“I’m So Smart, Listen to Me” Has Led To Historic Catastrophes

In a New York Times piece, “All Men Are Created Equal, Not Everyone Agrees“, Kim Phillips-Fein correctly critiques the current trend of rich men who disparage equality and want us to give way to whomever they take to be the exceptional few. She quotes billionaire Peter Theil and others that there are such special people, themselves included of course, whom we should defer to. She defends equality but points out that unfortunately notable people throughout U.S. history have disputed the idea that all are equal. It’s the same ridiculous and horrendous mistake that Ayn Rand made, which will be describe.

First, “All men” should obviously be shortened to “All”. All genders, all colors, all sexuality, simply “All”. The Times piece implies that but let’s state it explicitly.

Second, as the piece points out in quotes from various men, they confuse the meanings of equality. They claim that because not all have the same intelligence or productivity, that equality is therefore a myth. Well of course not all have the same capabilities or temperaments. The equality staked out in the Declaration of Independence is equality of value. Bright or not, greatly productive or not, each is a human deserving, no, requiring the full respect, and treatment-with-value as every other. That these men of claimed brilliance stumble over this simple distinction highlights their shortcomings. History shows that those same blind spots have created catastrophes.

To explain, let’s look at how this is all a repeat of the mistake Ayn Rand made. A mistake so absurd and deplorable as to, again, highlight its own shortcomings.

Well over a decade ago I read Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”. Long before reading it I had known her philosophy, Objectivism, and felt it had some truth but was incomplete. Knowing that, I never felt the need to read her novel. When I did read it I was surprised at it’s core theme. The core thing that she expresses relentlessly, almost without pause, throughout her long novel, is her complete contempt for almost all people.

It’s supposed to celebrate the individual, but just like in real life, actions speak louder than words. In her story there are maybe 25 people in the whole U.S. who are virtuous, productive and capable. All of the other 99.9999 percent are idiots who couldn’t even feed themselves if not for the work of this handful of worthies.

This is not some exaggeration. This literally is the story. The brightest man goes about finding all the other men who can think and are productive (they are almost without exception men), and convinces them to leave society and live in their own compound. Their expressed purpose is they think society is so messed up it deserves to collapse, and that if this small group withdraws it will collapse. Indeed the end scene is several of them flying over New York City watching as transportation and power and lights fail. Society disintegrates into chaos with, we’re given to understand, starvation and all the worst results you can imagine. All because this handful of people withdrew and the rest of us idiots are incapable of keeping the lights on without them.

A philosophy of productiveness, of initiative, of responsibility for oneself is exactly correct as far as it goes, like one side of a coin. The side of the coin she missed has most of the value of everything from the teachings of Jesus, to the philosophy of the Western World in the constitution. Her extreme elitism stands in contrast to the open compassion of Jesus, and to our constitution. To our central idea that we hold all people in such high esteem that the sanctity of every individual is our core. That the sanctity of the wisdom of the people, through democratic elections, is the foundation of our government. She claims to believe that, but her book tells a different story.

It is the bulk of the people, workaday people, whose industriousness, ingenuity, and character creates pretty much everything worthwhile. Their relentless building, generation upon generation, of cultures, economies, societies, cities, philosophies. Far from being unable to feed ourselves or keep the lights on, we are the ones who grow the food and literally do keep the lights on. Who did she think she was and how did she come to be so bizarrely arrogant and blindly ignorant? How does one come to think that the very people who grow all the food and do all the work couldn’t keep things going if not for the “blessed” presence of her and a few who think too much of themselves? If Musk and Theil and some of their fellows wanted to leave now, leave their companies to the direction of others, and go live in a compound away from the rest of us, they are welcome to it.

Adding a note here about the current crop of uber-rich, it is also the work of the many that created the wealth owned by the few rich men now claiming superiority. As directors they may have ambitious ideas and state the goals but then every step of carrying that out is done by competent, workaday people. The many built the wealth that those rich few now stand on to claim their superiority.

Unfortunately, it is often those few that are exceptionally effective who are too good at amassing power. They leave the workaday people with less than what their work should gain them, get them frustrated, play on their fears, play groups off each other, and end up undermining the good world that the work of the bulk of the people creates.

