Here is a list of military officers purged during the first 5 years of the Obama administration because they did not agree politically with Obama. The number of military officers "retired" in the prime of their careers is unprecedented in US history.
Wrong. There's lots of precedent. In the run-up to World War II, FDR and George Marshall deliberately "retired" nearly *every* high-level officer. And there's a good reason for this. Anyone who was around during World War I had a strong tendency to be "fighting the last war". He needed officers with new thinking.
This was also the practice of Lincoln; although the US didn't really have a standing army at the time, he sacked generals *constantly* until he found ones who were *competent* for the war which they were actually fighting.
I'm absolutely in favor of sacking careerist military officers. The only mistake: we should have sacked hundreds, nay, thousands more. These are the guys who can't win a war. New thinking is required, and they don't have it. The army should not, in fact, be a career, at least not for high-level officers -- they should have day jobs during peacetime, like they all did through the whole 19th and early 20th century. Every war is wildly different from the last one and the people who have lots of experience in the last war are most likely completely incompetent to strategize for the current war.
The US had a unique method of operation, where we set up a new military for each war, pretty much, until the Cold War. And the US won every war it got into. The Cold War changed all that; it gave us a military-industrial complex, an establishment; and since then, we tied in Korea and lost in nearly every subsequent war. The Cold War has been over since the 1990s; it's time to clean out the military so that a fresh, lean, new military can approach the current military problems of the world through *fresh eyes*.
Sorry to go off topic, but I couldn't let your false statement go unchallenged. We used to purge the military of highly decorated deadwood *all the time* in this country.
