Why Those 780 Top National Security Leaders Support Biden

Speaking publicly and in alarming terms about a partisan political issue does not come naturally to retired generals and former senior national security leaders. These public servants, many of them wartime commanders and leaders, are not given to histrionics or hyperbole. So when hundreds (it’s now up to 780)  of national security leaders – including 22 retired four-star general officers and five former Defense Secretaries who’ve served in both Republican and Democratic administrations — put their names on a public letter supporting former Vice President Joe Biden’s run for the White House, Breaking Defense contributor James Kitfield interviewed a cross section of them to find out why.

“All of us who spent careers in the military were raised on the notion that you lead by example, and President Trump has been the antithesis of that in dealing with this pandemic,” said Charles “Steve” Abbot, former commander of the U.S. Sixth Fleet and deputy Homeland Security Adviser. “Instead of taking steps that I would call ‘Crisis Management 101,’ President Trump shirked his duty to the nation by failing to provide the central leadership necessary to get our arms around the problem, and he continues to mislead the entire nation about this terrible threat. The result of that failure of leadership was that his administration committed an unrelenting string of missteps, and the American public has lost trust in what the president tells them.”

The final straw for Abbot was President Trump’s attack on mail-in balloting during a general election beset by a pandemic, insisting without evidence that it will lead to “the most rigged election in history.” That sustained attack on the legitimacy of a presidential election could all but portend a constitutional crisis in a close contest.

“If you want to know why hundreds of us who devoted our lives to service signed a letter saying we feared for our country, look no further than the spectacle of a commander-in-chief threatening not to support a peaceful transition of power if one is required. That’s an effort to undermine our democracy,” Abbot said in an interview. “So, as a Navy man, I would tell you that the ship of state had already taken on a bad list during this pandemic. And President Trump’s insistence that he may not accept the results of the election is a torpedo in the water.”

The signatories criticisms fall into some broad categories:

Belittling And Bullying Allies

President Trump’s America First foreign policy does not mesh with the worldview of most senior military and national security leaders. Trump is strictly transactional on the matter of burden-sharing and other issues related to our allies, and he has repeatedly expressed a view of alliances as little more than protection rackets. He also frequently goes out of his way to belittle and bully venerable allies, variously calling the Canadian prime minister “dishonest” and “weak,” Germany’s chancellor “stupid,” and the French prime minister “very, very nasty.”

“President Trump has no understanding or interest in the important work of keeping our alliances strong, or nurturing democratic partners and values around the world, because for him it’s all about power and projecting himself,” former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam War veteran and former Republican senator from Nebraska, said. “By treating our allies like a schoolyard bully for the past four years Trump has managed to isolate America. That’s one of many ‘firsts’ authored by Mr. Trump, and as he continues to zoom past all these boundaries and norms you have to worry about what would happen if he gets another four years.”

President Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton said earlier this year that Trump had repeatedly raised the issue of withdrawing the United States from NATO, and warned of “a very real risk” that Trump would actually follow through in a second term.

Nicholas Burns, former U.S. Ambassador to NATO and the number three official at the State Department, put it this way: “Every modern president since Harry Truman has viewed our commitment to democratic allies around the world as sacrosanct, because for half a century those alliances have been a key source of American power.” He noted that a dissolution of NATO is at the top of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s wish list. “Under President Trump we have walked away from that global leadership, and, as a result, trust in the United States has plummeted even among our closest friends. That’s done enormous damage.”

Coddling Dictators

Trump’s inexplicably chummy relationships with dictators and despots demonstrated by his “love letters” to North Korean despot Kim Jong Un; his telling Chinese leader-for-life Xi Jinping that he approved of China’s imprisonment of more than one million Uighur Muslims in “reeducation camps”; and his seeming inability to criticize a leader — Vladimir Putin — who has ordered the use of illegal chemical weapons against opponents, murdered them, interfered in U.S. elections and reportedly even put bounties on the heads of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. 

