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Four-star US generals and admirals are a taciturn bunch: they measure their words, qualify their statements and guard their silence out of loyalty to the armed forces and to their country.

Not this week.

A torrent of raw military condemnation has been unleashed on Donald Trump, with some of the most respected figures among retired military leaders lining up to express their profound disapproval of their commander-in-chief.

The outpouring was exceptional, both for the sheer number who unloaded on the president and for the unrestrained language in which they put it. The most breathtaking words came from William McRaven, a former commander of US special operations command who oversaw the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

In an opinion article in the New York Times, McRaven accused Trump of spreading “frustration, humiliation, anger and fear” through the armed forces and of championing “despots and strongmen” while abandoning US allies. The four-star admiral called for Trump to either shape up or ship out of the White House.

“If this president doesn’t demonstrate the leadership that America needs, both domestically and abroad, then it is time for a new person in the Oval Office – Republican, Democrat or independent – the sooner, the better. The fate of our Republic depends upon it.”

That Trump should be coming under such sharp criticism from figures as revered as McRaven is all the more extraordinary given that Trump put those he called “my generals” at the center of his cabinet when he took office almost three years ago. He appointed Jim Mattis as defense secretary, Michael Flynn and HR McMaster as successive national security advisers, and John Kelly as homeland security secretary and then White House chief of staff.

Now all those generals are gone, and some are speaking out.

Mattis, who has largely kept his silence since resigning last December, made clear his disdain for the president in the form of a stream of jokes at a black-tie roasting on Thursday night. In his first public comments about his former boss, Mattis mocked the amount of time Trump spends on his golf courses and poked fun at how he had avoided military service in Vietnam by claiming bone spurs in his feet.

“I earned my spurs on the battlefield; Donald Trump earned his spurs in a letter from a doctor,” Mattis said.

The new sense of license to criticize Trump among military leaders originated with the president’s highly contentious decision last week to pull US troops from northern Syria. The sudden move has paved the way for a Turkish invasion that has put a prominent US ally in the fight against Isis, the Syrian Kurds, in mortal danger.

Several US generals and admirals expressed their disgust and bewilderment at Trump’s decision. Adm James Stavridis, former supreme allied commander of Nato, told MSNBC that it was a “geopolitical mistake of near epic proportion”. He said its long-term impact would be to cast doubt on the reliability of the US as an ally.

“It’s hard to imagine how one could, in a single stroke, re-enable Isis, elevate Iran, allow Vladimir Putin the puppet master to continue his upward trajectory and simultaneously put war criminal chemical-weapon user Bashar al-Assad in the driving seat in Syria.”

On the same channel, the former four-star general and battlefield commander in the Gulf, Barry McCaffrey, said the Syrian withdrawal was “inexplicable”.

“Mr Trump seems to have single-handedly and unilaterally precipitated a national security crisis in the Middle East,” he said, adding that the president had put the armed forces in a “very tricky situation”.

Trump’s former national security adviser, HR McMaster, agreed that the decision would destabilize the region and intensify the Syrian civil war.



But the key question is what the highest echelons of the serving military think about Trump’s increasingly erratic leadership. A clue can be found in the viral photograph of the confrontation between Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the House, and Trump in the White House on Wednesday.

Pelosi is seen jabbing her finger at Trump who appears to be yelling across the table from her. Soon after the photo was taken Pelosi walked out of the meeting after Trump called her a “third-grade politician”.

Sitting next to Trump is Gen Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff – the highest-ranking officer in the US military. What he was thinking in the moment is not known, but he is looking down at his hands and his face is clenched.

Milley may not have the luxury to emote enjoyed by his retired four-star equivalents. But his expression spoke volumes.

General discontent: how the president's military men turned on Trump

Sitting next to Trump is Gen Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff – the highest-ranking officer in the US military. What he was thinking in the moment is not known, but he is looking down at his hands and his face is clenched.

Icarus wrote:That photo is going to go down in history as one of the most iconic images in US politics. That photos says so much. A woman standing up to and pointing down to a ruthless dictator who is clearly mouthing off like a petulant child, and his military officials sitting beside him with their heads bowed in shame because they're so embarrassed.

The funny thing is that photo was only released because Trump released it on Twitter thinking people would interpret it as Pelosi having a meltdown. But it will be remembered 50-100 years from now and serve to embarrass the Trump family forever.

Spiking drinks with cocaine, shooting Iraqi civilians, strangling a Green Beret: The Navy SEAL teams have been rocked by one high-profile scandal after another in recent months, and the leader of the elite commando force, Rear Adm. Collin P. Green, has vowed to clean house.

Admiral Green has come down hard on misconduct, fired two key leaders and made an unusually public admission that the Navy’s secretive warrior caste has an “ethics problem.” At the same time, though, he has steered wide of the SEAL at the center of one of the grimmest episodes, Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher, who was charged with shooting civilians, murdering a captive Islamic State fighter with a knife, and threatening to kill witnesses.

Chief Gallagher was acquitted of murder charges this summer, but evidence that he had engaged in a range of other misconduct, including theft and drug use, had come to light during the investigation. Admiral Green and other Navy leaders were planning to demote him and force him out of the SEALs — sending a message that such conduct had no place in one of the country’s premier fighting forces.

None of that has happened, though, because one of Chief Gallagher’s most vocal supporters happens to be the commander in chief. President Trump has repeatedly intervened, and has posted so many expressions of support for the SEAL on Twitter that the Navy now sees Chief Gallagher as untouchable, according to three Navy officials familiar with the case. Any talk of punishment has been shelved, not only for the chief, but for two other SEALs who had been facing possible discipline in the case, these officials said.

