The American President is the Commander-in-Chief of the US Military …
The US Congress sets the laws and pay the bill’s in addition to approving the bosses who want to work there….
And more and MORE?
The lawmakers are seeking to change some things due their feelings about the organisational unresponsiveness by the General’s at the top….
The military’s relationship with its civilian masters is regularly strained, as it was under Presidents Barack Obama and Donald J. Trump. But now, increasingly, it is lawmakers from both parties who are telling “the generals” how things are going to be, and less the other way around.
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, has amassed scores of supporters needed to pass a bill that would break with tradition and remove military commanders from a role in prosecuting service members for sexual assault, after years of failing to win sufficient support in the face of Pentagon opposition.
Lawmakers on both ends of the political spectrum have increasingly joined forces to curtail the military. They are pushing their prerogatives on the president’s powers to declare war, on troop levels overseas and on engagements in places like Syria, recently bolstered by President Biden’s decision to withdraw fully from Afghanistan, against the wishes of military leaders.
It was Congress that finally pushed the Marine Corps to integrate women in its training platoons, and lawmakers recently told Army generals to halt a fitness test that they deemed unfair to female troops.
The shift from reverence to skepticism in the legislative branch mirrors broader societal frustrations after two decades of wars, pervasive sexual assault and harassment of female troops — underscored by a grisly killing last year of a female soldier at Fort Hood — and political extremism in the ranks.
This month, a group of retired admirals and generals caused an uproar after signing a letter questioning Mr. Biden’s fitness for office and hinting that the 2020 presidential election may have been fraudulent, drawing further critiques of military leaders straying far outside their responsibilities.
“People in D.C. have a pretty strong political antenna, and it may be that the military brand is not what it used to be,” said John Gans, who was the chief speechwriter to Ashton B. Carter when he served as defense secretary….
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Congress also has become more interested in examining long-held positions by military and diplomatic officials that have yielded few new results, a point Mr. Kaine has made in several recent hearings. “We have to get out of saying the same thing over and over again,” he said, “because the results are showing that it wasn’t working to deal with sexual assault, it has not been working in some of these military engagements and it is not necessarily working in some other areas.”
“Let’s get out of the platitude mode,” Mr. Kaine added.
There are perhaps few areas in which Congress has more openly rebuffed generals than in the movement to overhaul the handling of sexual assault cases by taking them outside the chain of command and assigning them to military prosecutors….
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While Republicans and Democrats will continue to spar over Pentagon funding and other national security issues, the era of pushback against the omnipotence of generals now seems part of the culture of Congress….
image….cn.reuters.com