Trump's Promises to Radically Change the Military

Since incoming President Donald Trump announced his campaign for reelection, the public has weighed and dissected the merits and shortfalls of his aims for the military.

But what has been missing is how these promises or inferences might come to fruition and what challenges they may face on their way to implementation.

In this episode, we spoke to two experts with collective decades of experience in analyzing military policies, both foreign and domestic. We talked about five promises – or policies floated in the media – that will likely see early headway in Trump's military. 

• Using the active-duty military for mass deportations.
• Rollbacks on transgender troop policies.
• Replacing "woke" generals.
• Restoring Confederate base names.
• And keeping the military "out of wars."

We asked the experts: Are these possible? And if so, what would they look like in practice? 

• Host Drew F. Lawrence interviews military policy experts on Trump's plans for the military.

Additional Resources

• Trump Won. Here's What That Could Mean for the Military.
• Trump Refuses to Rule Out Use of Military Force to Take Control of Greenland and the Panama Canal

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Transcript:

SPEAKERS

Michael O'Hanlon, NBC News, Katherine Kuzminski, Drew F. Lawrence, President Donald Trump

President Donald Trump 

We want a strong and powerful military, and ideally we don't have to use it. They said 'He will start a war.' I'm not going to start a war. I'm going to stop wars...And we have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics, and I think they're the -- and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary by the military, because they can't let that happen.

Drew F. Lawrence 

Since announcing his campaign for re-election, the public has weighed and dissected the merits and shortfalls of incoming President Trump’s aims for the military.  But what has been missing, in our view, is how these promises or inferences might come to fruition and what challenges they may face on their way to implementation.  In this episode, we spoke to two people with collective decades of experience in analyzing military policies, both foreign and domestic. We talked about five promises – or policies floated in the media – that will likely see early headway in Trump’s military. Using the active military for mass deportations. Rollbacks on transgender troop policies. Replacing “woke” generals. Restoring Confederate base names. And keeping the military “out of wars.” We asked the experts: are these possible? And if so, what would they look like in practice?   For Military.com, my name is Drew Lawrence. It is January 17th. And this is Fire Watch.  I spoke to Michael O'Hanlon, the director of research in the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, where he focuses on the use of military force and American national security. I also spoke to Katherine Kuzminski, the director of the Military, Veterans and Society Program at the Center for a New American Security. She focuses on personnel issues in the force and civil-military relations. You'll hear from both of them throughout this episode.   So before we get into these individual topics, I'm wondering if you could tell us what you're keeping an eye out for in the first part of Trump's presidency as it relates to the military.

Katherine Kuzminski 

The first thing I'm taking a look at is who we're going to have in senior leadership positions on the civilian side...for each of the services, and we now have a full slate of nominees for military department secretaries. But it will really matter who some of these under secretaries and assistant secretaries of defense and each of the military departments are, because those are the folks who will be charged with diving deep onto specific parts of how the military operates.

Michael O'Hanlon 

It was an open question to me as to whether Trump would, in fact, stand by Hegseth, who really does not seem super well qualified...but he did stand by him, and you know, and he persuaded most Republican senators, maybe all Republican senators, to do so as well. Now, I don't think Hegseth is a fool, but I seriously question whether he's been following key strategic issues studiously enough, whether he gets too caught up in certain ideological debates. That may be why Trump likes him. It's a reason why I'm wary about him, even though I think he's probably smart enough to do the job, he hasn't necessarily been preparing himself, given his relative interests and his desire to sort of fight the culture wars, more than to protect the nation and win its wars. You know, I also feel that Trump has indicated more of a seriousness by contrast, not only with the Rubio and Waltz appointments, but also with the Kellogg appointment, the retired General Keith Kellogg who is now going to be Trump's envoy, or special representative for Ukraine, and Kellogg's a guy who I've known for a long time and who stood by Trump for a long time, 10 years, going back to the original campaign, and certainly is a person that some people would criticize for his politics, but he's not a nasty guy. He's just simply like Trump and been a quiet advisor and supporter, and he's also a long standing serious supporter of American defense policy, going back to as many years in uniform. So, if Trump were just going to pull out the rug from Ukraine, he wouldn't have put Kellogg in the job. I don't think. So there is stuff to hold on to. There is hopefulness in the broader set of messages, but there are also a lot of big questions.