Mr. Trump helped Chief Gallagher get released from confinement before his trial, and personally congratulated him on Twitter when he was acquitted.

“People want to hold these guys accountable,” said one Navy officer who was involved in the punishment deliberations. “But they are afraid that if you do anything, minutes later there will be a tweet from the White House, and the officer in charge will get axed.”

The officer, like others interviewed for this article, asked that his name not be used because he feared retaliation.

The president has previously made it clear that he believes the country should tread carefully when calling American troops to account for acts of war. Only last week, he announced on Twitter that the White House was reviewing the case of Maj. Mathew L. Golsteyn, a former Army Special Forces soldier charged with murder in the death of a Taliban bomb maker in Afghanistan. “We train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them when they kill!” Mr. Trump wrote.

The issue in Chief Gallagher’s case became apparent to Admiral Green’s team in August, when the chief’s lawyers — including one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers, Marc Mukasey, who joined the defense team two months before the June court-martial — had tried and failed to persuade Navy commanders to suspend any punishment. Soon after that, the president brought up the Gallagher case at a meeting with the Secretary of the Navy and the Chief of Naval Operations, according to a senior Navy official.

White House officials strongly denied that the Gallagher case was discussed. But hours after the meeting, the Chief of Naval Operations announced that he would personally take over the Gallagher case from another admiral, who had indicated that she planned to punish the chief.

The Navy had also planned to discipline two other SEALs who had come under investigation in the Gallagher case: Lt. Jacob Portier, who was charged with not reporting Chief Gallagher’s actions in Iraq; and Special Operator First Class Corey Scott, a platoon medic whose testimony at the chief’s trial prompted the Navy to open a perjury investigation. But the day after the White House meeting, the charges against Lieutenant Portier were dropped and the investigation of Special Operator Scott was ended.

The intervention from Washington left Navy leaders with a dilemma: Not punishing Chief Gallagher and the others would undermine efforts to restore discipline in the ranks, but punishing them only to be publicly reversed might make things even worse.

“All that’s off the table now,” said a Navy Special Warfare officer who was briefed on the most recent deliberations of Admiral Green’s team about the matter. Navy commanders grew concerned that if they took away from Chief Gallagher the Trident pin that signifies membership in the SEALs, only to see the president give it back again, the officer said, “it sends a message that the commanders aren’t in control.”

While taking no action against Chief Gallagher, the Navy recently fired two senior leaders of the team on which Chief Gallagher serves, SEAL Team 7, which has had other recent incidents of misconduct. The command cited a “loss of confidence that resulted from leadership failures.”

The two leaders, Cmdr. Edward Mason and Master Chief Hugh Spangler — both decorated career SEALs with unblemished records who took command of the team after Chief Gallagher had been arrested — filed a complaint with the Navy’s inspector general over their firing. They said that they had become “expendable scapegoats” in the admiral’s fight against an anti-authoritarian “Gallagher effect” that was threatening to spread through the force.

With his new, protected status, Chief Gallagher appears to be trolling Navy leadership.

A few days after the demoted leaders filed their complaint, an Instagram account belonging to Chief Gallagher and his wife started selling T-shirts emblazoned with the phrase “The Gallagher Effect.”

Another recent Instagram post from the account referred to Admiral Green and another top Navy leader as “a bunch of morons.”

And in a photo posted on social media by a former member of his platoon, Chief Gallagher is seen gripping a hunting knife similar to the one Navy prosecutors said he used to kill a captive fighter from ISIS, which is also known by its Arabic name, Daesh. The post, which was “liked” by Chief Gallagher’s account, included the hashtags #WeDon’tHaveAnEthicsProblem and #NoOneCriesOverSpilledDaesh.

Timothy Parlatore, a lawyer for Chief Gallagher, said the Instagram account is administered by the chief’s wife and does not reflect the chief’s views.

The original criminal charges against Chief Gallagher, 40, stemmed from his fifth combat deployment with the SEALs, when he led a platoon fighting ISIS in Iraq in 2017. In a text message sent to his supervisor before deploying, he said he did not care where the Navy sent him, as long as there was “sure action,” adding, “We just want to kill as many people as possible.”

He ended up in an advisory role largely behind front lines. But several men under his command told Navy authorities that he remained fixated on killing, and said they saw him shoot civilians with a sniper rifle and stab a captive teenage ISIS fighter in the neck. Their reports eventually led to the war crimes charges filed against the chief.

After Chief Gallagher was arrested in 2018, his family appeared repeatedly on Fox News, insisting that he had been wrongly accused. Soon Mr. Trump became a supporter, praising Chief Gallagher’s “past service to our country” on Twitter. Mr. Trump directed the Navy to release the chief from pretrial confinement in the spring of 2019 and ordered paperwork to pardon him before his trial in June.

During the trial, the Navy’s case against Chief Gallagher fell into disarray as a key witness, Special Operator Scott, changed his story on the stand and prosecutors canceled the testimony of other witnesses, fearing they would do the same. A jury made up largely of seasoned combat veterans found Chief Gallagher not guilty of nearly all counts.

After the acquittal, the president congratulated him on Twitter saying, “Glad I could help!”

Gunnar wrote:I think it is more accurate to say that Trump turned on the military than that the military turned on Trump.

Jersey Girl wrote:He consistently turns on everyone.