Anthony Zinni was the former commander of Central Command. “I never endorsed a presidential candidate in my life, nor do I consider myself a Democrat or a Republican, but Trump’s unwillingness to say anything critical of Putin or even raise the issue of intelligence suggesting that his government has put bounties on the heads of U.S. service members in Afghanistan was more than I could take,” he said in an interview. “I have a son who has served multiple combat tours in Afghanistan, and President Trump didn’t even want to make it an issue? I also have a lot of friends overseas in the allied military and diplomatic communities, and they don’t understand why Trump is pushing away our friends and befriending our adversaries. For us military types who always want friends on our left and right, it doesn’t make any sense.”

In his recent book “Rage,” investigative reporter Bob Woodward reports that Trump’s former DNI Dan Coats, a former Republican senator from Indiana, remains convinced that Putin has compromising information and leverage over Trump, though he lacked the intelligence to prove it. “How else to explain the president’s behavior?” Woodward writes. “Coats could see no other explanation.”

Michael Hayden served as director of both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Intelligence Agency (NSA). He recalls watching the infamous 2018 Helsinki Summit meeting between Trump and Vladimir Putin, when the president publicly accepted Putin’s denial of election interference over the repeated conclusions of his own Intelligence Community. In August the Intelligence Community’s top election security official told Congress that Russia is once again targeting Trump’s political opposition in this election cycle. 

“I watched President Trump’s Helsinki performance, when he said he didn’t ‘see any reason why’ Russia would have interfered in the 2016 election,’ and all I could say was ‘Oh my God!’ It was so awful, said Hayden. “When I talk with agency officials today, they tell me it’s impossible to break through the Fox News narrative that Trump relies on instead of his intelligence briefers. So we’ve dug a very deep hole under four years of Trump’s leadership. After four more years I fear that the America I know and served may not survive.”

Corrupting Institutions 

The effects of nearly four years of Trump’s efforts to politicize nonpartisan institutions of the federal government and bend them to his personal agenda have been on stark display. Trump recently publicly pressured Attorney General William Barr to indict presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son in connection with allegations no one has been able to verify. The president and his advisers have reportedly discussed firing FBI Director Chris Wray after Election Day for failing to act on the president’s call. After Trump recently publicly called on Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to release more of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails in hopes of engineering another “October surprise,” Pompeo agreed. Just ahead of the first presidential debate, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, a Trump loyalist who had sparse experience with intelligence matters before his nomination, selectively declassified unconfirmed intelligence suggesting that in 2016 it was the Clinton campaign that tried to tie Trump to Russia’s election interference. Some intelligence analysts believe that narrative is part of Russia’s disinformation campaign. 

“Attorney General Barr has been co-opted as the president’s personal lawyer. The Intelligence Community has been so grossly politicized that intelligence briefers withhold any negative intelligence on [Russian President] Vladimir Putin because the president doesn’t want to hear it, and Trump continues to try and corrupt virtually every government institution that has kept our democracy strong and free,” said William Cohen, a former Defense Secretary and Republican senator from Maine. “And the fact that President Trump now feels so unbound as to publicly pressure the attorney general to arrest his political opponents and critics, essentially one upping Richard Nixon’s enemies list, should send shudders through us all.” 

By now the White House playbook for politicizing and bringing independent institutions and agencies to heel is familiar. Shuffle the leadership until a compliant loyalist emerges; hollow out the bureaucracy by leaving positions in the second and third leadership tiers unfilled; rely on “acting” officials who often are unfamiliar with the place they are working and its topics so they can be more easily controlled and fired, thus circumventing the Senate’s constitutional role of “advise and consent”; and replace or simply fire independent watchdogs like Inspector Generals. Since May, Trump has removed or replaced five Inspector Generals, including watchdogs at the Departments of Defense, State, Transportation, Health and Human Services and in the Intelligence Community.