NBC News 

Well, now let's turn to a development in one of President-elect Trump's campaign promises, mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.

President Donald Trump 

It's like an invasion from within. And we're going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country.

NBC News 

Mr. Trump further outlined his deportation plan yesterday by responding true to a truth social post that's his social media platform, saying he will declare a national emergency and use military assets to deport undocumented immigrants.

Michael O'Hanlon 

I don't really know how you use the military to go around knocking on people doors and asking to see their ID cards, because that requires a process -- it might sound simple, but it requires a process of adjudicating when if somebody runs away from you, what do you do? How much force do you use to stop them? If they claim that they've got old ID papers -- Some of those look forged, but you're not sure how to assess if they forged. Is that really a job we think the military has been trained to carry out? And so when you work through the scenarios, you work through the tactical situations, it's just hard for me to see how the military does much more than provide general backup. But the more logical thing is to use the military at the border where the mission can be a little bit more simply specified. Obviously, military personnel are very smart. I'm not suggesting they're not as smart as American police, but they're trained to do different jobs. And they're not really trained to ascertain whether, in a mixed population of illegals and legals, a given person should be arrested, pursued whatever. In fact, we know that even when we're trying to do this sort of thing in a foreign land, like in Iraq or Afghanistan, with counter insurgency warfare, and we're trying to find the insurgents or the terrorists. It's very hard work, and we usually need to almost restructure and retrain the military to do this if we're going to do it well. In Iraq, it took four years before we got to the right approach. Now, legally, you can find a way to do it. Posse Comitatus allows the National Guard to do this kind of work, as long as they're not federalized. The Insurrection Act of 1807, allows even regular army to do it if the president declares an insurrection. And I don't put that past Trump, if things get bad enough, I don't think he will start with that.

President Donald Trump 

With a stroke of my pen on day one, we're going to stop the transgender lunacy.

Drew F. Lawrence 

In November, several media outlets reported that Trump was weighing immediate medical discharges for transgender service members. One estimate from a nonprofit said that there are currently about 15,000 transgender troops in the military. A spokesperson for Trump did not deny the possibility of the plan, but told us that, "no decisions on the issue have been made unquote." And going back to his first term, Trump reversed an Obama-era policy to allow transgender Americans to serve. In light of public comments denouncing Biden's reinstatement of the transgender service member policy from Sec Def nominee Pete Hegseth, the long and consistent policy could see yet again, another reversal.

Katherine Kuzminski 

Yeah, so this one is certainly complicated, and again, he did make moves in his first administration, but didn't necessarily talk about this on the campaign trail. For the audience, whenever something is a policy, that is fully owned by the executive branch, and so a president or a secretary of defense can change policy without having to go to Congress.

Michael O'Hanlon 

And even if you don't always institute a policy, you can create a climate that is less, you know, welcoming, and convince some people to leave.

Katherine Kuzminski 

If the policy were to change, does that mean you grandfather all the folks who are currently serving and just make it a policy for those who would enter in the future? Or are you separating individuals who are currently serving? So what will be left to commanders is to figure out how to discharge individuals with dignity for the service that they have provided to the nation, but if the policy changes, commanders won't be in a position to push back on the policy.

Drew F. Lawrence 

Also in November, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump's transition team was considering a draft executive order that would establish something called a "warrior board" to review whether top generals lack the requisite responsibilities to lead the military. And Military.com, reported that senior military officials were concerned the order would cut generals that Trump considers "woke" broadly defined as those who supported diversity initiatives or vaccinations, for example.

President Donald Trump 

Our generals and our admirals are now focused more on this nonsense than they are on our enemies. You see these generals lately on television. They are woke.

