James Joyner and Butch Bracknell War on the Rocks October 31, 2022 Officers in the U.S. armed forces take an oath to the constitution upon commissioning and renew it each time they are promoted to a new rank. In doing so, they pledge their loyalty to the country and their subordination to its laws. This oath is…
Category: Presidency
Defense One November 29, 2020 When President-Elect Joe Biden announced his foreign policy team last week, one post was conspicuously absent: Defense Secretary. It had almost universally been assumed that Michèle Flournoy would be the pick, but reports began to surface that progressive activists were opposing her for a variety of reasons; that Black leaders, most notably…
Defense One August 13, 2020 Retired soldiers John Nagl and Paul Yingling, who came to national prominence on opposite sides of the counterinsurgency debates, joined forces to argue that, if Donald Trump were to lose the election and yet refuse to leave office at noon next January 20, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs must give the order to…
Defense One June 5, 2020 Mara Karlin, a former senior defense official and national security scholar, rightly laments that retired general officers are having an outsized role in our national political debate. But she’s off the mark when she exclaims, “If this isn’t a civil-military relations crisis, I don’t know what is.” Rather, the crisis…
The National Interest November 3, 2018 President Donald Trump’s promise to send large numbers of troops to the southern border to stop the so-called migrant caravan making its way north through Mexico has been, to say the least, controversial. Many have called on Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis to put his foot down on the…
RealClearDefense February 9, 2018 Eighteen Democratic Senators have reportedly signed a letter to President Trump informing him they are “deeply concerned about the potential consequences of a preemptive military strike on North Korea and the risks of miscalculation and retaliation.” Further, they assert, “without congressional authority, a preventative or preemptive U.S. military strike would lack either a…
TCS Daily January 20, 2006 At noon on January 20, 1981, Ronald Reagan took the oath of office as President of the United States. Minutes later, the remaining hostages who had been held captive for 444 days at the American embassy in Teheran were freed. The Iran hostage crisis, which began on November 4, 1979, gripped…
Tech Central Station August 10, 2004 The pseudonymous blogger N.Z. Bear issues a bold proclamation: “I’m going to go on record and predict that the Swift Boat Veterans kerfuffle won’t just be a major negative for Kerry: it will be a campaign-killer.” His rationale is that, if any of these charges stick, it will cement the image…