Time to Fire Woke Generals and Restore Apolitical Military Leadership

As a 32-year United States Air Force combat veteran and 9/11 Pentagon survivor, I know first-hand how important it is to have the right leaders in moments of crisis. But despite valiant efforts by the Trump administration to restore competence and meritocracy to our military chain of command, our Armed Forces are rotting from the top down.

The simple truth is that the Biden administration’s promotions have turned America’s general officer ranks into a swamp of woke ideologues and self-serving bureaucrats. If the United States were to go to war today, we would be hampered by partisan hacks who put politics over warfighting.

Case in point of this glaring problem is a recent controversy surrounding retired U.S. Army Major General Patrick Donahoe, who most recently served as Commanding General of the United States Army Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Benning from 2020 to 2022. Late last week, General Donahoe reposted a New York Times hit piece on President Trump titled, “We Used to Think the Military Would Stand Up to Trump. We Were Wrong.”

That Times article advocates for nothing short of all-out mutiny by the U.S. military against the Commander-in-Chief. Authors Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson, high-ranking national security officials in the Obama administration, whine that the military has not openly defied President Trump’s orders while praising generals like Mark Milley and James Mattis who “resisted” Trump during his first term. (Milley, readers will well remember, infamously supported teaching Critical Race Theory in the military and said that he would have given China an advance warning if the United States launched an attack.)

That the Times would run such an astonishing article essentially calling for a military coup against a sitting president is telling in its own right about how liberals view America’s Armed Forces as an instrument of their political agenda. But for a recently retired general – a general promoted by Joe Biden – to share that story speaks volumes about just how deep the politicization runs at the Pentagon. Amid furious and justified backlash, Donahoe deleted his entire X account.

This isn’t Donahoe’s first foray into contentious political issues, either. Back in 2021, while he was still active duty, Donahoe launched multiple social media tirades against conservatives who opposed putting women in combat roles. The Army Inspector General later found that his posts were “inappropriate” and that he brought negative publicity on the Army.

Donahoe thankfully won’t be leading soldiers anymore, but it’s imperative that we ask how many more Biden-promoted generals with similar political axes to grind are still in positions of power. How many other Pentagon officials who swore an oath to follow the orders of the President of the United States are quietly looking for opportunities to undermine him? How many of them believe Trump to be the authoritarian bogeyman that the Times article portrays him as? How many are working to undermine his justified actions like deploying the National Guard to restore order to the streets of the nation’s capital?

A recent post on X from Marine veteran Stuart Scheller provides more insight into these questions. Earlier this year, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth tapped Scheller as the deputy lead on a task force to investigate Biden’s Afghanistan debacle. One of the generals the task force interviewed was Army Lieutenant General Douglas Sims.

As Scheller relays, his review panel “asked Sims for help obtaining records relevant to the planning and execution of the Afghanistan withdrawal.” But Sims, a “hand-picked protégé of Milley,” replied that “he couldn’t cooperate with the investigation because there weren’t any Democrats on the panel.”

Yet another astonishing violation of the chain of command from a senior officer. The Secretary of Defense ordered an Army general to hand over records to the review panel, but the general declined for expressly political reasons. Still, Sims received sympathetic treatment from The New York Times, which published yet another hit piece on Hegseth for denying Sims a fourth star.

Scheller alleges that most of the information in that article came from Sims himself – a general leaking to the Times because he believed the process was unfair. “You work for We the People,” Scheller reminded him – not the other way around.

The only way to address this pervasive threat is a systematic and thorough review of every general and admiral promoted under Biden. That includes the ones in the pipeline, polishing their resumes while waiting for those stars.

It may well be that there are some determined warfighters in this group. But all of them should be re-screened and approved by a Trump administration that is actually interested in making the American military the most lethal and efficient force in the world.

So here is my plea to President Trump: Don’t pin those stars on Biden-approved generals. As an alternative, reinstitute the brevet rank system – a time-tested way to promote battlefield-proven officers temporarily and fill vacancies fast.

Our military has a deep bench of retired colonels, including combat vets, nuclear ops experts, and squadron commanders who’ve led without bringing politics into the foxhole. These are the apolitical warriors who will restore meritocracy, lethality, and focus on the mission. No more generals who leak to the press or defy investigations. No more prioritizing pronouns over proficiency.

The reality of our modern top-heavy military is that for every general and admiral promoted, there are nine others just as qualified. We can rebuild a lethal, mission-focused general and flag officer corps in months, not years.

This isn’t about loyalty to a party and it’s not about a wholesale firing. The American people elected President Trump to drain the swamp, and the Pentagon is ground zero. We’ve watched our military decline under Biden’s generals – recruitment in the tank, readiness eroded by social experiments.

The Times frets about “Trump’s military,” but that’s exactly what we need: a force led by patriots who will execute lawful, constitutional orders, not obstruct them. If we act now, we can have a rebuilt officer corps ready to deter China, deter conflicts, crush terrorists, and secure our borders without the drama.

Rob Maness is a retired Air Force Colonel, a former wing and squadron commander, veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, a survivor of the 9/11 Pentagon attack, graduate of the U.S. Navy War College and Harvard Kennedy School, a former U.S. Senate Candidate, Chairman of GatorPAC, CEO and Owner of Iron Liberty Group LLC, and Host of the Rob Maness Show on WorldViewTube.