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It was never clear to me why General Christopher Donahue arranged to have himself pictured, complete with green-tinted night vision style special effects, on the tarmac as the last American soldier to leave Afghanistan. (According to a friend with intimate knowledge of what happened on the plane, the picture was “less than candid”) The performance was apparently intended to evoke the precedent of the Soviet general, Boris Gromov, who similarly cast himself as the last Soviet soldier to leave Afghanistan. Gromov did it on foot, walking across a bridge into Uzbekistan in February, 1989. As a civilian, he subsequently enjoyed a successful political career in Moscow, though it’s not yet clear if Donahue’s referencing of Gromov extends that far.
The general’s staged exit certainly made an impression, not least among denizens of the Washington defense intellectual blob who nestle at the feet of the uniformed high command and are aghast at War Secretary Hegseth’s loutish assaults on the medal-bedecked general officer corps, notably the recent abrupt displacement of Donahue from his four-star post as U.S. Army commander in Europe and Africa. The general’s forced retirement inspired an eloquent threnody in the New York Times from opinioneer David French, opening with an evocation of the “iconic image of the war on terrorism” - that Kabul airport picture - and summarizing Donahue’s military career as a string of military triumphs, including command of Delta Force, the Army’s elite team of dedicated assassins as well as directing operations against ISIS in Iraq and Russia in the Ukraine war.
There can be no denying that Hegseth, ardent proponent of misogynistic and racist purges among the upper ranks, is a repellant individual. But that should be no excuse to accord his four-star victims the status of martyrdom. They are the products of a system that subsists on threat-inflated budget bloat, supporting a top heavy tier of highly paid general officers - more than the US needed to fight World War 2 - who have grown accustomed to transitioning post-retirement to even more lucrative defense industry positions.
Interestingly, the worshipful attitude towards the general class prevalent in Washington and the media is not shared among more junior officers- those who were on fire bases or foot patrols in Afghanistan during a war that their seniors mendaciously claimed was trending toward victory.
“I have no respect for them, zero,” one former Marine company commander recently commented to me. He recalled a meeting of Marine four stars, which he observed as a staff aide, in which they discussed a planned boost to troop levels in Afghanistan. Agreeing that the move was militarily pointless, they celebrated it nonetheless because “it will blood our troops and do us good at budget time.” Another veteran with similar background expressed equally disobliging views, and pointed to the large number of service academy graduates who swiftly exit the military once they have experienced the system from the inside. “They’re usually the best and the brightest,” he added, “the ones that are left, who move up through the system, are second best. And don’t forget, Obama fired almost 200 generals during his eight years in the White House. But those generals had chosen their successors (through control of promotions) and those are the generals that Trump inherited. No wonder the Republicans are suspicious of them.”
Hegseth, insecure to the point of paranoia, undoubtedly has peculiarly malevolent reasons for jettisoning officers such as Donahue, or Army chief of staff Randy George, but some of that junior officer resentment of high command ineptitude is also visible in the former national guard major’s decisions. See for example the case of David Hodne, four star head of the army’s Transformation and Training Command until fired by Hegseth on April 2. Earlier in his career, while still a major he had been the “S-3”, the battalion operations officer, supervising the 2004 operation in which football star Pat Tillman was killed by friendly fire. The tragedy was the direct result of misguided commands from Maj. Hodne to split Tillman’s platoon in what was in any case a pointless mission. Despite this, he survived subsequent investigations, doubtless aided by the fact that the Tillman affair occasioned a tsunami of official coverups and lying, and glided effortlessly to four star rank until brought low by Hegseth.
Donahue has no similar SNAFU on his record, at least none that we know of. As a graduate of Delta force he was a member of what might be called the special operations cartel, officers who come through that component of the military, who tend to be notable for their hawkishness. A prime example was Eric Kurilla, whose career path had been in the elite Rangers, ultimately serving as Donahue’s predecessor as head of Central Command. He was known as “Israel’s favorite American General.” He reportedly persuaded Trump to attack Iran in 2025 and was subsequently feted by Netanyahu.
Significantly, even as the U.S. military lavishes contracts on Trump’s supporters, murders boat crews in the Caribbean, and wages an illegal war in the Middle East, not a single senior officer has seen fit to resign in protest. Only Joe Kent, formerly director of counter-intelligence, has had the character to so. That quality is evidently not in abundant supply in the Pentagon.
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© 2026 Andrew Cockburn
Washington DC, USA
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