Legions of Griswolds

The disappearing distinctions between promotion, politics, and Jelly of the Month Club

I.

In the movie Christmas Vacation, a suburban family man named Clark Griswold is planning to fund an in-ground pool with his holiday bonus. He’s shocked when expectations he formed over a long period of time are summarily vacated, without warning, through no fault of his own.

He’s come to rely on a bonus because it’s company practice, codified in company policy. He’s done more than expected of him. The company has profited. His boss supports the bonus. So too his boss’s boss. So he takes actions in reliance on the implied promise of a bonus only to have the rug yanked from beneath him. He’s left with a disappointed family who don’t understand, and a sense of failure he did nothing to earn.

Griswold finds out his craven jackass CEO has instead gifted him a subscription to the Jelly of the Month club.

His loyalty vacated by an insult to his belief system, he flies from love to rage. He will never feel the same about the company again, because it didn’t just treat him a little bit badly. It treated him like dirt.

At this moment on our real world timeline, fiction is officially less bizarre than reality. Board by board, senior US military officers who have formed reasonable and stable expectations about how they would be treated in the promotion process are being made into Griswolds.

After 25+ years of commitment, they’re having the reward they earned revoked without explanation or warning. They’re not even getting a jelly club subscription.

Those who do get promoted will find out soon enough, as they gulp from the poison chalice, that they were hoodwinked. They got the booby prize while passed over parolees were the true winners.

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II.

Pete Hegseth's first act as SecDef, after a single-vote confirmation that should have humbled him, was a purge of senior officers. He targeted women, minorities, and others associated with ideas or policies different from his own.

He didn't explain himself. But he didn't hide either. He was proud of firing people and blocking promotions. He seems to enjoy flexing his authority. He bragged about it.

The four-star leaders who survived the purge sat idle like potted plants, occasionally jostling to lick their coats like the feckless house pets they instantly made themselves into.

Vet Bros, El Camino restorationists, mullet revivalists, and Cabela-catalog-shopping Denny's loyalty card wielders were joined by the hardcore magma-brained hooligans who initially defended Hegseth.

He should be able to pick his own team, they said.
He's not a racist, he's just killing woke Marxism, they said.
This isn't about women in combat, but merit, they said.

They were full of shit, I said.
Of course they were, we all knew. Most of all, them.

Hegseth is now engineering promotions well beyond his inner circle, and his discrimination against women and black men is an undeniable pattern that would stand up in any federal civil rights court and even more easily in any civil personal injury suit. In a just world, would will someday become did.

It's a pattern consistent with Hegseth’s prior factless blathering about women in service. And his rule against medical shaving waivers, which requires black soldiers with skin conditions to scar their faces or lose their jobs. Clearly, he wishes for the latter.

This guy carries the biggest military hammer in the world, yet he never stops being a pathetic victim. He never misses a chance to spend his power abusively on vendettas targeting anyone who has ever made him feel small. Which is basically anyone more gifted or successful. But especially those who managed to be more gifted or successful while possessing female plumbing or non-white skin.

One almost suspects he's simply co-opting populist grievance narratives to mask a deeper inspiration he can't openly acknowledge.

Indeed, if you knew nothing more about Pete beyond his devout membership in the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), you would expect everything he's doing.

CREC’s grand poobah, “Pastor” Doug Wilson, has been Pete’s guest of honor in the hallowed halls of the Pentagon, where he has championed and represented a religious code hateful to the core values of the Constitution and the military volunteers who swear and sometimes even keep an oath to protect it.

CREC is a collection of fundamentalist zealot wingnuts who hope to weld together American identity and the goals of their regressive cult movement. For example, they claim slavery created "harmony between the races" and believe women should not vote, own property, or posses agency over the use of their own bodies.

Perhaps fuelled by such delusions, Hegseth is using his position to sculpt a senior officer corps in the preferred CREC image. White, male, heterosexual, anti-Constitutional, and most of all, unquestioningly obedient to authoritarian edicts.

His promotion tampering, unchecked, is becoming more frequent and brazen.

News broke last week he'd struck 1-star selectees from a Navy promotion list after it was certified by service leaders. At that moment, the grapevine crackled to life. It quickly became obvious he's been crossing names off the lists of every service, at multiple levels.

