What Odd Things To Be Saying

The way things are supposed to work, the President is the Commander in Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces and they all report to him, pledging to “obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me” within in framework of “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic”. I found it interesting that the commissioned officer’s oath doesn’t make any mention of the President, just the enlisted oath.

Because the U.S. is a Constitutional Republic and has long standing and clear restrictions on the military, we don’t generally give much thought to the role of the Armed Forces in Presidential transitions as there shouldn’t be one other than Marines saluting the new President.

In light of that, some recent news stories that have been popping up seem odd and ominous. The Zman pointed some out on his subscriber Substack like these:

Well those seem like strange things for the Pentagon to be talking about because it sure sounds like they are deciding which orders they like and which ones they don’t.

As the Zman wrote on Substack:

For example, this story informing us that the current head of the Pentagon is telling the military to carry out a smooth transition of power from Biden to Trump suggests that there is another option and that option was on the table. If these people were subjected to real questions by a genuine media, that would be the question. “Why did you think this was necessary?” is a question that answers itself.

It almost sounds like the military is declaring “We talked it over and even though we don’t have to, we will conditionally agree to obey orders from the duly elected President of the United States. At least for now.”

That isn’t a troubling development or anything.

It isn’t a secret that Trump and the top brass have had a tumultuous relationship with many former generals coming out and attacking the former Commander-in-Chief for political purposes late in the 2024 election cycle. Nor can we forget that General Mark Milley, appointed by none other than Donald Trump himself, ordered military leaders to ignore orders from Trump unless Milley himself authorized it:

Milley worried that Trump could ‘go rogue,’ the authors write.

“You never know what a president’s trigger point is,” Milley told his senior staff, according to the book.

In response, Milley took extraordinary action, and called a secret meeting in his Pentagon office on January 8 to review the process for military action, including launching nuclear weapons. Speaking to senior military officials in charge of the National Military Command Center, the Pentagon’s war room, Milley instructed them not to take orders from anyone unless he was involved.

“No matter what you are told, you do the procedure. You do the process. And I’m part of that procedure,” Milley told the officers, according to the book. He then went around the room, looked each officer in the eye, and asked them to verbally confirm they understood.

“Got it?” Milley asked, according to the book.

“Yes, sir.”

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The nuclear posture of our strategic arsenal is designed so that we can launch very quickly in response to an attack. This is because it has to be as a submarine launched ballistic or cruise nuclear missile can hit D.C. very quickly and while the Russians have only one aircraft carrier and that one is currently being refit, they do have 12 ballistic missile and 11 cruise missile nuclear-powered subs that carry nuclear Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles (SLBMs) that can reach the Capitol in minutes, far faster and with much less of a warning than land based ICBMs in Russia itself. The President does not have time to confer with the Joint Chiefs over coffee once missile launches have been detected and according to the Department of Defense, a ballistic missile sub carries a payload making it “the sixth most powerful nuclear power in the world”. With Russian moving to a new hypersonic nuclear missile, the time a President has to respond to a missile launch warning is compressed even further.

By Milley’s order he created a barrier to our strategic response, and while it fortunately didn’t come into play, his actions to convene a secret meeting outside of the chain of command and essentially order his subordinates to ignore an order from the Commander-in-Chief unless approved by him was treason and an actual act of insurrection by the most senior member of the military chain of command below the President. For violating his oath, ordering his subordinates to disobey orders from the President and putting this nation at risk Mark Milley should be arrested, tried and if found guilty put to death for treason. Of course that won’t happen but it should.

A major reason for this tumultuous relationship between Trump and the top brass in his first term is that the military is a) overloaded with generals and admirals and b) many of the people wearing stars seem to view the military as anything but what it was intended to do, protect the American homeland and the American people.

On the first part, the U.S. military is bloated in every respect but nowhere does that have greater impact than at the top. Check out this tweet from

An army that isn’t at war and hasn’t fought any sort of actual war for a long time, much less a peer or near-peer war, had 17 four-star generals. By way of contrast, in 1945 we had four-star generals like this guy…

Old Blood and Guts himself, General George Patton.

Today we have this dude wearing four stars, Richard Levine who goes by Dr. Rachel Levine and styles himself an admiral of the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps.

I wonder what Patton would have said about a Jewish faggot dressed like a woman and wearing the uniform and claiming four star status? Maybe he wouldn’t say anything and would instead just skip ahead to kicking the ever living shit out of him. Trump needs to fire Richard Levine on day one.

That figure has shrunk a bit for the Army, according to Wikipedia there are “only” 12 four-stars in the Army currently but there are 44 total four-star officers in the uniformed services.

Besides Richard Levine in the USPHSCC there are also 3 in the Space Force and two in the Coast Guard, 12 in the Army, 3 in the Marine Corps, 9 in the Navy and 14 in the Air Force. That is just the four-stars and doesn’t count the hundreds of one, two and three star officers who are kicking around with no wars to fight. One example caught my eye, the now retired four star general Gustave F. Perna. General Perna (U.S. Army-Ret.) was elevated to the rank of four-star general in 2020. He was previously a three-star heading up the United States Army Materiel Command but was promoted to four-stars to fight major war uh to head up Operation Warp Speed “to facilitate and accelerate the development, manufacturing, and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics”.

George Patton was given four stars to help lead the invasion of Europe. General Perna was given four stars to help develop and distribute a “vaccine” for the cold.