Rand’s one-sided coin, her philosophy of logic without heart, is dangerous. In her story not only do her elites withdraw, some actively sabotage the work of the many, under the idea that their collapse is needed in order to have a clean start toward a better future. Better in the eyes of one person, Ayn Rand. That’s the exact same mistake Mao Zedong made in China, starving millions, certain it was necessary in order to lead them to a better future. There is nothing more dangerous than moral certainty without heart.

We humans, we many, contain both, logic and heart. Our ideas are great because they have both, from New Testament compassion to the democracy and rights in our constitution. Rand missed that. Missed it in a most extreme way. Missed the best 99.9999 percent of it.

Now this current crop of uber rich want to repeat all of that mistake.

They are amazingly good at some things, at amassing money, and spearheading organizations of engineers to build spaceships and satellite networks and the like. At the same time they readily demonstrate that they are very bad at some essential human skills and understanding.

Take Elon Musk’s DOGE project to radically cut government spending. Wantonly hacking away at parts of an organization in the “move fast and break things” mode and then building new things as you go is a great way to advance a technology company. But it’s a terrible way to approach governing when the “break things” part is real peoples’ lives who may be ruined in the mean time.

Musk either didn’t know that, which would emphasize that his skills do not extend to human leadership, or he didn’t care, which would be worse. It verifies that even though these men are uber-accomplished they have flaws which disqualify them from leadership regarding the lives of the many.

Mao Zedong, as noted, was also amazingly capable and accomplished. He rose from being a peasant to leading the people of the most populous country to completely transform it. But, oops, the holes in his understanding of humanity led him to impose policies that created a famine that killed 40 million people. In a current parallel, there is a very credible estimate that when the DOGE project mostly eliminated U.S.A.I.D., the foreign aid agency, it resulted in 600,000 additional deaths worldwide, in the first year.

Being good at some things does not qualify one to mess with peoples’ lives. The fact that these current uber few don’t even seem to have a sense of what their limitations are, that they are too un-self-aware to know that they don’t know, is such a fundamental disqualification they would be terrible choices for most high positions. Yes, let them lead companies. But don’t let them anywhere near the governing of the people.

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Human beings love the sun. They go to the beach to lie in the sun. They build patios next to their houses where they can sit in the sun. Humans truly love the sun until there is too much of it. When there is too much sun for too long, it gets hot, and humans go inside to get out of the sun and the heat. “Inside,” in most of the developed world, means air conditioning. Human beings love air conditioning, because inside, out of the sun, air conditioning keeps them cool.

To be “inside” means to enter a building. Buildings need roofs to protect what is within them from the sun and rain. The walls of buildings contain the air-conditioned interiors and help keep the buildings cool enough for humans to use them.

Roofs, in addition to protecting buildings from the sun and rain, make them visible from the air. When you fly over a city and look down, what you see are roofs. In big cities, you can identify buildings by their roofs. In Washington D.C., the Capitol’s dome is highly visible from the air. The distinctive shape of the White House, which used to have a central area flanked by two wings, made it identifiable from the air. In New York City, the Empire State Building and other landmarks are identifiable by their spires, or slanted roofs, or gabled roofs.

The problem with roofs from a purely military standpoint is that their easy visibility from the air makes them targets. Buildings tend to be grouped together by the purposes for which they were built. Downtown Manhattan contains buildings filled with banks and the headquarters of financial firms and their trading floors, and of course the people who run the banks and trade the stocks on the trading floors.

On military installations, some buildings contain command and control facilities filled with communications equipment and computers that control the complex weapons systems the military uses. Other buildings contain military equipment and weapons and military personnel. When during the first days of the war on Iran, the U.S. hit a girl’s school by accident, that was because its building used to be part of a complex of Iran Revolutionary Guard military command and control buildings. U.S. intelligence had identified the IRGC buildings by their roofs. The mission that was carried out using bombs and missiles destroyed all the buildings in the military compound, including the building that used to be in the IRGC complex but was now a girls’ school.

The Wall Street Journal published an extraordinary article yesterday on how the Iranian military damaged a major military installation in the Middle East, the Naval Support Activity (NSA) base in Bahrain. Using maps and images from Google Maps, the Journal showed images of the Navy’s complex taken by a Google satellite. It looks like any Naval or other American military facility anywhere – a complex of warehouse-like buildings spaced tightly together separated by streets and tree-filled plazas. There is even a field set up for baseball and football games.

