood that Trump did not understand the military or the importance of the chain of command.
“Today’s soldiers don’t want a secretary of defense”—referring to Pete Hegseth, the Fox TV anchor who is now confirmed as the secretary—“who works out and goes jogging with them. His job is to be a leader and not to be one of the soldiers. Trump doesn’t understand this. Sheridan and Grant were not out playing with the boys. They were planning the next step in the Civil War.”
“Do not think,” the official told me, “that Brown had his feelings hurt because Trump liked someone better to be the chairman. He understood that Trump had no clue about what the chairman of the Joint Chiefs does, and could do for him. Trump’s view of what these generals do is childish—derring-do and all that. He did not get the message—senior generals do not lead from the foxhole.”