The military is rightly understood as an apolitical institution, managed on the basis of merit, yet accountable at the highest level to democratically elected civilians.
The Biden administration has demonstrated, however, the extent to which military affairs are enmeshed with politics, to the detriment of national security. Conservative groups and elected officials have caught on to the decay in institutional credibility.
Ironically, though predictably, progressives and the media now decry conservative attempts to preserve the military’s institutional integrity as “politicized.”
Of late, media outlets like The Washington Post and Yahoo came to the defense of Air Force Col. Ben Jonsson, an officer whose promotion Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., is holding up. In Foreign Affairs, Marquette political science professor Risa Brooks used Schmitt’s hold on Jonsson’s…