“Donald Trump is the first president in our history who has sought to undermine every institution that promotes American values and democratic practices, from our judicial and voting systems, to Congress and the press, to our military and Intelligence Community. None has escaped his assault,” said retired Ambassador Robert Blackwill, former deputy National Security Advisor in the George W. Bush administration. “Personally it never occurred to me early on that President Trump would launch an all-out attack on our democratic institutions and processes, so my imagination failed me on that score. I’ve come to actually believe that he’s not a democrat with a small `d.’ I think his instincts are authoritarian.”

Janet Napolitano is a former Secretary of Homeland Security. “Whole subcabinets at some government agencies and departments that are supposed to be Senate confirmed are now filled by ‘acting’ officials, and the instability and lack of quality people at the leadership level has done tremendous damage to our institutions,” she said in an interview. As the head of the Department of Homeland Security, Napolitano said she could never imagine the department being involved in the separation of immigrant children from their parents at the southern border, or the recent deployment of Customs and Border Protection paramilitary units to Portland, Oregon to crackdown on violent protests there, over the objections of state and local officials. 

“What we’ve seen is that President Trump is very good at tearing down institutions, but not so good at building them up,” said Napolitano.

Despite its status by statutory law and tradition as one of the most nonpartisan institutions in the federal government, the Defense Department has not escaped the commander-in-chief’s efforts to enlist it for his political agenda. That became clear last June during Black Lives Matter protests against the killing in police custody of George Floyd. After proclaiming himself “your president of law and order” in a Rose Garden speech, Trump threatened to invoke the rarely-used Insurrection Act to send active-duty troops to “dominate” the streets of America. He then had National Guard troops and federal law enforcement violently disperse mostly peaceful protesters near Lafayette Square so that he could have a photo-op holding up a Bible at a nearby church. Flanking him that day as he strode across Lafayette Square were Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley. Both later apologized for their presence at the square.

“That whole incident around Lafayette Park was stunning to me, because those were mostly peaceful demonstrators exercising a right guaranteed by the Constitution that I’ve sworn allegiance to throughout my entire career,” said retired Gen. Peter Chiarelli, former Vice Chief of the Army. “This president has assaulted the military justice system on behalf of individuals charged with war crimes. He has ended the career of service members like [impeachment witness Lt. Col. Alexander] Vindman for doing his duty and what was right. He has maligned mail-in voting as a fraud and suggested that he might claim victory in a close election before all the ballots are counted, when as a service member I have voted absentee by mail my entire life. So like everyone else I’ve become numb after four years of this, but we have gone places in that time that I never dreamt we would go as a nation. I really do fear that the republic that I swore allegiance to is now under threat.” 

Pandemic Mismanagement

For many of the retired flag-officers and senior national security leaders who signed the “Open Letter to America,” the president’s leadership during the coronavirus crisis was the final affront. Confronted with a global pandemic and knowing early on that Covid-19 was an especially deadly and contagious virus, Trump nevertheless told the American public that the virus would disappear “like a miracle” when the weather turned warm, with or without a vaccine; that “anybody that wants a test can get a test”; that if the nation simply stopped testing for the virus “we would have very few cases”: that injecting powerful cleaning agents like bleach might cure the virus; that Covid-19 “affects virtually nobody” younger than 18. Meanwhile, with just 4 percent of the world’s population, the United States has 25 percent of the known infections, and at 230,000 plus lives lost the highest death toll by far of any nation.

After hosting what infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci called a “super spreader” event at the White House on September 26, where many participants refused to wear face masks and social distance, President Trump, First Lady Melania Trump, several senior advisers and an estimated 25 other officials tested positive for the virus. One of the attendees was Adm. Charles Ray, second in command of the Coast Guard, who later attended a senior-level meeting at the Pentagon and then tested positive for the virus, forcing the Joint Chiefs of Staff to go into quarantine.

James Kitfield, the only three-time winner of the prestigious Gerald R. Ford Award for Distinguished Reporting on National Defense, regularly contributes to Breaking Defense.