Douglas Ollivant
There is clearly an assessment by the incoming Trump 47 administration, and a significant portion of its political base, that the military generally—and perhaps the Army in particular—has a leadership problem. This distrust is perhaps personified in Pete Hegseth, the nominee for Secretary of Defense, who wrote a book on the subject.
It’s perhaps easiest to say that there is a “vibe shift” regarding the generals.[i] As an observer, I can discern at least three different versions of this shift. The most overly political is the response to “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion” or “DEI” initiatives inside the services. Hegseth’s take is that the excesses of DEI have weakened the military by promoting the incompetent or unfit, and thereby discouraging traditional sources of recruits—rural white men—from joining.
The second version has to do with military performance during the long wars. The ambiguous ending of the Iraq war and the undeniable failure to achieve any war aims in Afghanistan—not to mention the debacle of the withdrawal—contribute to the judgment that the generals didn’t know how to properly fight such wars, and that they were frequently deceptive to both political leadership and the American people. Senior general after senior general assured us that the Taliban was unable to hold ground against the valor of the Afghan Security Forces. Either they were utterly delusional in their assessments, or they were lying to us. Neither is acceptable and points to a need for reform.
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