Today we hear the Air Force, which already struggles to get good leaders into senior positions, had Brigadier General selections edited by SecDef.

I knew this was the case a week ago. I know he also redlined officers from the 2-star list. Some of those he is cancelling are generational talents.

It’s all very Soviet, which is to say arrogant and self-defeating.

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III.

For review, here's how the process is supposed to work.

By law, officer promotions up to O-8 are on a "Best Qualified" basis. The services conduct boards consisting of panels of higher-ranking officers who review, score, and rank-order the performance records of eligibles.

The top-scoring records are promoted.

The list is finalized by the service and shared with SecDef. It is then forwarded to the Senate for approval.

SecDef can, with permission, remove an officer after selection but before Senate confirmation. That permission must be requested from the President in writing. It must contain a valid reason connected to misconduct, moral or mental deficiency, or under-performance observed since selection.

The board process is rule-driven, and the rules are all about keeping merit at the core of every decision.

It’s not perfect. In the past few decades, the politics of making O-9 — combined with tight correlation between the caliber of senior officers and relative success in budget competitions — has created an incentive for political skill and regressively lower levels. It’s been a long time since promotions have been anything close to pure.

But if Aunt Edna gives you a pair of double-knit bell bottoms and Dad says you have to wear them, you don’t turn them inside out to prove your point. You have them altered, or you replace them with something better.

The Best Qualified promotion system is not perfect. It could be reformed and probably should be. But the one thing it has left is process rigidity to minimize undue influence.

Hegseth now melts that.

There is organizational politics involved in being positioned to succeed at a Best Qualified board, but there is no direct political test or nomination. Those things start at O-9 and they are verboten by law before that point.

Because otherwise, promotions rapidly become as louse-ridden and dishonest as everything else touched by partisanship. If political appointees are allowed to prostitute promotion lists to elevate cronies, favorites, club members, and loyalists, we will succumb very quickly to total erosion of leadership and expertise.

There is absolutely nothing partisan about wanting this process to remain untouched by the greasy, slimy fingertips of politicians. They don’t deal in merit. Fuckery is their business, and unfortunately, business is good.

Tampering with a Best Qualified promotion process is the absolute 180-degree opposite of meritocracy, and also exactly what Hegseth has been doing since he got his job.

It harms morale. It harms retention. It erodes confidence.

It treats our best and most committed military servants, all of them decorated veterans of multiple wars, as disposable husks. This inflicts a moral injury which will radiate pain within their hearts and families for life.

But most of all, it demonstrates depraved indifference for national defense, which is supposedly this chucklehead's whole job.

To defend this nation, we need the best performers in the hardest roles at the highest levels. Not ball-jugglers, bootlickers, goose-steppers, back-washers, or moral mercenaries. Not virtue-signaling howler monkeys willing to sell their own mothers for an extra slurp at the fountain of approval. And certainly not crusading Jesus-freaks who think what they believe way too often.

And yet, here's how this imperfect but sacred process is working at this moment in time.

Best Qualified boards are conducted. Best officers are chosen. SecDef is notified. SecDef takes out his red sharpie and crosses out a bunch of names.

Service chief shrugs and sets off to make his tee time. Senator snorts another shot of cask-aged glue before beckoning the next lobbyist.

And every time, we get weaker. More irresolute. More vulnerable. Less unified.

Many get more ashamed. Despondent. Many elders like me wonder what the Hell we were doing all those years only to watch it all be so grossly defiled while those charged with standing guard do nothing.

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IV.

Futility beckons in this moment. All we can do is stay frosty and eat lima beans until the world turns.

But as a few dozen impeccable officers become the latest Griswolds of the Month, here are a few observations I find useful, and hope you will too.

This is bad for defense.

I know most of the officers struck from the USAF list directly. Some of them I served with and know well. They are superb. Their selections were correct. We're losing more than we can measure. The officers who mentored them will lose faith. The officers they mentored will too.

This is bad for current operations.

