MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Senator Jack Reed, Democrat from Rhode Island, has a question for retired Air Force Lieutenant General Dan Caine - quote, "will he have the ability to speak truth to power?" Senator Reed is the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, and he will get the chance to pose that question directly to General Caine during his confirmation hearings for the position of chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Caine is President Trump's pick to replace General CQ Brown, who was fired on Friday, along with several other top Pentagon officials.
We're going to talk about the shake-up now with Frank Kendall. Until about a month ago, he was a top Pentagon official as secretary of the Air Force. Secretary, welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
FRANK KENDALL: Hello, Mary Louise. It's good to be with you.
KELLY: Hey. So to be clear, your departure was part of the regular turnover when a new administration takes over, right?
KENDALL: Yeah, that's correct.
KELLY: OK. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as you well know, this is the highest-ranking officer in the U.S. armed forces. They are appointed to serve four-year terms. They also serve at the pleasure of the president. So just - it is within a president's powers to pick a new head of the Joint Chiefs, correct?
KENDALL: It is. I've never seen it done before quite this way. Normally, chiefs carry over from one administration to another very smoothly, without any interruption. As far as I know, there was no reason not to do that in this case.
KELLY: You have concerns about General Brown being fired. Just lay out for us what they are.
KENDALL: Sure. First of all, General Brown is one of the, if not the, finest officer I've ever worked with. One of the things that stands out about the military services in the United States is the apolitical nature of all of our officer corps. And I've been through a lot of transitions, and I have seen in every case very smooth, professional transitions where people - you know, they adopt to the policies of the new team in charge, they follow orders, as they should, and they give good advice.
KELLY: I want to play a little bit of what - this is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who went on Fox yesterday and spoke about CQ Brown. Here's what he said.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PETE HEGSETH: I have a lot of respect for CQ Brown. I got to know him over the course of a month. He's an honorable man. Not the right man for the moment.
KELLY: Hegseth has in past shared his view that the Pentagon needs to be purged of, and I quote, "the woke stuff," and he said that doing so would start with firing CQ Brown, who I will note, is Black. How do you think, Secretary, that this may fit into the stated overt efforts by the Trump administration to scale back DEI?
KENDALL: I don't really understand the connection, quite frankly. I also don't understand the obsessiveness about wokeness, whatever that is. You know, it's perfectly within the purview of a new secretary and president to change policies, and that's perfectly fine. And I think all the officers who serve would take - carry out those orders, to - be a lawful order to - it would be no problem. There isn't much there to actually remove. There's a few hours of training a year. And I - again, I don't know what they mean by wokeness. I'm not sure what they mean by that at all.
The impact of what they've done is to politicize these positions to a degree that I've never seen before. These officers serve apolitically. They are loyal to whoever's in power. They carry out their policies. And what's been created by doing this is an environment in which career officers suddenly have to worry about their political alignment.
KELLY: And just to stay with the questions about wokeness - I hear you saying you don't even understand what that means. I think the Trump administration would argue that means diversity initiatives have been pursued at the expense of performance. In your long experience at the Pentagon, did you see that?
KENDALL: No, absolutely not. We did pay attention to disparities in the Department of the Air Force. We had some studies that were done under the previous Trump administration that showed significant disparities, but we never lowered any of our standards about moving people into positions or promoting them or any anything else that was competitively selected.
KELLY: Do you know General Caine, President Trump's pick for chairman? Is he qualified?
KENDALL: I do. I have no reason to say that he's not qualified, except for the fact that he does not have the experience that is normally associated with that job. Normally, and by law, a person who goes into the chairman's job - chairman of the Joint Chiefs - should have served as a four-star general in another major command, either as a head of one of the military services or as a head of one of the major component commands around the world. General Caine has not done that.
KELLY: I also want to ask about the removal of some of the Defense Department's top military lawyers in this purge.
KENDALL: Yes.
KELLY: This is not generating headlines as big as removing the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Why is it worth paying attention to?
KENDALL: I find that more troubling in a way than removing the other individuals who've been removed.
KELLY: Why?
KENDALL: He seems to want to have JAG officers who will say yes to whatever operational people want to do - judge advocate generals, which are the lawyers in uniform, basically. They're the people who administer the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the criminal law that applies to people serving, and also interpret things like the laws of armed conflict or the laws that would restrict the use of the military against American civilians. So they have a very important role to play. They're professionals. They're not political appointees at all. So to just reach down within the structure and remove the legal authorities that would constrain the behavior of the military, ensure that the military follows lawful orders, is very troubling to me.
KELLY: Retired Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall. Thank you for speaking with us.
KENDALL: Thank you, Mary Louise. Good to be with you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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