Perhaps the best one can say of the current administration’s purge of our nation’s most-senior military officers is that, unlike many historical examples over millennia of a state suppressing its military leaders or entire military castes, the own-goal dismissal of our most-capable combat officers has been non-violent. While that may set it apart from most past purges, it will not spare us the consequences of spurning those who might save us in an existential crisis.
Pledged to the United States Constitution and conditioned to shun politics, our generals and admirals may grind their teeth, but they salute, obey their orders, and leave. But the costs of subjecting such men—and women—to administrative persecution and public humiliation because they will not swear unconditional fealty to an individual over the Constitution will have consequences, be it in peace or war, that will not be readily undone.
To be fair, not all military purges that flared in the darkness of bygone centuries were without sound purpose. Purges and their aftermaths occurred under various circumstances and yielded complex results. Nor can spite, vengeance, and the satisfactions of cruelty be overlooked as operational factors: Given power, some human beings delight in brutality that far exceeds any justification.
Let us consider a few exemplary purges.
By the early fourteenth century (a span destined to become conspicuous in its horror), the Knights Templar had evolved from a military order pledged to personal poverty, the protection of pilgrims and, vitally, the defense of the bits and pieces of the eastern Mediterranean that remained in Christian hands, into a wealthy state within a state that still fought the infidel but looked after its own power shamelessly (not unlike Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps today).
Debt-smothered kings and dukes across Europe simmered at Templar wealth and haughtiness, but the trans-national Templars believed they were untouchable.
They were not.
In connivance with jealous monarchs, Pope Clement V issued a bull that opened the door to the Templars’ destruction as heretics. Phillippe IV of France led the way, not merely suppressing the order but burning its leaders and their subordinates at the stake. Across Europe, rulers enthusiastically followed suit.
By the end of that century, with the Ottomans hurling their armies up the Danube, European monarchs had so exhausted themselves in petty squabbles that they could mount no decisive countereffort. And the Templars were no longer there to unify resistance across borders. The century ended with the catastrophic Christian defeat at Nicopolis.
A more practically minded purge was Peter the Great’s ferocious disbandment in 1698 of the Streltsi, or musketeers, who during Russia’s long time of troubles had evolved from the czar’s elite soldiers to soldiers who chose the czar. Young Czar Peter knew he had to modernize his military along European lines. The Streltsi resisted the reforms, giving Peter an additional rationale for a purge. He grasped it with both of his large hands. That purge marked the rise of “modern” Russia.
Those Ottoman armies that conquered their way through the Balkans and up the Danube built their vast armies around a corps of elite troops, the Yenicheri, or Janissaries, who were the terror of eastern and central Europe for four centuries. But the empire began to recede, and the Janissaries, in their turn, became the force that decided who would become or remain sultan. By the early nineteenth century, the Janissaries, addicted to corruption, clung to their grand past, resisting reforms military and civil. Sultan Mahmoud, who sought to restore Ottoman greatness, organized a violent end for the Janissaries, but it was already too late. Turkey, once the superpower of its age was well along on its way to earning the soubriquet of “the Sick Man of Europe.”
The greatest, most-savage military purge of all, of course, was Stalin’s massacre of his own best generals, beginning with the brilliant theorist and reformer Marshal Mikhail Tuchazhevsky. A purge within an even greater civilian purge, the military version began with the show trial and swift execution of Tuchazhevsky and seven other top officers in 1937. By 1941, as many as thirty-five thousand officers of all ranks had been arrested by the security services and, more often than not, killed, one by one, with a bullet to the back of the head.
Whether the purge resulted from Stalin’s paranoia, military plotting, or German misinformation fed to Stalin, the result was a disastrously inept response to German tanks rolling across the border in 1941 (even then, arrests and executions of Soviet officers continued for months).
Stalin wanted only officers who were devoted not to Russia or communism or the world revolution but solely to Stalin himself. As a result, the Soviet Union lost over a million soldiers in the first few weeks of the war and came within a frozen breath of losing Moscow in the Eastern Front’s first, grim winter. Ironically, the military leaders who ultimately stormed Berlin were often officers who had barely escaped execution and survived torture in the GULag before a desperate Stalin ordered them returned to uniformed service.
And one more purge (by another name) demands mention for sheer contrast: When war erupted in Europe in 1939, the new chief of staff of the U.S. Army, George C. Marshall, found himself in charge of a tiny, ill-equipped Army with an officer corps top-heavy with out-of-shape, out-of-touch generals and colonels in their fifties and sixties (which was old in 1939). Overwhelmingly, these men owed their rank solely to their seniority: The “Old Army” did not promote on merit. You put in your time and waited for someone else to retire or die of a heart attack so you could inherit his billet.
Marshall knew he needed younger, energetic, robust battlefield leaders. The dead wood had to go, but Marshall did not fire men willy-nilly. He established a tough-but-fair board to review each senior officer’s record for fitness to command. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, 500 colonels and not a few generals were gone. And superb, forward-looking leaders took our troops to war. Whether one calls this a “reduction in force” or RIF (a later term), or a purge, the lessons are the same: Do not fire your best officers when war might be just around some explosive corner; instead, clear a path for the best to advance. And let merit reign.
Of course, today’s slow-rolling purge of our most-dedicated men and women in uniform bears little relation to the far away bloodbaths of history. Tears and sweat surely have been shed, but no blood has been spilled in the Pentagon’s E-ring in these soft-core purges in which the selfish demand the personal loyalty of the selfless. But the bloodshed may come upon us suddenly and on a scale our post-modern society refuses to contemplate.
If we are then led by those whose professional vocabulary consists of only two words, “Yes, sir!” we shall rue the loss of those whose careers were cut off because they had the integrity to say, “No, sir. That’s wrong.”
Ralph Peters is a retired Army officer and author.
