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Top Brass Is On The Run Ahead Of Trump’s Return

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Morgan Murphy

With less than a month to go before President-elect Donald Trump takes office, the top brass are already running for cover. This week the Army’s chief of staff, Gen. Randy George, pledged to cut approximately a dozen general officers from the U.S. Army.

It is a start.

But given the Army is authorized 219 general officers, cutting just 12 is using a scalpel when a machete is in order. At present, the ratio of officers to enlisted personnel stands at an all-time high. During World War II, we had one general for every 6,000 troops. Today, we have one for every 1,600.

Right now, the United States has 1.3 million active-duty service members according to the Defense Manpower Data Center. Of those, 885 are flag officers (fun fact: you get your own flag when you make general or admiral, hence the term “flag officer” and “flagship”). In the reserve world, the ratio is even worse. There are 925 general and flag officers and a total reserve force of just 760,499 personnel. That is a flag for every 674 enlisted troops.

The hallways at the Pentagon are filled with a constellation of stars and the legions of staffers who support them. I’ve worked in both the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Starting around 2011, the Joint Staff began to surge in scope and power. Though the chairman of the Joint Chiefs is not in the chain of command and simply serves as an advisor to the president, there are a staggering 4,409 people working for the Joint Staff, including 1,400 civilians with an average salary of $196,800 (yes, you read that correctly). The Joint Staff budget for 2025 is estimated by the Department of Defense’s comptroller to be $1.3 billion.

In contrast, the Secretary of Defense — the civilian in charge of running our nation’s military — has a staff of 2,646 civilians and uniformed personnel. The disparity between the two staffs threatens the longstanding American principle of civilian control of the military.

Just look at what happens when civilians in the White House or the Senate dare question the ranks of America’s general class. “Politicizing the military!” critics cry, as if the Commander-in-Chief has no right to question the judgement of generals who botched the withdrawal from Afghanistan, bought into the woke ideology of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) or oversaw over-budget and behind-schedule weapons systems. Introducing accountability to the general class is not politicizing our nation’s military — it is called leadership.

What most Americans don’t understand is that our top brass is already very political. On any given day in our nation’s Capitol, a casual visitor is likely to run into multiple generals and admirals visiting our elected representatives and their staff. Ostensibly, these “briefs” are about various strategic threats and weapons systems — but everyone on the Hill knows our military leaders are also jockeying for their next assignment or promotion. It’s classic politics

The country witnessed this firsthand with now-retired Gen. Mark Milley. Most Americans were put off by what they saw. Milley brazenly played the Washington spin game, bragging in a Senate Armed Services hearing that he had interviewed with Bob Woodward and a host of other Washington, D.C. reporters.

Woodward later admitted in an interview with CNN that he was flabbergasted by Milley, recalling the chairman hadn’t just said “[Trump] is a problem or we can’t trust him,” but took it to the point of saying, “he is a danger to the country. He is the most dangerous person I know.” Woodward said that Milley’s attitude felt like an assignment editor ordering him, “Do something about this.”

Think on that a moment — an active-duty four star general spoke on the record, disparaging the Commander-in-Chief. Not only did it show rank insubordination and a breach of Uniform Code of Military Justice Article 88, but Milley’s actions represented a grave threat against the Constitution and civilian oversight of the military.

How will it play out now that Trump has returned? Old political hands know that what goes around comes around. Milley’s ham-handed political meddling may very well pave the way for a massive reorganization of flag officers similar to Gen. George C. Marshall’s “plucking board” of 1940. Marshall forced 500 colonels into retirement saying, “You give a good leader very little and he will succeed; you give mediocrity a great deal and they will fail.”

Marshall’s efforts to reorient the War Department to a meritocracy proved prescient when the United States entered World War II less than two years later.

Perhaps it’s time for another plucking board to remind the military brass that it is their civilian bosses who sit at the top of the U.S. chain of command.

Morgan Murphy is military thought leader, former press secretary to the Secretary of Defense and national security advisor in the U.S. Senate.

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Canadian veteran says she knows at least 20 service members who were offered euthanasia

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From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Canadian Armed Forces veteran Kelsi Sheren told members of the House of Commons that he has proof of veterans being offered assisted suicide.

Canada’s liberal euthanasia laws have made the practice so commonplace that a Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) veteran has said she knows and has “proof” that no less than 20 of her colleagues were offered unsolicited state-sponsored euthanasia.

Kelsi Sheren, who is a CAF veteran, recently told MPs in the House of Commons veterans affairs committee that “over 20 veterans have confirmed being offered MAID.”

“I have the proof, and I have proof of more,” Sheren told the committee during an October 28 meeting.

Conservative MP Blake Richards asked Sheren if she was willing to provide them with evidence to affirm her allegations.

Sheren noted how the 20 veterans have given written testimonies, or actual audio recordings, of when they were offered what in Canada is known as Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD).

“We also have other individuals who are too afraid to come forward because Veterans Affairs has threatened their benefits,” she told MPs, adding that some other veterans were even offered non-disclosure agreements along with “payouts if they were to take it.”

Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC) has told the media its “employees have no role or mandate to recommend or raise (MAid). ”

As reported by LifeSiteNews, this is not the first time reports of CAF veterans saying they were offered MAiD.

Indeed, as reported by LifeSiteNews, it was revealed last year that the federal department in charge of helping Canadian veterans appears to have purposefully prevented the existence of a paper after scandalous reports surfaced alleging that caseworkers had recommended euthanasia to suffering service members.

A new EPC report has revealed that Canada has euthanized 90,000 people since 2016.

As reported by LifeSiteNews last week, a Conservative MP’s private member’s bill that, if passed, would ban euthanasia for people with mental illness received the full support of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition (EPC).

https://kelsisheren.substack.com/p/maid-will-always-be-abused-305?utm_source=podcast-email&publication_id=2800927&post_id=178742271&utm_campaign=email-play-on-substack&utm_content=watch_now_button&r=lqs9o&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

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Why we keep getting Remembrance Day wrong

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This article supplied by Troy Media.

Troy Media By Pat Murphy

Remembrance Day once honoured soldiers for their courage and conviction, but the values they fought for have long since been rejected

With the untimely death of Tim Cook on Oct. 25, Canada lost a valued historian. Military history was Cook’s oeuvre, and the First World War was a particular specialty. His ability to marry academic rigour with accessible storytelling made him a relatively rare bird.

Naturally, Cook wrote about battles, military commanders and political leaders. But he was also fascinated with ordinary soldiers, scouring the archives for personal letters from the front and other material to develop an understanding of what
motivated the soldiers and how they managed the day-to-day horrors of prolonged trench warfare in an environment characterized by cold, mud, lice and rats, not to mention the ever-present spectre of violent death.

Camaraderie was critical. To quote from an interview with Cook: “one of the ways they cope is to create their own tribe, their own group that is insulated from everyone else.”

All of which brings us to Remembrance Day.

Although formally recognized as “remembrance for the men and women who have served, and continue to serve our country during times of war, conflict and peace,” both the origins and iconography of Remembrance Day relate to the First World War. There’s the two-minute silence at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month to observe the formal end of hostilities in 1918; the playing of the Last Post; and, of course, the ubiquitous red poppies.

The conflict wasn’t post Confederation Canada’s first military endeavour, but its scale dwarfed anything that came before it, and only the subsequent Second World War was a comparable event. Some 620,000 Canadians served between 1914 and 1918 and approximately 60,000 were killed. To get a sense of scale, adjust the fatalities for population growth and it would be comfortably north of 300,000 today.

In War: How Conflict Shaped Us, Margaret MacMillan notes the long history of cultures elevating personal characteristics associated with battlefield success, honouring bravery, endurance, toughness and the willingness to face death. It’s been pretty much a universal characteristic.

Nor should we think of war as only a male activity driven by patriarchal social structures. While it’s true that military hierarchies are traditionally male and the fighting in most wars has been done largely by men, women have always played
a key role in reinforcing the culture.

We, though, have become somewhat uncomfortable with the warrior ethos. Take, for instance, In Flanders Fields. Written in 1915 by Guelph’s John McCrae, the poem has acquired iconic status over the decades. It’s haunting and melancholy, sufficiently so to grab at your throat and send shivers down your spine. It’s also become inextricably intertwined with Remembrance Day.

There is, however, a small problem. While we now view the First World War as senseless carnage, In Flanders Fields has a very different perspective. As the third and final stanza makes unequivocally clear, the poem’s message isn’t about the war’s futility—it’s about the need to keep the faith and carry on to victory.

Much the same can be said about the music associated with the era. Those songs written in recent decades stress the sadness and futility of it all, but the actual popular music of the time was cheerful, patriotic and resolute.

Rather than seeing the soldiers as they were, we insist on recasting them as victims. Stripping them of personal agency, we ignore the fact that 80 per cent of them were volunteers, people who, for various reasons, chose to go to war.

So what motivated them?

Many were surely lured by the male affinity for adventure, compounded by patriotic fervour and enthusiastic loyalty to the concept of king and empire, however incomprehensible or disreputable the latter may now seem to us. There was also the buzz of an environment where the usual social norms regarding life, death and destruction had either vanished or become significantly attenuated. In her book, MacMillan documents how some found the whole experience “vastly exciting.”

Acknowledging this shouldn’t be confused with cheerleading. As I’ve previously written on more than one occasion, I think Britain’s reluctant decision to enter the First World War was a tragic error on many fronts. And if Britain had stood aside, Canada wouldn’t have been involved.

But respectfully remembering those who died shouldn’t be confused with turning them into something they were not. They weren’t hapless victims—they were people with beliefs and values of their own, even if we no longer look at the world in the same way they did.

Troy Media columnist Pat Murphy casts a history buff’s eye at the goings-on in our world. Never cynical – well, perhaps a little bit.

Troy Media empowers Canadian community news outlets by providing independent, insightful analysis and commentary. Our mission is to support local media in helping Canadians stay informed and engaged by delivering reliable content that  strengthens community connections and deepens understanding across the country. 

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