AlterNet
This week, the top brass of America’s military — more than 800 four-star generals, lieutenant generals, major generals, and admirals — were summoned from their posts around the world to a conclave in Quantico, Virginia. The apparent reason? To listen to “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth and their commander-in-chief, Donald Trump.
Hegseth delivered a diatribe against political correctness, beards, fat generals, and women in combat missions. Trump gave a long, rambling, incoherent mess of a speech.
It seemed unlikely that the military’s top brass were summoned merely for this.
But if not, what was the real purpose of this unprecedented gathering? Other than Hegseth’s and Trump’s bonkers speeches, we don’t know. Was the event also used to distribute highly sensitive information? To enable face-to-face communications about pending changes in the use of military force? To get buy-in from the top brass for an agenda that had to be communicated in person?
Here are several of the views I’ve gleaned from military-watchers I trust about the real purpose of this gathering:
1. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says it was nothing but a pep talk. He and Trump merely wanted to speak to the generals and admirals about what Hegseth calls a shift toward a “warrior ethos” at the Pentagon.
Maybe. But without falling into a conspiratorial mode, I’ve heard some other possibilities.
2. Trump is gearing up to use the military to go after undocumented immigrants on a far larger scale than he’s already done. This is the concern of many who worry about Trump’s tendency to treat the military as an arm of politics.
3. Trump is preparing to use the military to occupy cities inhabited largely by Democrats, in order to intimidate people from voting during the upcoming midterm elections. Although it was an incoherent speech, in it Trump said he told Hegseth to use American cities as “training grounds” for the military.
Here are Trump’s words: “It seems that the ones that are run by the radical left Democrats, what they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they’re very unsafe places. And we’re going to straighten them out one by one, and this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room ... This is a war from within. We should use some of these dangerous places as training grounds for our military.”
4. The worst fear of all: He’s planning to turn America into a police state. He and his regime (Vance, Hegseth, Miller, Vought, and Bondi) plan to take over all government power, negate the Constitution, and destroy democracy. Two of the people I spoke with fear this is the real agenda.
Hence, today’s Office Hours question: What do you believe was Trump’s major purpose in meeting with America’s military leaders on Tuesday?
Robert Reich is a professor at Berkeley and was secretary of labor under Bill Clinton. You can find his writing at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
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