The Journal followed the initial photo of the Naval complex with blown-up photos of buildings that had been hit by Iranian drones. There were holes in the roofs of the buildings, one after another. One of the buildings, a large square structure with a roof covered in air conditioning equipment, was the headquarters for the Navy’s Fifth Fleet, which controlled all the ships you read about during the war – the three aircraft carriers, the destroyers and guided missile ships and mine-sweepers.

The close-up photo of that building showed a hole in its roof. Not a big one – the hole was in a corner of the building consisting of probably one-eighth of its roof. The Journal reported, “The building is no longer usable, according to a U.S. official.”

Another photo was a street view of a completely destroyed building that contained the Naval Security Forces training center. The Journal reported without comment, “The NSF provides security for the base and routinely conducts emergency preparedness drills.” Drills the Journal did not bother to report did not work to protect the huge Naval Support Activity base at all.

Another street view photo showed extensive damage to a building that housed Task Force 59, identified by the Journal as “the Navy’s first drone and artificial intelligence unit, historically housed drones in one bay of the complex.” The Journal dryly reported that Task Force 59 was “charged with using unmanned drones and AI systems to monitor key Middle East waterways.” The Journal did not bother reporting how badly Task Force 59 failed in its mission since the main waterway it was supposed to “monitor” was closed and controlled by Iran using the same sort of drones that destroyed the task force’s headquarters.

The Journal also published a video showing a Shahed drone striking and destroying a domed radar that was part of a complex of two AN/GSC-52B satellite communications terminals. The drone strike happened in the “opening hours of Iran’s retaliatory strikes.” The Journal did not note that the destruction of the terminals and radars that cost $20 million each left them unusable for the remainder of the four-month war. The Shahed drone flew at a speed of 140 miles per hour and cost about $5,000.

According to the Journal, no American navy personnel were injured during the Iranian drone strikes, but the base was sufficiently damaged that it was closed for the duration of the war. The headquarters of the Fifth Fleet was moved somewhere else. The equipment that was destroyed stayed in the ruined buildings, however, and was unusable because it was damaged, and because there were no Navy sailors there to operate it.

The buildings at the naval base in Bahrain were not the only military installations destroyed by Iran using $5,000 drones. Iran hit every military installation in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Iraq and Kuwait – 20 military and diplomatic facilities in all, according to the Journal. The only deaths caused by the Iranian drone strikes happened at a U.S. facility in Kuwait and an airbase in Saudi Arabia, seven in all. Six airmen were killed when a U.S. refueling tanker crashed in Iraq.

Now the U.S. is “reevaluating its footprint in the region,” according to the Journal. The Pentagon is considering moving its military installations west, out of range of Iranian drones. Israel is one place where new U.S. bases might be constructed. The Pentagon is considering putting some of the new bases underground.

Underground bases do not have roofs. However, as the U.S. showed in attacks on Iran during the war and last year, underground facilities can be destroyed by missiles and bunker buster bombs.

Because the naval facility in Bahrain had the initials “NSA,” I decided to take a look at the National Security Agency, also called the NSA, headquartered in Maryland. Driving on I-25 past its location, several exits are marked for the NSA and Fort McNair, the American military intelligence base. Both are large complexes of many buildings. Here is a satellite view of the NSA headquarters:

Lots of buildings. Lots of roofs. The only thing protecting that U.S. facility from Iranian drones, or Russian drones, or Chinese drones for that matter, is the Atlantic Ocean. I can tell you that the NSA is not protected from attack by missiles, however, because our government thinks that our military facilities, including the Pentagon and the CIA, are invulnerable. Just as they thought all those military bases in the Middle East were invulnerable. There were no missile or drone defenses for the military facilities in the Middle East that have now been closed, every one. The Shahed drone in the video could have been shot down by a soldier firing an M-240 machine gun that costs several hundred dollars. It could have been shot down by an M-163 Vulcan air defense gun, a rotary “Gatling” style weapon that fires 20 mm cannons and has been in service since 1968. I commanded a platoon of M-113 armored personnel carriers like it in 1969. It is equipped with a pod of Stinger heat-seeking anti-aircraft missiles that have been in service since the mid-1960’s. There are also shoulder-held versions of the Stinger that could have shot down the Shahed drone that destroyed millions of dollars in communications equipment in Bahrain and sent the entire Navy Fifth Fleet packing. So we could have used weapons that are 60 years old to defend the billions of dollars of military bases got knocked out during the war we just lost against Iran.

