PENTAGON OFFICERS: WE QUIT IF TRUMP WINS
BY NANCY A. YOUSSEF
The plans of the next president are personal to the officers of the Pentagon, who are threatening to quit if The Donald becomes commander-in-chief.
Republican presidential candidate and business mogul Donald Trump has repeatedly vowed to build up the U.S. military if elected president.
But it is not clear he will have the experienced commanders within the ranks to do it.
In the halls of the Pentagon, there is a different plan afoot for the Trump presidency. Here, officers are privately contemplating what they would do should Trump become their commander-in-chief. And more often than not, they proclaim they will leave.
“By 2016 I will have my 20 years in and can get out of here,” one military official said, referring to the amount of time a service member needs to collect retirement pay.
Spend enough time with a service member, and the topic of Trump comes up, always unsolicited. It is far less political than it sounds. Trump’s attack plans for the so-called Islamic State widely known as ISIS—his call to ban Muslims from the United States, his suggestions that cutting off the flow of information through the Internet can protect the homeland—many said, are an affront to the values they vowed to die to defend.
Each one of them took an oath to defend the Constitution, which protects the freedom of speech and gives Congress, not just one person, the power send the nation to war. They also swear to “obey the orders of the president of the United States.”
In other words: The plans of the next president are personal to them.
Some said repeatedly hearing Trump and the other GOP candidates spelling out a plan that is only a more brazen—and perhaps reckless—version of the current strategy was not reassuring. They noted that for all the talk of supporting the troops, Congress has yet to pass an updated Authorization of the Use of the Military Force, which would in effect mark a congressional buy-in to the war effort. That some of the candidates have said they support a new AUMF, but have yet to pass one, was only moderately reassuring, they said.
This Daily Beast correspondent has heard such sentiments from at least a dozen commanders in the past few months. Such conversations can also be heard at common areas—in cafeteria lines and around lunch tables.
There are fears of being asked to carry out futile war plans that would bring instability. Almost all of today’s commanders are veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They all know someone who died in combat; indeed, they may have sent someone on a mission that ended with death. And because of that they bring a unique vantage point to lessons learned, from the frontlines where the cruelty of warfare is impossible to miss. Those who send them, meanwhile, sit thousands of miles away and learn what is happening through the filter of distance.
The U.S. military still is rebuilding after a decade of repeated deployments and overworn equipment. And the prospect of endless quasi-war thousands of miles away—even if it’s fought mostly by drones and elite special operations forces—is not tenable, they argue. These commanders are too focused on recovering from the last war to hear politicans talk about the prospect of a future one.
And so in the course of conversation, plots of a different kind emerge—contingencies in case Trump really is elected to the White House.
“This is not the country I joined to defend.”
“I am turning in my papers.”
“I’m moving to a farm.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/12/16/pentagon-troops-it-s-us-or-trump.html?via=newsletter&source=DDMorning
DO SOMETHING!
| 
