TRUMP DOWNGRADES THE US MILITARY

The firing of Joint Chiefs Chairman Charles Brown is 'appalling'

Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Charles Brown Jr. listens to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth answer reporters’ questions before a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Pentagon on February 5. / Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

Last week, Eliot A. Cohen, one of America’s preeminent defense intellectuals, a conservative with whom I had major disagreements after 9/11, surprised me by publishing a bitter critique of President Donald Trump’s purge of the Pentagon’s leadership in the Atlantic. He was especially incensed that Trump fired Air Force General Charles Brown as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, America’s highest military post, and replaced him with an unqualified lieutenant general who had no experience running a senior joint command.

Trump’s “sacking” of Brown, Eliot wrote, “was completely legal—and appalling.”

I wrote to Eliot and asked him if he knew of Brown’s work over the past year personally engaging with military and political leaders in Israel, Iran, and Russia to keep Israel, after its bombing successes in Lebanon and Syria, from taking its air war to Iran. The broad scope of Brown’s personal interventions was not known to the world’s media, and they were not always shared in detail, I have been told by one of his close associates, with President Biden and his senior foreign policy advisers.