Undermining America’s National Defense
Creating a domestic danger
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s decision to deny retirement benefits to transgender members of the Air Force being separated under administration policies banning their service is leaving many who have served honorably feeling ‘betrayed and devastated.’ Service members who have served between 15 and 18 years in the Air Force can receive retirement benefits. Still, Hegseth’s ruling denies this benefit to transgender service members, giving them the choice to accept a lump-sum separation payment offered to junior troops or be removed from the service without compensation. Trump’s policy banning transgender service members is being challenged in court.
While this particular action is capricious and cruel, as are the executive orders, E.O. 14168 and E.O. 14183, media coverage of the matter has missed the broader issue—its potential impact on national defense.
Several key points are emerging from this that anyone concerned about the U.S. military’s ability to perform its core mission should be aware of.
First, there is the slow degradation of morale among troops across all services, as service members worry that anyone could be next on the chopping block. Low morale undercuts any unit’s fighting ability, and in the long term, this could impact the quality of people lining up to join the military. There is also the concern: today, transgender troops; tomorrow, who? Will others be banned for religious, gender, or ethnic reasons?
There are signs that just such attacks are already underway. Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first female Chief of Naval Operations, was fired without any clear explanation in February, leaving the military without a single woman in a four-star general or admiral leadership position. With the military facing difficulties in meeting recruiting quotas, the impact this will have on the willingness of women—and minorities—to enlist is unknown, but probably negative. Another troubling sign is Hegseth’s war on ‘woke’ civilian instructors at the senior military schools, and his push to replace them with uniformed instructors. This move, if he is successful, will degrade the quality of instruction given to future military leaders, depriving them of a diversity of views, which is an asset, not a liability. The other problem that this move fails to take into account is where the military instructors will come from in services that are already struggling to meet enlistment quotas. This is particularly acute when only 23 percent of young people are qualified to serve without a waiver.
The defense secretary has also been on a campaign to restore Confederate symbols to the military, subverting the will of Congress to defend ‘proud’ Confederate history, including restoring a Confederate memorial to Arlington National Cemetery. The signal this sends to members of the military who are ethnic minorities, who in 2017 made up 2 percent of the forces, is decidedly negative, with the attendant negative consequences on force morale.
When these factors are taken into account, along with everything else this administration is doing with and to the military, it spells potential disaster for the military’s ability to fulfill its primary duty of defending the nation against foreign enemies. Military units, National Guard and active duty, have been pulled away from their primary missions to engage in Trump’s massive anti-immigration campaign, with deployments along the southern border and to Los Angeles to support ICE operations. While these actions might not have specifically violated the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of federal military forces for domestic law enforcement except in highly unusual circumstances, they degrade citizen trust and confidence in the military, with negative consequences for national security. The latest move by the administration, to deploy the National Guard in the nation’s capital, using the false pretext that crime in the city is out of control, only further exacerbates the civil-military relationship.
All of the incidents above have received media coverage, but as discrete occurrences, without any analysis of their combined impact on military readiness and morale, civil-military relations in an already polarized and divided country, and their combined potential to undermine U.S. national security. Not enough has been said about the secretary’s positions before being appointed, in his 2024 book, War on Warriors, where he wrote disparagingly about women, people of color, and LGBT people in the military, and that he didn’t think the military should be focused on or even engaging in rooting out extremism in the ranks. Any one of these things is problematic, but when taken together, they are frightening. They raise the specter of a military, organized for domestic deployment in support of the regime rather than to defend the nation against foreign enemies.
Brick by brick, these actions, like water dripping on a rock, are eating away at our ability to defend the homeland from the real threats it faces. I served in the U.S. Army from 1962 to 1982, serving two tours in Vietnam, and I recall the 1970s when the military struggled with declining morale. Bitter sectarian divisions, desertion, and poor discipline, with the army, during the final years in Vietnam, plagued with racism, drugs, and ‘fragging’ of leaders, threatened to destroy the military from within. Coming out of Vietnam, the Army was demoralized and undisciplined, and it took nearly a decade to undo the damage. The lesson to be learned from that terrible experience is that the U.S. military, as strong as it is, is not immune to the effects of poor leadership, and when things go wrong, it takes a long time to undo them. In the 1970s and 1980s, we were at risk of being unprepared should an adversary decide to take advantage of our weaknesses. One has to ask if we can afford that risk today.