Military Madness
Photo Credit: Koshu-Kunii-unsplash
In just one year, Trump’s military decisions, at home and abroad, have deteriorated our nation’s security.
When I graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1972, America was embroiled in the Vietnam conflict, and I was on my way to becoming an antiwar activist. Today, I’m even more of a pacifist than I was then, though I still have deep respect for the men and women serving in our military. It’s because of that respect that I’m so angered by the behavior of our ridiculous president.
Always obsessed with playing “tough guy,” Trump boasts of pushing defense spending beyond a trillion dollars annually, framing it as proof he’s rebuilding America’s might. Unfortunately, these infusions of money, unrelated to strategic discipline, are mostly theatrics. Instead of strengthening readiness, this pattern pushes the Pentagon toward headline-grabbing projects — like missile defense domes and border-security — at the expense of unglamorous work like training and maintenance, essential to keep a force in fighting condition. That’s partly why civil-military relations have sharply deteriorated in Trump’s second term.
We’ve seen troops booing Trump’s political opponents at official events. We’ve watched him federalize the California National Guard over the governor’s objections. And we’ve witnessed him deploying Marines alongside those Guard units in a domestic political fight. These all blur the line between a nonpartisan military and the political interests of a president, damaging the relationship between armed forces and the society they serve.
Morale suffers when service members see careers terminated for reasons unrelated to performance or law, like sweeping efforts to push out active-duty transgender personnel and high-profile purges of senior officials perceived as insufficiently loyal. When troops conclude that advancement depends more on personal fealty than on competence or constitutional fidelity, they either leave early or learn the wrong lessons about what kind of officer succeeds.
Recent Trump decisions have put commanders in impossible positions by ignoring legal guardrails on the domestic use of force. His repeated resort to federal troops for immigration-related operations inside US cities, including detentions during raids in Los Angeles, pushes the military toward a quasi-policing role that the Posse Comitatus tradition has long tried to avoid. Some retired officers, including a few I’ve spoken with personally, now openly warn that the US attacks in Venezuela and the pattern of activating Guard units without state consent is eroding the principle that the armed forces are loyal first to the Constitution, not to the president’s personal agenda.
This constitutional fog degrades readiness in a subtle but real way: commanders must now anticipate not just enemy behavior but also how to respond if ordered to act outside legal boundaries. Time and mental energy that should go into joint exercises, logistics, and innovation instead go into hedging against a commander-in-chief who treats law as an obstacle rather than a constraint.
Trump’s rhetoric toward NATO undercuts the collective security framework that US war plans actually assume. He has questioned whether the United States would honor Article 5 (the pledge to view an attack on one NATO partner as an attack on all). He has claimed that immigrants at our southern border constitute an “invasion,” fundamentally misreading what counts as an “armed attack.”
Furthermore, Trump’s portrayal of allies as freeloaders “off the front lines” is not only an insult to those nations who came to America’s aid in Afghanistan; it is also blatantly untrue. Peak deployment for the US in Afghanistan was slightly over 100,000 troops, whereas the 47 allied nations deployed a total of 41,893 troops. According to Jason Davidson, writing for the Watson Institute’s Cost of War Project, Canadian forces, rather than US forces, stood the greatest chance of dying (5.4%) and the UK the next highest chance (4.7%), whereas the fatality rate of US forces was less (2.3%).
When the president floats seizing allied territory such as Greenland or parts of Canada for US strategic use, he signals to both friends and adversaries that treaty commitments are transactional. That perception invites hedging abroad and forces US planners to contemplate fighting with thinner access, weaker basing rights, and less political support, no matter how enormous the budget may be.
In that sense, the danger of Trump is not only that a reckless leader is more willing to seek out conflict, but that his own policies leave the United States with a more politicized and isolated military on the day he decides to use it.
