Why Is Trump Planning to Use a Warrior Board?

The topic of discussion for this Constitution Monday is that the President of the United States is also the Commander-in-Chief of the military forces. This gives the President the power to appoint military leaders. President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Pete Hegseth to be his secretary of defense has set the Left to worrying.

According to Jarrett Stepman, Hegseth is an Army veteran who received two Bronze Stars and served tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also made a statement about removing “woke” senior military officials that is concerning certain generals. 

Firing incompetent generals is a good thing. In fact, it might be what the military needs right now to regain the confidence of the American people.

According to a number of reports, President-elect Donald Trump will be creating a commission to review leaders in the military with the assumption that many of the top brass will be fired.

Trump will be using a “warrior board” of retired officers, The Hill reported, to review our current crop of three- and four-star officers and will weed out the ones the commission disapproves of.

That’s not all.

Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth – an Army veteran who has been awarded two Bronze Stars, and who served in Iraq and Afghanistan – said in past interviews that it’s necessary to remove “woke” senior military officials who have left the U.S. armed forces in a sorry state.

“First of all, you’ve got to fire [the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] and obviously you’ve got to bring in a new secretary of defense, but any general that was involved – general, admiral, whatever – that was involved in any of the DEI woke s-, has got to go,” Hegseth said in an early November interview on “The Shawn Ryan Show” podcast. DEI is shorthand for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Trump and Hegseth – the author of “The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free” and “Modern Warriors: Real Stories from Real Heroes” – clearly intend to shake up the military at the top.

The Left, however, isn’t taking it well.

Legacy media is reporting on that development as if it’s some kind of ominous sign that Trump will “politicize” the military. They are even calling it a “purge.”

One left-wing podcaster, Fred Wellman, who includes “democracy advocate” in his X bio, even posted that removing generals is “truly fascist.”

Ah, yes, civilian control of the military, so fascist.

Stepman then embarked on a quick history lesson about how POTUS has the power and authority to remove “generals and other high-ranking military leaders” and how such removal can be a boon, not a hindrance, to a strong military.

Peacetime militaries – and I only use that phrase loosely to refer to our own era of near-constant, low-level asymmetrical conflicts – frequently calcify. Leaders who successfully navigate the bureaucratic treadmill to make it to the top ranks in those times are frequently not the best wartime leaders.

Militaries need to be shaken up from time to time.

Stepman reminded his readers that military leaders were purged in both the War of 1812 and the Civil War because the old ones were incompetent and/or becoming calcified. The world of today is close to being drawn into World War III. Trump needs to purge the old military leaders who want a woke military and bring in younger ones with which we can win the battles and the wars.