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Army protocol dictated that I should walk one or two steps behind Major General James E. Lee.
General Lee had other ideas.
“Walk on up here next to me,” he said. “We’re not in the field. I need to know what you know or have heard about why this program is taking hits.”
We were walking through the United States Senate on our way to a meeting of the Senate Armed Services Committee. The program taking the hits was a new tank the Army badly wanted Congress to fund: the M1 Abrams tank.
I was a young soldier assigned as a congressional liaison officer to the Secretary of the Army’s Office of the Chief of Legislative Liaison. Lee wore two stars.
At that moment, however, the difference in our ranks mattered less to him than the difference in what we knew.
I had met Lee not long before in his Pentagon office. I had arrived prepared to salute. Instead, he walked around his desk and stuck out his hand.
“Welcome aboard, son.”
He was a big man, slightly taller than my six-foot-two, lean and broad-chested, with a slight Southern drawl. But what immediately caught my eye was the Combat Infantryman Badge on his dress-green jacket.
You didn’t have to ask what that meant.
He had been there.
During that first meeting, Lee explained what my new job would entail: working in the Senate, representing the Secretary of the Army, helping secure funding for Army programs, and working with senators’ military caseworkers on behalf of soldiers and their families.
Then he gave me one instruction I have remembered for nearly half a century.
“Don’t let anyone in the Senate, and especially not the senators, intimidate you. They are just like you and me: they put their pants on one leg at a time.”
Inside the committee offices sat Sen. John Stennis of Mississippi, then the committee chairman. Stennis had concerns about the Abrams, particularly its cost and reliability.
Lee let him finish.
Then he pulled out a notebook, not an enormous briefing packet, and explained why the Army believed the tank was important and why the program deserved full funding. If the senator remained concerned, Lee said, the Army would arrange for a congressional delegation to see the tank being tested.
I eventually led that CODEL.
The program received its funding.
I didn’t have the vocabulary for it then, but I had been given a lesson in senior military leadership.
Rank gave Lee authority. Decades of experience gave him judgment.
Neither persuaded him that the stars on his shoulders meant he knew everything he needed to know.
What Thirty Years Buys
Last fall, Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth summoned roughly 800 generals and admirals to Quantico.
I did the arithmetic then.
If each officer had served an average of 30 to 35 years, that auditorium contained somewhere between 24,000 and 28,000 years of military service—millennia of warfighting experience, stacked like cordwood in pressed uniforms. Regular Army. Navy. Marines. Air Force.
The number was almost comical.
What has happened since makes it considerably less so.
Trump and Hegseth have removed or forced out a remarkable collection of senior military leaders. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The chief of naval operations. The Air Force’s second-ranking officer. The director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. The Army chief of staff. Gen. Christopher Donahue, commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa, retired early this summer after a reported clash with Hegseth.
Each case has its own circumstances, and presidents and defense secretaries unquestionably possess the authority to replace senior military officers.
Indeed, they must.
Civilian control of the military is not an inconvenience of American democracy. It is one of its foundations. Generals advise. Civilian leaders decide.
Nor are generals infallible. American history contains more than enough evidence of senior officers exercising poor judgment, fighting the last war, resisting necessary change, or confusing military objectives with national policy.
But acknowledging that individual generals are replaceable is very different from concluding that senior military experience is expendable.
That is where the arithmetic matters.
Thirty years in uniform is not simply thirty trips around the sun.
It represents commands held, troops led, deployments completed, exercises conducted, mistakes made, lessons learned, allies encountered, adversaries studied, weapons evaluated, logistical failures survived, budgets fought over, intelligence absorbed, and decisions made when the consequences could be measured in human lives.
James Lee had not been manufactured the morning Senator Stennis questioned the Abrams program.
The Army had spent decades producing the man who walked into that room.
And even then, on his way to defend one of the Army’s most important programs, his first instinct had been to ask a junior soldier what he knew.
That is what experience can teach.
Being in command does not mean knowing everything.
It means knowing whom you need to hear before deciding.
Then Comes the Day You Need Them
The distinction matters more now because America is once again confronting the kinds of military questions for which accumulated judgment exists.
After the war with Iran, the Pentagon is evaluating America’s military posture across the Persian Gulf.
Nearly 40,000 American troops normally occupy almost 20 sites stretching roughly 1,500 miles from Jordan to Oman. Some American facilities have been damaged. Rebuilding them may cost billions of dollars. Iran has demonstrated that American bases can be vulnerable. Gulf allies are wondering what comes next.
