The Generals You Don’t Need—Until You Do (🇺🇸 US-UK🇬🇧 Edition)

Many years ago, I walked through the United States Senate beside Major General James E. Lee on our way to defend the Army’s new M1A1 Abrams tank before the Senate Armed Services Committee.Protocol said I belonged a step or two behind him.Lee told me to walk beside him.“I need to know what you know,” he said.I didn’t understand it then, but I had just been given a lesson in senior leadership: authority and knowledge are not the same thing.Last fall, Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth summoned roughly 800 generals and admirals to Quantico. By my arithmetic, that room contained somewhere between 24,000 and 28,000 years of accumulated military experience.Since then, a remarkable number of America’s senior military leaders have been removed or forced out.Presidents unquestionably have the authority to replace generals. Civilian control of the military demands it.But experience is different from equipment. Congress can buy another tank. It can rebuild a damaged military installation.It cannot appropriate thirty years of judgment.And someday a president may discover that the generals he thought he didn’t need were precisely the ones he needed most.— Dunneagin📖 To read the text of this essay and explore the catalog, visit Civics Unhinged on Paragraph.☕ Reader editions and collected volumes—including Volumes 1, 2, 3, and The Liar’s Guide to Autocracy—are available on the Fourthwall bookshelf. Get full access to ~ Civics Unhinged: Dispatches From Trumpistan ~ at dunneagin.substack.com/subscribe