Franklin, Andrews, Kramer & Edelstein

[scion]

The only defense secretary who consistently stood up to Trump was Jim Mattis, and he resigned in protest in December 2018 over Trump’s abandonment of the Syrian Kurds. As former CIA officer Marc Polymeropoulos tweeted, it is hard to imagine that if Mattis were still in charge — rather than a “highly political JV leadership team” — that the Defense Department would have been so unprepared for an attack on the Capitol or so slow to respond.

After four years of assiduous effort, Trump succeeded in politicizing the Defense Department and undermining its effectiveness. The result was the Jan. 6 catastrophe. It is terrifying to imagine how much worse the Pentagon would have gotten if Trump had won a second term. Now it is incumbent on Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to clean up the department and rebuild the battered guardrails of military professionalism.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/03/04/how-trumps-politicized-pentagon-bungled-response-capitol-invasion/