Here is a Vulcan and Stinger pod mounted on an M-113 platform.

The United States had billions of dollars in military equipment in the Middle East, including artificial intelligence facilities, high-tech communications gear, extraordinarily expensive radar domes attached to anti-aircraft systems, several of which were destroyed as they sat undefended on the ground at U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia.

Iran has none of that sophisticated military stuff. Iran had Shahed drones that it manufactures in underground facilities that were not destroyed during the war. Iran has missiles that it also manufactures underground that were not destroyed during the war.

It was announced today that Trump ordered a retaliatory strike on Iran because they hit a passing cargo ship with a drone recently. The ship was damaged, but there was no loss of life, and it kept going. So, Trump ordered our military to hit “Iranian missile and drone targets,” according to the New York Times. The strikes lasted 90 minutes.

Goody-goody. That must have scared them.

Everything we have costs millions and millions of dollars. It takes a multi-hundred billion dollar defense budget to run the whole thing. We have military installations all over the world, more than 100 of them according to military experts. All our weapons and military personnel are protected from the sun and rain under roofs in buildings. But they are not protected from drones and missiles. Look at what Ukraine is doing with inexpensive drones to Russia right now. There is a gas shortage in Moscow. Crimea has been “turned into an island” by drone strikes from Ukraine.

It was recently reported that an AI system known as “Mythos” made by Anthropic took five hours to completely “infiltrate nearly all of the National Security Agency (NSA) classified systems within a few hours” during a “red-team” evaluation and test of vulnerabilities. So, all those NSA buildings in Maryland in the satellite photo were rendered inert in a few hours by a couple of computer techs sitting at terminals typing on keyboards. Wow. I feel safer already.

It was also reported that Russia is “bombarding” and “seeding” AI systems all over Europe with propaganda. So, if you’re in France or Germany and you ask Chat GTP or Grok a question, you just might get Russia’s version of an answer today. AI systems are said to “learn” from raking through billions of bits of data, and what they’re learning in Europe is being controlled at least in part by Vladimir Putin.

We spend billions and billions on defense and security, and we are not secure, and our military facilities overseas are not safe. If drones can knock out military bases in the Gulf, they can be used by non-state actors in Africa and Asia and elsewhere to damage or put entirely out of business all those military “assets” we have spent decades establishing.

The Wall Street Journal quoted a retired admiral who commanded our Navy in the Middle East saying the Navy base in Bahrain “has been there for more than 50 years. I think there are some things we would do differently.”

The admiral is right. This is the world we live in now. We are going to have to do a lot of things differently, or we will go broke on a “defense” that can’t defend and a system of “intelligence” that isn’t intelligent enough to know that a country like Iran can locate the roofs of our military installations and knock them out with weapons they make in underground bunkers for way less than what Trump just spent to ruin the reflecting pool on the mall in Washington.

In short, unless we get smart and make it fast, we are fucked.

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For the first time in history, the country in which I live – the Netherlands – has issued a Code Red alert due to the heat. Code red is only issued when the environmental circumstances are such that there is a significant risk of “destabilising of society”. I can only remember that we’ve had this for very severe storms in the past. Today, we have it for heat. In Utrecht, it’s right now 37 degrees Celsius, but due to high humidity levels, it feels like 40. In the South-East of the Netherlands, temperatures are around 39 degrees, hence feel-like temperatures well over 40. And the reporting we saw from London and Paris looked even worse.

The weather presenters here have done a good job in explaining the relation to climate change. Some right-wing politicians keep downplaying these explanations, saying we should enjoy the lovely weather with a cool beer by the pool, but I think reality is hitting too hard for that kind of ideological nonsense to have much influence very longer.

One friend sent me a message saying that he has started to suffer from climate anxiety; if this is the beginning [for us!], where will it end?