The USAF is chronically stretched. Training and experience levels are at their lowest in this century. Positioning strong, empowered leaders who can punch at their weight class in key roles is absolutely critical to controlling risk and supporting teams. Every one of these redlined officers was bound for a key role. Proxies will now be leaned upon to cover, at a higher level of structural risk. The vacancies they create will be filled forward in the same manner, cascading risk through the entire service.

In a time of war. Which used to make bureaucrats more cautious.

Let’s not overlook the unprecedented hubris and absurdity of the circumstances. During active hostilities, in a war in which the Air Force has lost more than 40 aircraft and had to disperse from its bases in the region due to Iranian counterattacks that were insufficiently defended, the Secretary of Defense is ignoring the service’s opinion on who to promote. Without deigning to furnish his rationale.

Sean Parnell is a liar.

In his press statement, the Pentagon's press secretary claims promotions are solely merit-based and that race and sex would never be considered. But Hegseth himself has said in public hearings that he is making promotion decisions to counterbalance alleged previous social engineering based on diversity criteria. Which means race and sex are being considered. Which means merit is not the sole basis for decisions. People like Parnell lying is nothing new. What’s new is how blatantly they do it, and how lithely we accept it. The former won’t change until the latter does.

Hegseth lacks confidence in the Air Force.

If he had confidence in Secretary Troy Meink and Chief of Staff Gen. Ken Wilsbach, he would refrain from objecting to promotion of the officers selected by their board. By undermining their authority, he calls into question their judgment on key personnel decisions. If he doesn't trust them to run merit promotion boards properly, then he should fire them and get someone to investigate their suspect board process. Except he obviously thinks the board process was fine, since many selections were allowed to stand.

What else doesn't he trust them to do? If he doesn't trust these men to run the department, why should we?

Which brings me to …

Gen. Wilsback should resign.

There are two kinds of generals. Those who demonstrate integrity in the pivotal moments, and those who lose the respect of everyone in their charge.

I had my doubts about Wilsbach’s selection to follow a spineless chief of staff in a moment where backbone would be needed. Those doubts were warranted.

Hegseth has made Wilsbach's position untenable. It's obvious to all airmen at all levels that CSAF has no authority when it matters. Every officer on the recent lists had his sponsorship or they would never have met the board or been published as selectees. His sponsorship turns out to mean nothing material, which is an embarrassment to Wilsbach and a glove slap of reality to everyone else.

The other reason Wilsbach should resign is that by toothless silence, he has made his own position untenable. He's turned his back on his own airmen and left them behind. That breaks the code. It breaks the world. It means there is no top cover, and everyone now knows it. Which means it's everyone for himself or herself.

I've been saying for a long time that we need different generals. We're locked into a status quo of moral cowardice and apathy capable of bringing down the whole circus.

We Need Different Generals

Pete is the one taking actions, but when amateur hour is over and the world’s most toxic dilettante moves on, the rest of us will suffer for it. Some of us will deserve it, but many who don’t will pay nonetheless, for we are not in a just world.

These people wear our flag every day when they go to work. They represent us abroad. They are our face in the mirror and the conscience that speaks to us, because we are only worthy of the greatness we claim if we do right by those who voluntarily defend us. Pissing on some of them pisses on all of them.

Which, my dear Pete, is how unity works.

We're collectively doing wrong by them, because we’ve had the wrong people in charge for a long time.

But even as I swaddle in the warmth of my DD214, never more content with the decision I made to leave the Air Force before colliding high-aspect with the fickle beast of politics masquerading as something better, my thoughts turn to everyone rear-ended in this quarter-century long-con game of bait-and-kick.

I fantasize, on their behalf, of a day in the not distant future when they can confront, without fear of retaliation, those who humiliated them, hollowed out their commitment, and called into question their service to a nation which can no longer be trusted to treat them with dignity and fairness.

When, to paraphrase Clark Griswold, they can do the following:

… look him straight in the eye … and tell him what a cheap, lying, no-good, rotten, floor-flushing, low-life, snake-licking, dirt-eating, inbred, overstuffed, ignorant, blood-sucking, dog-kissing, brainless, dickless, hopeless, heartless, bug-eyed, stiff-legged, spiny-lipped, worm-headed sack of monkey shit he is.

Hallelujah. Holy shit.

Where’s the Tylenol.

TC is an independent writer who speaks for himself.