The letter calling for the removal of President Joe Biden from office from 120 retired US generals and admirals follows a long pattern of interference in politics by senior officers and appears timed to force Biden to reverse his plans to pull all military forces out of Afghanistan, military analysts told Sputnik.
More than 120 retired US generals and admirals published an open letter on Thursday in which they expressed concern over Biden’s mental and physical condition, as well as the policy of his administration.
“The mental and physical condition of the Commander in Chief [Biden] cannot be ignored. He must be able to quickly make accurate national security decisions involving life and limb anywhere, day or night,” the letter reads.
SIGNIFICANT NUMBERS
Former US Army Military Intelligence officer and ex-CIA official Phil Giraldi said the call by the officers was not unprecedented, but the number of them willingly to publicly speak out on the subject was unusual.
“It is not completely unprecedented as a number of former military and intelligence officers signed on to statements regarding the inadvisability of re-electing Trump but the numbers here are significant,” Giraldi, a founding member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity said on Thursday.
Giraldi also expressed skepticism whether Biden’s mental and physical health had deteriorated to the extent that the generals and admirals claimed.
“I am wondering about the comments about Biden’s condition. He seems a bit doddery but where is the evidence that it is more than that? I do not know,” he said.
Giraldi suggested that the letter was meant to pressure Biden to reverse his commitment to withdraw all US military forces from Afghanistan by September 11 this year.
“I wonder if this is appearing now in the form it is in to force a reversal of the Afghanistan decision? It smells of something like that,” he said.
US MILITARY MEDDLING IN POLITICS
Veteran Pentagon analyst Pierre Sprey agreed that the Generals and admirals’ letter fitted into a long pattern of attempted interventions in policymaking by serving and retired senior military officers going back to the 19th century and the US Civil War.
“There is nothing unprecedented about our generals meddling in US politics. Quite the opposite: there hasn’t been a period in American history when generals and admirals weren’t meddling in politics, particularly during the wartime and the run-up to war,” he said.
Usually, the most flagrant among those many meddlers also happened to be rather poor military leaders, Sprey recalled.
Notable examples included Gen. George McClellan during the US Civil War, 19th-century naval warfare theorist Adm. Thayer Mahan, World War I US military commander in Europe Gen. John Pershing, Gen. Douglas MacArthur in World War II and the Korean War, US Army Air Force commander in World War II General Henry Arnold and special forces commander General Maxwell Taylor, Sprey said.
“Among all the avenues of political meddling available to our generals – and some of those avenues have been very successful indeed (sadly) – perhaps the silliest and most useless is signing letters en masse,” he said.
However, the latest letter was weak in its analytical assessments, Sprey pointed out.
“Though indeed Biden is a disaster for the country and the world, the shallow and astonishingly primitive Trumpista platitudes stitched together by these 120 military troglodytes utterly miss the mark of Biden’s dangerous incompetence. Their letter will sink into historical oblivion, leaving nary a ripple,” he said.
The former military officers in their letter called on all US citizens to get involved at all levels to elect politicians, who will act to save the nation and hold those currently in office to account.
