Pentagon purge underway

The resignation of a top Pentagon official in the run-up to Donald Trump’s inauguration as the 47th president, is a warning signal of an expected exodus of career civil servants from the US department of defence. Laura Cooper, deputy assistant secretary of defence for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia, played a key leadership role in masterminding the multi-billion dollar military aid programme to Kyiv, following the Russian invasion nearly three years ago. While, unlike political appointees to government departments who are invariably replaced when a new administration takes over, Cooper, as a highly experienced civil servant, would have been expected to keep her job. However, US defence sources said many civil servants at the Pentagon had received phone calls from Trump’s transition team in recent weeks warning that their jobs were vulnerable. One source revealed that a section which Cooper led, liaising with the coalition supporting Ukraine, looked set to be axed because of Trump’s campaign pledge to end the war as soon as he took office. The phone calls, the source said, had created an atmosphere of intimidation inside the Pentagon. The calls made it clear the new president would be seeking officials who could demonstrate their loyalty to him. Cooper, who joined the Pentagon in 2001 and was a former policy planning officer at the state department, had already run afoul of the president-elect. Against orders from the White House during Trump’s first administration to ignore a subpoena she had received from Congress in 2019, Cooper gave testimony to a committee about the president’s suspension of $400 million in aid to Ukraine. The timing of the delay in delivering arms to Kyiv was at the heart of a congressional impeachment investigation into allegations that Trump had abused the power of his office. The impeachment failed to win sufficient votes. Cooper is expected to take up a lectureship role at the National Defence University in Washington, according to Politico. Her departure after more than two decades at the Pentagon comes as Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine, Lieutenant-General Keith Kellogg, has reportedly postponed a planned trip to Kyiv aimed at working out a formula to end the war. Reuters reported that the trip would not take place until after Trump takes office on January 20. Meanwhile, the resignation of the Pentagon’s Russian and Ukrainian expert could lead to other departures of experienced staff. The Pentagon which has a budget of $842 billion and employs about 3.4 million personnel, including more than 2.5 million members of the armed forces, is facing a purge of both military and civilian staff. “People are being identified for cuts and the whole atmosphere is intimidating. It’s causing a real morale slump, everyone is worrying about their jobs, their mortgages and their livelihoods,” the source said. “These are devoted civil servants who want to serve their nation but their jobs now seem to depend on their demonstrating loyalty to the incoming president and not to the constitution as it should be,” the insider said. Among the military potentially facing the axe are three-star and four-star officers considered inadequate for their command posts. Officers known to have been close to General Mark Milley, the former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff who had a combative relationship with Trump during his first term, are reported to be on lists drawn up by the transition team. One question being asked inside the Pentagon is whether Trump will try to remove General Charles Q Brown, the current chairman of the joint chiefs of staff who is an African-American, and Admiral Lisa Franchetti, chief of naval operations, the first woman to hold this position. “General Brown raised concerns [when he was Pacific Air Forces commander]. about the killing by a white police officer of George Floyd (an African American] in 2020. Will this be considered woke and be held against him?” a defence source asked. `Key to the Trump doctrine for the military will be loyalty to him as commander-in-chief. In his first term as president, he once questioned why he couldn’t have generals like Adolf Hitler, claiming they were obedient, according to Bob Woodward in his book, War. This followed his challenging experience dealing with General Jim Mattis, his first defence secretary, as well as General Milley, and also General John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff from 2017 to 2019.