On this veterans day week there are a few things we rarely discuss. One is the separation of the military from civil governance. We are lucky as a nation, for the most part the military stays out of politics. While Trump has made that difficult and I will always respect those who err on the side of caution. It is a serious decision.
From , The Atlantic
The Slow-Boil Revolt
Retired senior military officers are growing more concerned that the Trump administration doesn’t want their advice—and they’re struggling with how much they can say publicly.
Say nothing as norms shatter around you, and you’re implicitly enabling a president who some of your former colleagues believe is threatening national security. Speak up, and you risk destroying the balance of power that protects American democracy.
“For the U.S. military, being apolitical is a critical element of civilian control of the military—an absolute in a democracy,” the retired four-star general Joseph Dunford told us in his first extensive comments since leaving active duty. “The alternative is a military dictatorship.”**************
The dilemma for retired senior officers now is whether the oath they took to the Constitution in military life requires deference to the sitting president—as, for example, Mattis has argued—or whether the president himself is such a danger to the Constitution that upholding the oath actually demands discarding the apolitical norm, as McRaven and Hayden have done. Brooks said that commenting on any politician in an ad hominem way represents the crossing of a Rubicon, and that he didn’t know what might force him to do so.
Kathy Gilsinan and Leah Feiger
But, he said, “silence itself, like being overly aggressive, can undermine the Constitution.”