I’m trying to remain hopeful, and am hoping (and pleading) that this experience will make more people realise that we need to massively step up our efforts on climate action. We need to scale up climate change adaptation immediately to protect those most at risk of the harms of climate change. Most of those people are not in Europe but in the Global South, and given a widespread lack of care of what happens to people in poor countries, I’m more worried about them (and have been wondering for a long time how we can make the biggest emitters – which in fact are not Europeans but Americans, Canadians, and others – care about the effects on the most vulnerable in the Global South. Let me know if you know, because I don’t.)

But we must also redouble our efforts on climate mitigation. Some people are still trying to downplay the need for this. I saw a Dutch commentator on social media say that even if we were to put out all the fires today, the world would still get warmer. Yes, that’s true, but it’s also beside the point. If we carry on as we currently do, the world will warm up much more and we will suffer far more serious harms from climate change than if we step up our climate mitigation efforts. It is the choice we face between a slightly warmer world and a much warmer world with far more unpredictable weather and other climate risks.

All of this reminded me of the The Ministry of the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson’s unrivalled science fiction novel, which anyone who hasn’t read yet really ought to read. In that novel, after the situation had deteriorated to unimaginable extremes, humanity – with a little help from climate rebels – finally found the courage and the political strategies to tackle the climate crisis. A great deal of political action and persuasion is still needed on numerous fronts, but we can only hope that the current heatwave in Europe will make a contribution to turn the situation around for the better.

Trump’s Declining Support Exposes the Limits of America’s Fixed-Term Presidency

So, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is out after less than two years at 10 Downing Street, mostly victim of continuing bad economic news.

Moreover, Starmer resigned when it became clear that his own Labor Party’s confidence in his leadership had eroded so substantially that he could not lead.  In effect, Starmer did the right thing, getting out the way to allow a different team to take over a drifting ship.

Compare that to the American cousin country where Donald Trump daily is showing plummeting polling over war, tariffs, excessive deportation and abuse of the prosecutorial tools of the Justice Department and other government agencies for political gain. Beyond his growing political problems internationally and domestically, Trump now finds himself unable to get his legislative proposals and now even some of his appointees through even the Republican majorities in the House and Senate.

Trump is being ridiculed for his focus on self-glorifying projects to etch his name on buildings, add Trumpian gold flourishes everywhere and obsess about “vandalism” causing the algae bloom in the National Mall’s reflecting pools during summer heat – all while problems of hunger, health, pollution and global instability grow.

Trump cannot or will not explain why he talks peace and war practically in the same sentence any more than he can provide any sustainable evidence for his anti-immigrant zealotry or his insistence that “rigged” elections result when voters decide against him.

Needless to say, Trump is not talking about walking away even for the good of a country that finds him increasingly out of touch. If we’re depending on the coming election is going to have to speak loudly about changing directions, the recent primaries show us that there is an anger building that Trump is seeking desperately to redirect.

Parliamentary Systems

Of course, the differences stem from our systems of government. The parliamentary system in Great Britain, as in many other countries, requires greater adherence to popular responsibility and accountability than do the fixed presidential terms of our democrat republic. At least as significantly, other presidents have chosen to live within the written law and the spirit of law that has meant even powerful American presidents have shown some deference to Congress, the courts and to the national public.

Trump’s recently repeated statements of unlimited and unrestrained power show it is not constitutional frameworks or chosen systems of governance that is at stake, but his chosen means to prefer authoritarian dictators throughout world history as his guides to leadership.

It would be bad even if Trump were successfully handling the multiple problems facing this country through his self-selected bullyism. But on so many fronts, Trump is coming up so short that his stylized approach to power is to blame others for his own bad choices, to insist that ill effects should be seen as wins, and that anyone who dares to air or offer public criticism is inviting investigation or criminal prosecution.

Worse, Trump, his family and businesses are making money from our collective inability or lack of will to hold him accountable for his actions.

Parliamentary systems are no panacea. Great Britain is paying the price for its populist Brexit departure from the European Union a decade ago, and it has not balanced either its decline as a world power or its economic problems against the rising social services needs it must deliver.  And so, we are seeing the emergence of a seventh prime minister in a decade, hardly a sign of stability.

Some parliamentary systems, like Canada’s or Australia’s, seem to function relatively smoothly, despite occasional ideological transitions. On the other hand, countries like Israel find that parliamentary systems do not protect a public from a dominating politics that depends on increasingly thin coalitions built as much on ego as national will.

