Key Takeaways
- The Pentagon is preparing for an overhaul under a potential Trump administration.
- Donald Trump has suggested he would be open to using active-duty forces for domestic law enforcement and mass deportations.
- Pentagon officials are discussing unlawful orders and the potential impact on senior military leaders.
Pentagon officials are holding informal discussions about how the Department of Defence would respond if Donald Trump issues orders to deploy active-duty troops domestically. This includes large swaths of apolitical staffers, defence officials said.
Trump has suggested he would be open to using active-duty forces for domestic law enforcement and mass deportations and has indicated he wants to stack the federal government with loyalists and “clean out corrupt actors” in the US National Security establishment, CNN reported.
Trump in his last term had a fraught relationship with much of his senior military leadership, including now-retired Gen, media reported.
Mark Milley who took steps to limit Trump’s ability to use nuclear weapons while he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The President-elect, meanwhile, has repeatedly called US military Generals “woke,” “weak” and “ineffective leaders.”
Officials are now gaming out various scenarios as they prepare for an overhaul of the Pentagon.
“We are all preparing and planning for the worst-case scenario, but the reality is that we don’t know how this is going to play out yet,” one Defence official said.
Trump’s election has also raised questions inside the Pentagon about what would happen if the President issued an unlawful order, particularly if his political appointees inside the department don’t push back, according to media reports.
“Troops are compelled by law to disobey unlawful orders,” said another defence official. “But the question is what happens then – do we see resignations from senior military leaders? Or would they view that as abandoning their people?”
It’s unclear at this point who Trump will choose to lead the Pentagon, though officials believe Trump and his team will try to avoid the kind of “hostile” relationship he had with the military during his last administration, said a former Defence official with experience during the first Trump administration.
“The relationship between the White House and the DoD was really, really bad, and so … I know it’s top of mind for how they’re going to select the folks that they put in DoD this time around,” the former official said.
Defense officials are also scrambling to identify civilian employees who might be impacted if Trump reinstates Schedule F, an executive order he first issued in 2020 that, if enacted, would have reclassified huge swaths of nonpolitical, career federal employees across the US government to make them more easily fire able.
