To travel north of Kyiv in Ukraine is to enter a graveyard of the Russian Army. When I was there in 2023, the battlefield had been largely cleaned up, and the villages were coming back to life. But the signs of mortal struggle were everywhere. Buildings were pocked with bullet holes, some were reduced to piles of rubble, and I could still spot the occasional hulk of a destroyed Russian tank.
A year earlier, the scene was different. Russia had just retreated, and bodies were lying in front of ruined homes. There were so many destroyed Russian tanks in the streets, The Associated Press reported, that their charred remains had left a “layer of black dust” that covered the suburbs. It was a scene of carnage more suitable for World War II than for a prosperous suburb outside a modern European capital.
It was all a monument to Russia’s colossal failure.
This was not supposed to happen. The Russian military had spent enormous sums modernizing its forces. It had enjoyed success in a much more limited conflict in Syria. In 2014, it had taken Crimea while hardly firing a shot. The Ukrainian military was supposed to be outmatched and outgunned.
What happened? It’s a complicated story, but one lesson is clear: A military and intelligence apparatus organized around pleasing the boss is ripe for catastrophic failure. As a 2023 analysis in Foreign Policy found, President Vladimir Putin “sits atop an intelligence and policy machinery that tells him only what he wants to hear.”
So Putin walked into war thinking that Ukraine was more fragile than it really was, that Ukrainians actually wanted Russian rule and that the Russian military was more capable than it proved to be. But that’s what happens when a national security establishment prioritizes political loyalty over professional excellence — armies fail and many, many people die.
It’s a mistake to think of the Trump administration’s Signal scandal — in which top officials discussed sensitive military plans on an unsecured civilian messaging app — as merely a problem of competence or even a problem of corruption. It’s much worse than that.
Let’s look at the Signal chat in context. Days after President Trump took office in January, he fired the Pentagon’s inspector general, who is often a watchdog of last resort for soldiers who call out corruption or face unfairness or injustice in the ranks.
Then, immediately after Pete Hegseth assumed office as secretary of defense, the Trump administration fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chief of naval operations, the vice chief of the Air Force and the top JAG generals at the Air Force, the Army and the Navy.
They were not relieved because they were corrupt or insubordinate, or because they had failed on the battlefield. The only discernible reason was that they were perceived to be out of political alignment with the administration.
And the JAG generals, like the inspectors general, are also crucial instruments of accountability.
Hegseth has trumpeted his early tenure as turning the page on woke, as a sign of a more lethal military that is laser-focused on America’s enemies — a true military meritocracy.
Then he went and committed an extraordinary violation of operational security, a violation so dangerous that Navy pilots are furious that he put their lives at risk.
By putting operational plans in a civilian chat app (with a journalist present!), he risked leaking some of the most sensitive military information that exists: the timing and targets of an attack. Had the Houthis or their Iranian allies obtained that information, they could have prepared for the attack, they could have launched their own pre-emptive strike, and they could have moved targeted assets and individuals to a more secure location.
But a security breach is a problem. It doesn’t create a crisis if it’s handled properly. At the very least, this should mean a Justice Department investigation. Hillary Clinton faced an F.B.I. investigation when classified information was found on her private email server.
When Sandy Berger, Bill Clinton’s national security adviser, took classified documents from the National Archives, he was prosecuted. So was the former C.I.A. director David Petraeus when he improperly shared classified information with his mistress. The Department of Justice under President Joe Biden appointed a special counsel to investigate Biden when classified documents were found in his home.
So how did Pam Bondi, Trump’s attorney general, respond? She all but dismissed the possibility of an investigation and pivoted to condemning Hillary Clinton. Even if you believe that Clinton should have faced prosecution (as I do), the response to the failure of the Department of Justice under President Barack Obama isn’t to lower standards even further.
The difference between the American and Russian militaries is easy to articulate. At its core, the U.S. military is professional. The Russian military is political. That doesn’t mean that the Russian military doesn’t have professional elements; it’s that when push comes to shove, political loyalty is the ultimate value.
You can reach the highest heights if you have unwavering loyalty to Putin. If you do not, then you can forfeit your career (and even your life). Traditionally in the American military, politics is irrelevant to your advancement. And if politics does intrude, it’s seen as a grave breach of the military ethos.
It’s rare to even know the political affiliation of American admirals and generals. When Dwight D. Eisenhower retired from the Army, for example, both parties courted him to be their presidential nominee.
According to the soldier’s creed, an American soldier isn’t just a warrior; he’s a guardian of “the American way of life.” One does not defend the American way of life by contradicting and violating fundamental American principles of political freedom and accountability.
Trump’s presidency is fundamentally anti-system. If there is anything that unites his coalition (apart from love of Trump), it’s the desire to disrupt, to break things, to smash the system. But what if the system that he’s breaking happens to be the best in the world?
No one should argue that the military is perfect. I spent eight years as a JAG officer, and I had to respond to several incidents of serious misconduct. But one thing I never questioned was the vast majority of my peers’ core commitment to honor and courage.
Their honor and courage made me regret that I didn’t join the military sooner. I joined later in life, and went to officer basic training when I was 37 years old. When I arrived at Fort Lee in May 2006, I realized immediately that I’d made the right decision. Serving my country alongside those men and women was the great honor of my life.
Indeed, it’s the ordinary service member’s commitment to honor and courage that gives me optimism that the military can resist Trump’s worst depravity — at least for a time. But if the MAGA ethos governs the military long enough and ruthlessly enough, then the military will warp and change in response.
The path to promotion will run through political subservience as long as Trump and Hegseth are in charge, especially at the highest levels of command. For example, witness Trump bragging that his choice for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff wore a MAGA hat and said he “loved” Trump and would “kill” for him — a possibly fictional story that nonetheless illustrates Trump’s priorities perfectly.
Before Russia invaded Ukraine, several leading Trumpists developed a strange fascination with the Russian Army. They contrasted masculine Russian recruitment ads, which featured chiseled Russian soldiers displaying their martial prowess, with much softer American ads on social media.
The Russians were masculine and tough, they said. Americans were woke and weak. But the illusion of Russian prowess was shattered on those battlefields north of Kyiv. There is much more to military strength than physicality and bravado. Ukraine, the much smaller representative of the so-called woke West, has turned much of Russia’s conventional arsenal into smoking ruins.
It’s telling that Hegseth is turning to martial, masculine symbolism to save his career. He’s putting out images of himself working out with Navy SEALs, as if his fitness can cover for his carelessness and incompetence.
Sure, service members like it when senior leaders work out alongside them, but they like it much more when senior leaders live by the same standards they impose on their troops. They also like it much more when senior leaders can keep the nation’s most precious secrets.