For a host of legal, practical and philosophical reasons, Americans are not going to switch systems anytime. But we could do a much better job of requiring that our leaders at least hear what the criticism they earn and the rightness of owning up to their errors.

Our Elections

The localized primaries increasingly seem to be seen on the national scale. As the spotlight has moved during the primaries from state to state or district to redrawn district, each is being seen as much a mini referendum on Trump as on any local issues. The races have been marked by a huge influx of campaign money and a slew of he-said, she said political ads from anonymized political action groups.

The only issue of lasting note among Democrats seems to be who has been positioned as the loudest anti-Trump vote, regardless of the fact that as a whole, the Congress has proved ineffective at stopping Trumpism.

What this Tuesday’s election reaped was a bushel of headlines about the influence of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani to knock off two Democratic congressional incumbents, progressives both, and elect a third in a district with a retirement, with younger, brasher, more solidly anti-Israel candidates. From all accounts, it was Mamdani’s backing with young voters of color that made the difference for his slate more than any one policy factor.

Our politics are as much about perception about where our politics stand as it is about the various labels or party banners being waived.

The takeaway, however, is that it is Trump who should be worried, even as his popularity fell anew in the most recent polls. The U.S. system is slower to respond that those parliamentary set-ups, but the inexorable rise of anger and frustration over the combination of military and diplomatic decisions contrary to the Trump promises, the effects of prices and personal corruption are building.

“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.

The post Starmer Out, Where’s Our Accountability? appeared first on DCReport.org.

Christopher Donahue is a four-star general. He graduated from West Point in 1992 and served as an Infantry officer in the U.S. Army for 34 years. He will be forcibly retired on July 2.

These are the kinds of facts and figures you read about when Hegseth gets rid of yet another general officer. He has done it dozens of times since taking office last year, either forcing generals and admirals into retirement or firing them outright. In April, he fired three Army generals: General Randy George, the Chief of Staff of the Army; General David Hodne, chief of the Army Transformation and Training Command; and General William Greene Jr., the Army’s chief of chaplains.

Previously, Hegseth fired General Charles Q. Brown, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the military’s highest-ranking officer. He fired Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the Chief of Naval Operations, the highest-ranking admiral in the Navy. He fired Vice Admiral Nancy Lacore, who was chief of the Navy’s Reserve Corps. He fired Admiral Linda Fagan, the first woman commandant of the Coast Guard. The list goes on, and it’s long, and it features, as above, the names of many generals and admirals who are Black or female, or Black and female.

Recently, Hegseth took the unprecedented step of interfering with the Navy’s promotion board system and removed nine Navy officers who were on the list to be promoted to be one-star admirals. Three of those he removed were women, and two were Black men. The remaining list contained no female officers, even though women make up 21 percent of the active-duty Navy, and only two non-white officers. Racial minorities comprise 38 percent of the Navy.

Hegseth’s rampage through the senior ranks of the military was accompanied by constant referrals to “woke” generals and “DEI hires,” in reference to women and Black generals and admirals. His speech last September to all the senior generals and admirals and senior enlisted soldiers and sailors was replete with references to his campaign that the days of the “woke” military were over.

What Hegseth has been doing is removing general officers and admirals who were appointed to their ranks or achieved promotions as junior officers under Democratic presidents such as Joe Biden or Barack Obama. Let me tell you something that I know about general officers. They don’t care who was president at any time of their service. General Donahue came of age in the Army in the 90’s, when Bill Clinton was president. He was promoted to higher rank and served in the Pentagon when George W. Bush was president. He served in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan while Barack Obama and Joe Biden were president. He served most recently as head of the U.S. Army in Europe and Africa during the presidencies of Joe Biden and Donald Trump. During the time he was in charge of the Army in Europe, he oversaw the Army’s cooperation with the training and arming of the Ukrainian military, which for four years has been fighting against Russian aggression in their homeland.

I can tell you that General Donahue did not care who the president was. He cared about his job. He cared about the war being fought at the very edge of the area of his command in the Baltics and Poland. He cared about the possibility that if Ukraine fell to the Russians, countries in which U.S. Army soldiers served would be next.

