Why military leaders reacted so strongly to Trump's use of troops
By Dov S. Zakheim, opinion contributor — 06/05/20 10:30 AM EDT
It was not only Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley who publicly distanced themselves from President Trump’s intention to employ the military to disperse protests rocking the country over the past week. Each of the military’s chiefs of staff, at least one service secretary and a senior enlisted military official all weighed in as well.
Indeed, despite having been told twice not to comment on the situation before Esper made a statement of his own, a senior military leader spoke out anyway on June 1, the very day that force was used to clear a path for the president to walk from the White House to St. John’s Church.
Chief Master Sergeant Kaleth Wright, the Air Force’s top enlisted official and an African American, tweeted that his “greatest fear†is “that I will wake up to a report that one of our Black Airmen has died at the hands of a white police officer.†The following day, again before Esper held his press conference, Wright’s chief of staff, the highly popular Air Force Gen. David Goldfein, sat alongside Wright in a video taken in the chief master sergeant’s office. Wright again did not mince words: “I’ve been really outraged, not just for the last week. It drew up a lot of rage and a lot of anger from the past because I’ve just watched this over and over and over again.â€
more
https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/501185-why-military-leaders-reacted-so-strongly-to-trumps-use-of-troops