Some 24 hours after firing Defense Secretary Mark Esper, President Donald Trump continued to wreak havoc on the Pentagon civilian leadership structure, removing multiple senior civilian officials and filling their positions with figures viewed as loyalists to the president—including someone who previously called former President Barack Obama a “terrorist leader.” According to CNN, the abrupt overhaul—referred to by one senior defense official as “the beheadings”—has sounded the alarm inside the Defense Department, which was already thrust into chaos by Esper’s ousting and is now facing further uncertainty as to what is on Trump’s agenda during the transition. “This is scary, it’s very unsettling,” a Pentagon official told CNN. “These are dictator moves.”
The sweeping changes include the departure of James Anderson, who resigned as the Pentagon’s acting policy chief on Tuesday. “I leave knowing that the team will persevere, regardless of what lies ahead,” he told his staff in a departing message that encouraged them “to remain mission focused, apolitical, and never to forget your oath of office.” It was not immediately clear whether Anderson’s resignation came at the White House’s behest, though he has reportedly clashed with the administration over its previous attempts to install Trump loyalists at DoD. Anderson was replaced by retired Brig. Gen. Anthony Tata, who was nominated to become under secretary of defense for policy earlier this year but had his nomination withdrawn after CNN uncovered a trove of Islamophobic and offensive comments he had made in addition to pushing “deep state” conspiracy theories. In 2018, Tata tweeted that Obama was a “terrorist leader” who did more to harm the U.S. “and help Islamic countries than any president in history.”
Tuesday also marked the departure of retired Navy Vice Adm. Joseph Kernan, the Pentagon’s top intelligence official, as well as the chief of staff to the Defense Secretary. According to CNN, multiple civilian and military officials inside the department fear how the overhaul could undermine national security by allowing Trump to use “his final weeks in office to potentially again call for initiatives he wants to pursue that the Pentagon opposes,” CNN reports, such as again invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy active duty forces against future protests or flout military advice and withdraw troops from Afghanistan by Christmas. Officials also fear that the Trump loyalists at the helm lack the necessary experience for the job, including Esper’s replacement, Christopher Miller, who was heading the National Counterterrorism Center before he was placed in the role in an acting capacity. “Miller is in over his head,” in part because he was a relatively low-level official with an expertise focused on counterterrorism, one official told CNN, describing Miller as a “tool” and “vassal of the [National Security Council].”
Democrats also expressed alarm over the sweeping changes. “It is hard to overstate just how dangerous high-level turnover at the Department of Defense is during a period of presidential transition. The top policy professional in the Department resigning the day after the Secretary of Defense was fired could mark the beginning of a process of gutting the DoD—something that should alarm all Americans,” House Armed Services Chairman Adam Smith said in a statement Tuesday. Ben Rhodes, former deputy national security advisor under Obama, also raised grave concerns. “There’s no non-disturbing explanation for removing the entire Pentagon civilian leadership and replacing them with a bunch of Trump acolytes during a lame duck presidency,” he wrote on Twitter.
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