ar-AAJprM5

He treated the Generals like he does anyone else. Sings their praises and then takes every opportunity to bash them as the worst ever

OK, I'll give my cynical view of top Military Politics. I think we all will agree that the top Military positions are as much political as they are performance driven. If we look historical at the Patton and Eisenhower. Patton was the most brilliant field General that the US produced in WWII, but he had about as much tact as Donald Trump, so he was never a politically viable choice. Eisenhower never held a combat command, but he was very good at the politics both within the Services and internationally, so go he ended up President. If you look at the current crop of Generals, they all came up during Neo Liberal (which has nothing to do with our concept of liberal or conservative) administrations all the way back to Bill Clinton that have embraced the concept of Globalism and the attended need to police those unruly and uncooperative countries. I include both the Bush's in that category too. So the people at the top got there supporting a 28 year old interventionist policy that the current Administration's seems to want to change. I have a lot of respect for Mattis, but it was clear from day one that he supported a policy very similar to supported by John Bolton, and he wasn't willing to follow the wishes of the sitting President. I'll give him credit for manning up and resigning a job that conflicted with his values, even though in this case I feel that both Mattis and Kelly's interventionist attitudes are wrong. We have had 18 years of conflict, at what point do we say enough? I think most of America if they were polled would support pulling out of most of these conflicts, some that are now so old that new soldiers weren't born when the original cause occurred.

The crux of the matter is, Trump thinks he is Patton but knows jack shit about the military. He probably thinks he is too smart to get a COA and COG analysis. With a broad stroke of his pen, he claims victory while we are going back into Syria. Never mind he turned his backs to the Kurds and Syrian Democratic Forces.