There’s a trope in the world of print journalism that if a headline ends in a question mark, the answer is almost always, “no.”
So, if you’re flipping through this edition of the magazine in a rush, I’ll give the BLUF, which in today’s vernacular means “bottom line up front.”
No, President Donald Trump likely has little need for a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, given his penchant for ignoring unwelcome advice and preference for his own “commonsense” gut instincts, but the country probably does.
Given that the Joint Chiefs chairman’s primary role under statute is to serve as “principal military adviser to the president, secretary of defense, National Security Council, and Homeland Security Council,” and that Trump is famously advice averse, especially when that counsel comes from senior military officers whom he faults for past mistakes, a chairman such as Air Force Gen. Charles Q. Brown, Jr. whose term ran until 2027, was destined to be relegated to a role akin to a eunuch at an orgy.
The chairman, like all senior officers, serves at the pleasure of the president, and every president has the prerogative to seek military advice from someone they respect.
Brown was unceremoniously dispatched as part of a Friday night massacre that ended the careers of several seasoned senior officers, including the first female member of the joint chiefs Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Lisa Franchetti; Air Force Vice Chief Gen. James Slife; and the Defense Department’s top military lawyers.
Trump put the rest of the chiefs and the current crop of top commanders on notice, too.
“I don’t see big promotions in that group,” Trump said at his Feb. 26 Cabinet meeting, where he blamed senior officers for botching the 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal. “I think they’re going to be largely gone. It was so terrible, the way that was handled. … The whole place went crazy, that was so badly handled.”
It should be noted that the chairman and his fellow chiefs — there are eight of them with the addition of the Space Force during Trump’s first term — “have no executive authority to command combatant forces,” as is spelled out on the Joint Chiefs of Staff website.
The only troops the chairman commands are those on his mixed military and civilian staff, which numbers between 1,600 and 2,500. Members work to analyze intelligence, plan military operations, oversee logistics, and draw up contingency war plans.
The chairman is not in the chain of command, which runs from the president through the defense secretary to individual combatant commanders.
A historical note: In 1990, then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney inserted Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell into the chain of command to keep a tighter rein on the Gulf War commander, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, but that the was first and only time that happened.
Critics on social media accused Trump of eroding the bedrock principle of an apolitical military.
“Trump wants to create his own Praetorian Guard, an armed force that answers only to him,” posted Tom Nichols, a staff writer at the Atlantic. “That has never ended well either for the military or for the civilians.”
Retired military officers and Democratic lawmakers in Congress also lambasted Trump for firing Brown, a well-respected combat pilot with decades of command assignments and whom Trump himself made the Air Force’s first black chief of staff.
“This appears to be part of a broader, premeditated campaign by President Trump and Secretary Hegseth to purge talented officers for politically charged reasons, which would undermine the professionalism of our military and send a chilling message through the ranks,” said Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
No reason was given for Brown’s premature retirement, but as the four-star commander of Pacific Air Forces in 2020, Brown recorded a video in which he said the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer had him “thinking about a history of racial issues and my own experiences that didn’t always sing of liberty and equality.”
In the eyes of some, such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, that forever branded Brown as a “too-woke” general.
Hegseth called for Brown’s firing before he had any idea he would be nominated for defense secretary, telling podcast host Shawn Ryan before the election, “Any general that was involved in any of the DEI s*** has to go.”
In his dismissal post on Truth Social, Trump called Brown “a fine gentleman and an outstanding leader,” and Hegseth called him “an honorable man,” who was just “not the right man for the moment.”
Trump has no shortage of people he can call on for military advice, beginning with his national security adviser, former Green Beret and ex-Florida Rep. Mike Waltz, and his vice president, JD Vance.
But what Trump seems to want in his senior military adviser is someone out of Central Casting, the very model of a can-do commander with what the kids today call “rizz.”
This explains in large part why he’s replacing Brown with an obscure retired lieutenant general, Dan Caine, who made a big impression on the president during a chance meeting in Iraq in 2018, when Caine was a two-star deputy commander fighting the Islamic State group.
Trump recounted the story in recent remarks in Miami, but he told it first to gales of laughter at the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference.
“I met generals I didn’t know,” Trump regaled the crowd. “General one, general two, general three. I mean, these generals — there’s no person in Hollywood that could play the role. These guys are, like, perfect people. I said, ‘What’s your name?’ ‘Sir, my name is Raisin.’ ‘What the hell kind of a name?’ I said, ‘Raisin, like the fruit?’ He goes, ‘Yes, sir, Raisin.’ ‘What’s your last name?’ ‘Caine. Raisin Caine.’ I said, ‘You got to be kidding me.'”
“Listen, we got to get out — I want to know: Why is it going to take two years?” Trump said he asked Caine later at a pull-aside.
“‘Sir, we can have it totally finished in one week,’” Trump recalled. “I said, ‘One week? I was told two years. One week?’ ‘That’s right, sir. We’re only hitting them from a temporary base in Syria, but if you gave us permission, we could hit them from the back, from the side, from all over, from the base that you’re right on, right now, sir. They won’t know what the hell hit them.’
“’Why didn’t my other generals tell me that? Why didn’t they tell me that?’ I said, ‘Did you tell them that?’ ‘Not our place to say it, sir. They come in from Washington, sir. We have to take orders. You’re the first one to ask us our opinion.’
“So, I went back and I said, ‘I’m going to get back to you soon, Raisin. I think you’re great.’”
By the time Trump recalled Caine to active duty in late February to face Senate confirmation for the top uniformed position, he knew his call sign as an F-16 pilot was actually “Razin,” not like the fruit. Dan “Razin” Caine.
Hegseth is promising to make the U.S. military more “bada**,” and Trump the promoter knows marketing is a big part of that — plus, he’s always been a sucker for catchy call signs.
One reason Trump took an early shine to legendary Marine Gen. Jim Mattis as his first defense secretary is he thought Mattis’s call sign was “Mad Dog.”
HEGSETH DEFENDS TRUMP’S FIRING OF JOINT STAFF CHAIRMAN CQ BROWN
Turned out that was something a journalist tagged him with. Mattis’s actual call sign was CHAOS, an acronym for “Colonel Has Another Outstanding Suggestion.”
And we all know how that turned out.