I don’t mean to crap on General Perna, he served 40 years in the Army, honorably from what I can tell, and earned his 38+ year O-10 pay of over $18,000 per month for the rest of his life. My point is that there appear to be way too many people wearing stars with not enough to do, and that many of the highest ranking officers seem to have political positions that have transformed the military into a giant social engineering experiment instead of a fighting force dedicated to defending America and her people.

It might be somewhat inevitable. Neither party has sought to shrink the military, there is just too much money and pork spending to spread around. With no real enemy to fight, instead the government and the military-industrial complex have been creating new enemies to justify endless military spending. After the fall of the Soviet Union that justification shifted to the Global War on Terror (GWOT), primarily in Iraq and Afghanistan but also in damn near every region of the world.

More recently as people grew weary of the GWOT and started asking uncomfortable questions about why we were occupying Afghanistan 20 years after 9/11, followed by the disastrous withdrawal, the military started to focus on a new “enemy”: White Americans. Without a real “enemies, foreign…”, They have decided to focus on “enemies, …domestic”. We were told that lots of veterans were secretly White supremacist domestic terrorists (See: The Vet Threat!) and then that the ranks of the military were riddled with secret White supremacist cabals that needed to be rooted out and replaced with black trannies.

The real threat in the military is not from White supremacist terror cells among the enlisted but rather from woke senior officers who see the American people as a bigger threat than any foreign power. News stories like this have been making the rounds: U.S. Military Now Authorized to Kill Americans on U.S. Soil?. They couch it in terms of “authorizing lethal force in certain circumstances when assisting civilian law enforcement” but it still raises questions and lots of concerns. From Department of Defense Directive 5240.01, effective September 27, 2024:

(1) The Secretary of Defense may approve any type of requested permissible assistance
described in Paragraph 3.2.

(2) The decision to approve requests for these types of permissible assistance described
in Paragraph 3.2. to law enforcement agencies and other civil authorities are reserved to the
Secretary of Defense:

….

(c) Assistance in responding with assets with potential for lethality, or any situation
in which it is reasonably foreseeable that providing the requested assistance may involve the use
of force that is likely to result in lethal force, including death or serious bodily injury. It also
includes all support to civilian law enforcement officials in situations where a confrontation
between civilian law enforcement and civilian individuals or groups is reasonably anticipated.
Such use of force must be in accordance with DoDD 5210.56, potentially as further restricted
based on the specifics of the requested support.

Lots of military and legalese mumbo-jumbo but in essence it does give the Secretary of Defense the ability to approve of “permissible assistance” that may “may involve the use of force that is likely to result in lethal force”.

That is getting a bit far afield so let’s get back to the main point by quoting from the AP article pictured above:

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin directed the military on Thursday to carry out a smooth transition to President-elect Donald Trump, with a reminder to the force of its obligation to follow the lawful orders of the next commander in chief.

While such memos are rare, it was not the first time the military’s top civilian leader has pressed the force on its duty to the Constitution in regard to a changeover of control under Trump.

However, in the context of the incoming president’s suggestion that he may use federal forces at the southern border, and Project 2025 plans to force out career civilians and fill positions with Trump loyalists, the Biden administration has taken unusual steps both to try to insulate those civil servants and to remind the military of its own sworn oaths.

“As it always has, the U.S. military will stand ready to carry out the policy choices of its next Commander in Chief, and to obey all lawful orders from its civilian chain of command,” Austin wrote in his letter to Defense Department personnel.

I certainly hope that right after shit-canning Richard Levine, Trump will get rid of DEI-hire Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, he of mask and face shield fame. Austin wore this embarrassing get-up during a trip to the Philippines in 2021. I am sure the Russian and Chinese military commands had a good chuckle over this.

Austin’s statement and the accompanying article are certainly suggesting that the military might push back on orders to secure the southern border of the U.S. and otherwise ignore orders from Trump. Who will determine what is a “lawful” order? That likely will be the subject of court cases, meaning that the Commander-in-Chief might have to slog through legal challenges to his order which is a great way to run a military. It isn’t just the idea of using the military to defend the southern border or to expel illegal alien invaders, you know actually defending the U.S. homeland, but also the Commander-in-Chief’s prerogative to hire and fire as he sees fit, a privilege every President has. Most executive branch senior positions serve at the pleasure of the President meaning that each new President can and usually does clean house and replace existing officials with people of his own party unless he is succeeding someone from his own party, something that hasn’t happened since George H.W. Bush succeeded Reagan in the 1988 election.

While Lloyd Austin will likely be gone and quickly from the office of the Secretary of Defense, many of his cronies will remain unless purged by Trump. I sincerely hope Trump and his advisors are aware of this and will work quickly to bring the military and especially the top brass to heel. I don’t have any hard data to support this but I would guess that the lower ranks, especially the enlisted and NCOs, support Trump far more than commissioned officers and as you go up the ranks, the less support Trump has. It cannot be overstated how important it will be for Trump to establish control over the military as there is nothing more dangerous to U.S. stability, and that of the rest of the world, than the idea of the American armed forces going rogue. Trump needs a tough, non-neocon, experienced military leader to run the Department of Defense and to start getting rid of leftist ideologues who allow their Trump Derangement Syndrome to trump their oaths.

What a strange world we live in where the top military brass are on the same side as the far left.