In the end, it was mostly blither. When Secretary of Defense Peter Hegseth announced a gathering of some 800 generals and admirals (with their senior enlisted advisers), rumors ran wild. Was the administration going to switch the commissioning oath so that officers swear fealty to the president rather than the Constitution? Was the secretary of defense going to publicly dismiss stunned three and four stars? Would he declare an American withdrawal from Europe and Asia to concentrate on hemispheric defense? Would he at least reveal the outlines of the new National Defense Strategy? None of those things happened.

Instead, we got a great deal of verbal incontinence, of two different sorts. President Trump—who initially seemed not to have heard about this planned gathering, but when he did dec

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