Michael O'Hanlon 

You know, if you were going to convene these kinds of warrior boards and try to get rid of, I think we have about 1000 flag officers in the US military. So that's one, two, three and four star general or admiral. And let's say that's the population that you're worried about, and you want to make some substantial dent in that population, so you want to maybe get rid of, let's say, dozens. That's going to be a pretty tall order to find dozens of people who have done egregiously woke things by whatever standard that would be defined. It would also create a requirement for many of the rest of that 1000-strong general, flag officer population to watch this happen. Or maybe even testify against their fellow generals and admirals. If Trump wants to do that, he's going to be weakening our military vis a vis China and other real threats. So what I think is more likely, is they will have their decision about which one or two or three or four or five sacrificial lambs to go after, or, you know, symbolic representations of the supposed wokeness and then claim that by firing them, they either took such people out of crucial positions or sent a message to the rest of the force to stop being so darn woke.

Katherine Kuzminski 

But the question of, can a president unilaterally fire general officers? The answer is yes. What a president can't do is unilaterally then back fill that position so they can nominate a new, say, combatant commander or service chief, but then that individual has to be confirmed by the Senate. The real challenge on the norm side is the perception that partisan alignment is a requirement for the job. General Officers are political actors. They are operating within a context where they're fighting for resources, for their service, for their combatant command. And so they are political positions, but they are not partisan positions. These individuals have been nominated to each successive rank by different presidents. So that matters, because we want to have consistency over administrations within our military profession.

President Donald Trump 

Should we change the name from Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg? So here's what we do. We get elected. I'm doing it. I'm doing it.

Michael O'Hanlon 

Yeah, you know, anything that's been legislated would presumably have to be unlegislated and and I just can't believe that Republicans are going to fall in line on this kind of an issue when they have such a narrow majority.

Katherine Kuzminski 

This is one where the law is what will constrain President Trump. The law keeps base names from being named after Confederate generals. However, it does not remove the President's authority or the executive branch's authority to rename bases. So the the furthest you could push it is to rename these bases something entirely new, but the law constrains him from renaming them after Confederates. The campaign promises and some of the comments that came up in Hegseth nomination of, we want to focus on lethality. We want an army that -- or a military that wins...The Confederates lost, right? And so that's also part of the debates, and part of the support for removing Confederate base names was not necessarily -- for some -- about the complicated history of the United States, but that these guys are losers.

President Donald Trump 

Remember when crooked Hillary Clinton used to say 'he's going to get us into a war? Look at him. Look at his rhetoric.' I said, 'No, my rhetoric is going to keep us out of wars. That's what happened. We had no wars.

Drew F. Lawrence 

And my last question is a broad one, because it's a campaign promise that entails keeping the military "out of wars." And at the same time, you know, he has suggested using, or at least his inner circle has suggested using the military for actions against the cartels in Mexico and South America.

Michael O'Hanlon 

I appreciate his desire to stay out of wars. And in fact, we've had a tradition since World War II of a lot of presidents, I think, exceeding their constitutional authority. And I think we need Congress playing a bigger role in decisions on the use of force more generally, and we need to be aware that we Americans, even though we tell ourselves we're a peaceful people, we're often very assertive around the world, including and especially in Latin America, historically. But then to come back to your specific question about cartels, of course, attacking them could be the exception ... that destroys the rule in this case. If we could solve the problem of fentanyl with one splendidly surgically, you know, Israeli-style 1967 surprise attack on 20 drug labs in Mexico and elsewhere, with or without the permission of those governments, that would be an interesting idea. And everything I know historically about trying to attack these kinds of targets with air power or Special Forces makes me wary that we can be successful. Anytime we think we can just deal with a criminal government like the Taliban in Afghanistan or Saddam Hussein in Iraq and do it surgically, we've been proven wrong. The fascinating thing about Trump and his relationship with the Republican Party, is that he wound up being one of the toughest critics of George W Bush, and he could get away with that and still win a republican nomination. So he understood that Republicans themselves had decided that the support they gave to some of these interventions of the early 21st century maybe was misplaced. Or at least the way it was translated into policy, was badly done, and maybe some of these illusions we were given of how it could all be a cake walk, to use the words of one of Bush and Rumsfeld's advisors, that that was unfortunate. So we got to be really careful about being talked into the possibility of future cake walks over new problems like drug production near our own borders.

Drew F. Lawrence 

Thank you for listening to this episode of Fire Watch. Thank you to our executive producers, Zach Fryer-Biggs and Jared Keller. If you enjoyed this episode, give us a rating. And as always, thanks for listening.