Americans will elect a new President in November. One of the hottest debating points in the ongoing electioneering in the United States these days happens to be who, as the 47th President, will consolidate and further the global military supremacy of the world’s number one power.
Will it be Donald Trump, the 45th President, or the incumbent Vice President Kamala Harris? In other words, whether Trump or Harris is best suited to be the next Supreme Commander of the US Armed Forces is a big question.
This question concerns the serving and retired personnel of the U.S. military. Who are they most likely to vote for?
As of June 30, 2024, the U.S. military has a total force of about 2.8 million, which includes about 1.3 million service members in the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, Space Force, and Coast Guard in “Active Duty”; about 738.000 members in “Reserve and national guard”; and about 754 000 “Civilians” working with the military.
They are deployed all over the world. If on duty outside their registered residences, they are encouraged to vote in elections electronically through email, fax, web-based portal, or app, depending on the facilities available or allowed in their respective domiciled states.
It is difficult to find out who they will vote for as they are debarred from publicly expressing their political inclinations as long as they are in the service.
Therefore, one could only guess, and the only way to guess what the U.S. military thinks about its Presidential candidates is by what retired military officials say or write about them. Here, the rationale is that the serving members share the same ecosystem as the veterans.
If one goes by the yardstick of these veterans’ preferences, Kamala Harris appears to be far ahead of Trump in the race to occupy the Oval Office.
A close follow-up of what the veterans have written in the leading American newspapers and periodicals or spoken on the news channels recently indicates that most of them believe that despite Trump repeatedly saying that no one loves the military more or has done more for them than him, he, in reality, has contempt for “military service, discipline, and tradition.”
According to Randy Manner, a retired U.S. Army Major General, who is part of the group National Security Leaders for America, which has more than 740 former military, government, national security leaders, and other public servants as members, has signed an open letter proudly endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris as the next President of the United States.
“While the U.S. military rightly prohibits active duty service members from engaging in partisan political activities or endorsements, as leaders who previously served our country in the military, government, and other national security positions, the other signatories and I felt a moral obligation to endorse the vice president as our next commander in chief,” he has revealed.
Apparently, this group, which includes a retired four-star Gen. Larry Ellis, a highly decorated veteran who served under 10 presidential administrations; his colleague, General Lloyd W. Newton; Admiral Steve Abbot, a former advisor to President George W. Bush; and General Michael V. Hayden, who led the CIA under him (President Bush), described Trump as a “danger to our national security and our democracy.”
Similarly, ML Cavanaugh, who co-founded the Modern War Institute at West Point after recently retiring from the U.S. Army, where he worked for 25 years, argues that Trump, when he was President, destroyed the concept of a professional military, which is not loyal to a party or a president but to all the people through an oath to uphold the Constitution.
“Today’s U.S. military is the world’s most powerful weapon, and in the wrong hands, it could become a potent political tool as well. This weapon must not be placed under an unfit commander in chief, as the former president showed himself to be during the previous administration and as he has vowed to be again if he regains power”, Cavanaugh wrote.
As President, Trump is accused of having damaged civilian-military relations. He used troops — and senior officers — in clearly political events, at times referring to “my generals.” He is said to have planned the use of the military in “suppressing” the racial unrest in many parts of the country following the killing of Michael Brown, a black American.
These military veterans seem to agree with the school of thought that says Trump is not a true Democrat as he, as the President, had joined hands with dictators like Kim Jong-un of North Korea, belittled the NATO allies, hurt the country’s economic growth by imposing tariff restrictions and challenged the integrity of the country’s electoral system.
However, their most important allegation is that Trump does not believe in the political neutrality of America’s armed forces, “a sacred principle of civil-military relations in the United States,” which was even sacrosanct for the highest-ranked Generals who became Presidents – George Washington, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Ulysses S. Grant.
Are These Accusations Fair?
There is another school of thought that does not think so. Senior analysts like Loren Thompson write “Love Him Or Hate Him, President Trump’s Defense Legacy Is Profound.”
For him, Trump is the first President in decades who did not commit the United States to new overseas military campaigns. He bought the military four years of relative peace in which the idea was to rebuild itself away from endless wars.
For Trump, and here he was right, China should be the main focus of U.S. military preparations for the foreseeable future. This must include new weapons designed and produced to meet Beijing’s challenge.
It was Trump who had called for robust modernization of the U.S. strategic nuclear forces. “All three legs of the Cold War nuclear triad—missiles at sea, missiles on land, and long-range bombers—were wearing out, and Trump subscribed to the Reagan philosophy of peace through strength. His administration fully funded a modernization plan inherited from Obama without exhibiting any of the latter president’s hesitancy about nuclear weapons. He also funded the first major modernization of the nuclear command-and-control system since the Cold War ended”, Thompson argues.
Going by the White House archives during his Presidency, Trump not only rebuilt the U.S. military but also created the sixth branch of the Armed Forces – the United States Space Force, the first new branch since 1947.
It was Trump who upgraded the U.S. Cyber Defenses by elevating the Cyber Command into a major war-fighting command and reducing burdensome procedural restrictions on cyber operations.
President Trump was said to have allowed over $2.2 trillion in defense spending for military modernization. He empowered America’s defense industrial base, directing the first whole-of-government assessment of the country’s manufacturing and defense supply chains since the 1950s.
Importantly, he had secured three pay raises for U.S. military personnel and their families, the largest pay rise for the troops in a decade.
Incidentally, Trump was the first American since Ronald Reagan not to start a war, directly or indirectly, though his regime had played a big role in destroying terrorist ISIS’ territorial caliphate in Iraq and Syria, killing its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and eliminating “the world’s top terrorist” Qasem Soleimani (One of Iran’s most powerful men and head of the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force, an elite unit that handles Iran’s overseas operations – and one deemed to be a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S.)
All told, however much the Democrats and their supporters, including military veterans, may dislike Trump, the fact remains that the Biden regime has stuck with many of the military trends that define Trump’s defense legacy.
But then, in politics, perception, not necessarily reality, matters, and these perceptions are essentially made or sustained by the elites controlling or using a country’s dominant media.
And here, Trump seems to be the victim, not a hero. He has hardly any big veterans to argue for him.
- Author and veteran journalist Prakash Nanda is Chairman of the Editorial Board of the EurAsian Times and has been commenting on politics, foreign policy, and strategic affairs for nearly three decades. He is a former National Fellow of the Indian Council for Historical Research and a recipient of the Seoul Peace Prize Scholarship.
- VIEWS PERSONAL OF THE AUTHOR
- CONTACT: prakash.nanda (at) hotmail.com
- Follow EurAsian Times on Google News