So somebody must decide.
Rebuild the damaged installations?
Relocate them?
Consolidate American forces into fewer, better-defended bases?
Reduce the American presence?
Maintain the existing posture and strengthen its defenses?
Or ask the much harder question: whether the strategy that produced that posture still makes sense?
Those are not merely military questions. Ultimately, they are presidential ones.
The president decides what American interests require. The secretary of defense implements that policy. Congress controls money and possesses its own constitutional responsibilities.
But before any of them decides, somebody ought to be sitting at the table who understands what each choice might mean when the shooting starts again.
That is why nations spend thirty years producing generals.
Not so generals can make decisions for presidents.
So presidents do not have to make those decisions alone.
The Experience You Cannot Requisition
America can replace equipment.
If the Army needs more tanks, Congress can appropriate money and industry can eventually build them. If an installation is damaged, engineers can repair it. If ammunition stocks fall, factories can increase production.
Professional judgment works differently.
If America wakes tomorrow morning and discovers that it desperately needs another officer with thirty years of command experience, Congress cannot appropriate thirty years.
No emergency supplemental can manufacture it.
No presidential declaration can create it.
And no executive order can substitute confidence for experience.
That is what troubles me about Trump and Hegseth’s thinning of America’s senior military ranks.
The issue is not whether any general should have remained in a particular job. Reasonable civilian leaders can disagree with their military advisers. Presidents can reject their recommendations. Defense secretaries can demand different strategies and different leadership.
But if senior officers begin to understand that professional disagreement, unwelcome advice, or insufficient enthusiasm for an administration’s worldview may carry professional consequences, something more important than an individual career begins to change.
The officers who remain learn too.
They learn which advice is welcome.
They learn which conclusions travel safely upward.
And eventually a president may discover that the generals sitting around the table are very good at telling him what he wants to hear.
That is when he will need the generals he thought he didn’t need.
“I Need to Know What You Know”
Nearly half a century later, I remember surprisingly little about General Lee’s Pentagon office.
I remember the handshake.
I remember the Combat Infantryman Badge.
And I remember walking through the Senate beside a two-star general who had decided Army protocol was less important at that moment than information possessed by the junior soldier assigned to accompany him.
“I need to know what you know,” he told me.
Perhaps those words stayed with me because they contained something I was too young to recognize at the time.
Lee understood that authority and knowledge were not the same thing.
The stars gave him authority. Leadership required him to recognize the limits of what he knew.
Presidents face the same distinction.
A strong president does not need generals who make decisions for him. Nor does he need generals who agree with him.
He needs generals whose experience permits them to tell him what he does not know, what he may not want to hear, and what could happen if his judgment proves wrong.
Then the president decides.
That is civilian control.
But first he must listen.
Keep reading: The Presidency Teddy Roosevelt Would Not Recognize
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If this week’s dispatch aligned with your reading, forward it to an un-unhinged colleague who still keeps an eye on the clockwork.
Reader and listener correspondence is always welcome at dunneagin@dunneagin.net. Questions, observations, or a note on how you first stumbled into the chronicle are particularly appreciated.
*_A note on the shelf: Every Tuesday dispatch compiles toward a permanent, physical record. We print what the screen forgets._*
Because someday, perhaps without warning, the country will confront a problem nobody anticipated, involving an adversary nobody expected, in circumstances no campaign speech prepared anyone to confront.
And on that morning, the president may discover why America spent thirty years creating the people sitting across the table from him.
Those are the generals you don’t need—until you do.
If this week’s dispatch resonated, The Truths Presidents Hear—or Don't examines the companion question of presidential counsel and leadership.
📬 To receive each new essay by email the day it publishes, subscribe to Civics Unhinged.
☕ Reader editions and collected volumes—including Volumes 1, 2, 3, and The Liar’s Guide to Autocracy—are available on the Fourthwall bookshelf.
If this week’s dispatch aligned with your reading, forward it to an un-unhinged colleague who still keeps an eye on the clockwork.
Reader and listener correspondence is always welcome at dunneagin@dunneagin.net. Questions, observations, or a note on how you first stumbled into the chronicle are particularly appreciated.
_ A note on the shelf: Every Tuesday dispatch compiles toward a permanent, physical record. We print what the screen forgets.
— Dunneagin
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