Most of the generals and admirals removed by Hegseth served their country for more than 30 years, as General Donahue did, and General Charles Q. Brown did, as Admiral Lisa Franchetti did. To become a general officer is the equivalent of achieving a top position in an American or international corporation, except the pay is way, way lower. Four-star generals and admirals earn about $200,000 a year. Senior vice presidents and CEOs of corporations earn in the millions. During General Donahue’s command, he probably moved his family at least a dozen times, maybe more, as his assignments changed. Serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, he was not only in danger in combat, he was away from his family for years. I don’t have to look up his record to know that he missed his children’s birthdays and graduations from high school and college. He missed his wedding anniversaries. So did the admirals fired by Hegseth. When deployed on ships during their careers, they spent years away from their families.

Taking as an example just the latest victim of Hegseth’s purge of the military’s senior ranks, General Donahue served with hundreds of his fellow army officers. He served with West Point classmates, and fellow West Pointers who were senior to him as cadets. He served with hundreds of lieutenants and captains and majors. Donahue and his fellow officers went through the military’s schools with fellow majors and colonels at the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth and the Army War College in Carlisle Barracks. Donahue attended the Naval War College and the Naval Command and Staff College, equivalent to the Army’s school at Fort Leavenworth, so he became acquainted with Navy officers his own age and senior to him, with whom he would serve in later years in his 34 year career.

You can’t buy experience like Donahue and other generals and admirals had during their careers. You can’t pay for the friendships they made, the networks they became a part of. There were officers all the way through his career who were promoted to colonel and brigadier general and major general at the same time he was. The general officer corps is a kind of club of officers who have the same experiences, the same connections, the same sets of friends and acquaintances. As a lower ranking officer, Donahue served as an aide to senior generals at the Pentagon and accompanied them to Capitol Hill for hearings and meetings with members of the House and Senate. Donahue got to know the same members of Congress as his boss did. Later, when he became a general and served in positions of command and control in the Army, his connections on Capitol Hill really meant something. He was part of Special Operations in the Army, commanding Delta Force for two years and serving as operations chief at Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg. He got to know the entire leadership of the special operations officers and senior enlisted soldiers who serve “in the dark” on special operations, many of which we never heard about.

Let me put this as bluntly as I can: you cannot replace that level of knowledge and connections. You especially cannot replace the level of dedication it takes for officers, both junior and senior, to serve in these dangerous positions. There are other officers who served alongside Donahue, but there is only one of him, with his special experiences that came from combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and overseas with Delta Force.

At West Point and the Naval Academy and Air Force Academy, and at the various schools in the military, and in all the units in the Army and Navy and Air Force and Marines, there is one word used to describe the service of an officer like Donahue: honor. He served with distinction, sure. He has five Bronze Stars and three Legions of Merit to show for it. But most importantly, Donahue served honorably.

So did General Brown. So did Admiral Franchetti. So did General Greene, the Army chief of chaplains, who was pushed aside so that Hegseth could promote military chaplains who share his fundamentalist Christian Nationalist beliefs. Hegseth is not firing some generals and promoting other generals in an attempt to continue the tradition of honor and service that marks all the branches of our military. He is purging and promoting to politicize the senior leadership of our military so that they will be more likely to carry out his orders and the orders of the man who appointed him, Donald Trump.

A politicized military has nothing to do with honor. All that Hegseth cares about, all that Trump cares about, is loyalty – not to the Constitution, as the Oath taken by every officer swears their allegiance. Hegseth and Trump want loyalty to themselves, and that’s it.

A general officer such as Christopher Donahue represents a brick in the wall of the edifice of honor that this country has spent two and a half centuries building to defend our democracy against enemies both foreign and domestic. Trump and Hegseth are disassembling that wall, brick by brick, and replacing it with shit like Trump’s ballroom and the gold leafed Oval Office and the slime-ridden reflecting pool and Trump’s silly 250-foot-tall arch.

Arches and ballrooms and gold leaf have no honor. General officers like Donahue and Admirals like Franchetti have more honor in their lower lips than Trump or Hegseth could ever manage to summon forth from their tiny, corrupt souls.

We will recover from these fools and their crimes, but not easily and not quickly. They are throwing away 34-year long careers in the military, and they have nothing to replace them with.

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