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I don't get why a singular cabinet position has this much control over the military.
Because the position is the head of the military. Normally, you may not want the president to be directly micromanaging tactical decisions because they often don’t have military experience in the same way the head of the defense department usually does. In this case, the system doesn’t work because we have a yahoo hiring other yahoos to do incredibly important jobs.
The real heart of your question, in my opinion, is “why do we centralize power and create vulnerabilities when bad actors can assume those positions?” The answer, in America, is a fundamental mistake by a the founding fathers in believing that all the branches of government were unlikely to be corrupted at the same time, and that they would hold each other accountable when things started to get bad. If the White House became corrupt, the legaslative branch is supposed to stop it. If the legislative branch is corrupt, the court is supposed to stop it. They didn’t concieve of the situation we’ve been in: where all of those branches have abandoned their duties to hold each other accountable. On second thought, I guess you could argue that Thomas Jefferson saw that as a possibility, but his solution was a population that was ready for violent revolution under those conditions. He did not account for the current surveillance/drone/bomb inequality that exists between the people and their government, so his idea was more reasonable for a time where the people and the establishment were able to have equal levels of firepower.
Furthermore, the early constitution placed too much emphasis on the idea that people who are wealthy have a greater stake in the success of the country, and therefore are properly motivated to preserve it (i.e. voting being restricted to land owners). They designed the rules in a pre-global society under the assumption that capital investment in the country equated to the self preservation instinct extending to the nation. Whether or not that was ever true, it certainly is false in the modern world where a rich person can simply move anywhere on the globe that is most beneficial to them in the event of a national collapse.
I have been involved in several cooperative organizations that have no direct leader, and I can anecdotally say that there are pros and cons to both approaches. On the one hand, decentralized and fully democratic power structures definitely keep one bad leader from abusing their power and hurting the community in the process. On the other hand, there is a massive reduction in executive efficiency, and seemingly simple decisions can suddenly take months to finalize while everybody gets their two cents in. That is why most cooperative organizations utilize meeting rules to limit the amount of time a single issue can be debated.
In the case of war, taking a month to finalize a decision can have catastrophic effects, which is why there are single figureheads who have the ability to call the shots quickly. However, as we see now, there is also a massive liability that is created when corruption has been allowed to run rampant and you get a fascist in that seat.
To be tedious. The president is the head of the military, the secretary of defence is literally the secretary though to be fair the term today would be director.
The president says what they want done and the sec def directs how to go about doing that.
Because Republicans controlled Congress and the Oval and let him...
That's why he's being impeached, it's not that he did horrible shit, he did it without approval.
There's just as much grounds to impeach the president and House/Senate majority leadership for letting him do it.
Your could have this much power over the military as long as everyone with authority just lets you and says people have to do what you say.
That’s why he’s being impeached, it’s not that he did horrible shit, he did it without approval.
He probably had approval, just not on paper, and now he's the fall guy because he thought he was one of the boys.
Nothing Hegseth did was without the explicit consent of the president and the implicit consent of Republican controlled congress(and quite a lot of Democrats)
And at ANY TIME congress could have pulled funding for the war as is their power constitutionally.
This is simply a way to shovel all the blame onto one person while obfuscating their own accountability, Trump's own accountability, and Israel's accountability.
While actively avoiding the mechanism in their face that could end this war tomorrow because deep down most Republicans and a good chunk of Democrats support these actions or at least the larger foreign policy behind it.
Which TBC also only works if Trump doesn't continue the war and goes further up the escalation ladder. Which by all accounts he is positioning to do.
Sacrificial asshole confirmed.
He really should have paid more attention. Or kept receipts.
Would be neat if he got impeached regardless of putting in his resignation. I'd love it for him to have it in his permanent record, so to speak.
Yeah this needs to happen more. These people need the permanent consequence of a conviction that includes being barred from holding public office in the future.
It's trumps war as much as hegseths so trump will be impeached too, right???
way too little, too late
incoming false flag ....
No one does false flags, they instigate and allow a response to land.
Israel tried it and Iran didn't bite.
trump launched attacks on election day and Iran didn't bite.
And Trump won't try to instigate to save hegsforth, because it hurts trump now.
No one does false flags
I wouldn't go that far....
Second Gulf of Tonkin, The Nayirah Testimony, Operation Northwoods, USS Liberty, Gleiwitz Incident, Ryazan, Lavon Affair, USS Maine
And it depends on how strictly we are defining that term, cause CIA activities are awash in operations meant to create or foment incidents, create pretenses for further interventions/escalations, and obfuscate US or western responsibility.
Hegseth is a Nazi and the invasion of Poland literally started with a false flag... these people have proven time and again there isn't a creative bone in their body, they just keep pulling out old playbooks and slogans.
But he won’t be removed.
He already has been impeached. Does he mean removed as a result?
Articles were filed; that doesn’t mean the House approved them (meaning Hegseth was formally impeached) or that the Senate voted to remove him
Ah, true. Getting ahead of myself there.
Do you really expect Rafael Cruz to understand how the American government works? Shame on you.
But Cruz was right and the person you responded to was wrong