Trump Pulls the Military Back Into the Political and Culture Wars

In his early-days blitz, President Trump fired the first woman to ever lead a military service branch, signed an order to send active-duty U.S. troops to the border and said he was reinstating, with back pay, former service members who had refused to take Covid vaccinations, a breach of military health rules.

And a portrait of his former senior military adviser, whom Mr. Trump has accused of disloyalty, was swiftly taken down at the Pentagon.

Mr. Trump’s nominee for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, said at his confirmation hearing last week that the president wanted a military “laser-focused on lethality, meritocracy, warfighting, accountability and readiness.”

It is not starting off that way.

Instead, the military is back where it has historically not wanted to be: in the middle of political and culture wars that could erode bipartisan support and, eventually, the public’s support for a military that is supposed to be apolitical.

The removal of the portrait of Gen. Mark A. Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, from a hallway lined with portraits of others who have had the job, may be the least significant and yet most symbolically important of the White House’s decisions.

Mr. Trump appointed General Milley during his first term. But the general angered him by arguing against deploying active-duty troops to quell protesters in 2020. He also drew the president’s ire when he publicly apologized for walking, in his Army fatigues, across a park near the White House with Mr. Trump after the authorities had used tear gas and rubber bullets to break up a peaceful demonstration.

“There will be troops who believe that Milley represented the firebreak between lawful and unlawful orders,” said Douglas E. Lute, a retired three-star Army general who coordinated operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other countries on the National Security Council for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

“It’s like lowering the flag to half-mast,” General Lute said. “Not because everybody falls in love with Mark Milley, far from it, but the fact that as the chairman, he believed in doing what was right, and history seems to be showing he was on the right side of decision-making.”

Also gone is the Coast Guard commandant, Admiral Linda L. Fagan, who was the first female uniformed leader of a branch of the armed forces. Among the reasons she was fired was an “excessive focus on diversity, equity and inclusion,” according to a statement from the Homeland Security Department.

Admiral Fagan, who had previously been the service’s second in command, graduated from the Coast Guard Academy in 1985 as part of just the sixth class that included women. She rose through the ranks, serving at sea on an icebreaker and ashore as a marine safety officer.

The admiral was told on the evening of Inauguration Day that she had been fired, as she was waiting to have a photo taken with Mr. Trump at the Commander in Chief Ball, a military official said. Efforts to reach Admiral Fagan for comment have been unsuccessful.

As the new Trump team sweeps into the Pentagon, other senior military officials are bracing to see if they will face similar fates.

Mr. Hegseth, a Fox News host and a veteran, has criticized the Pentagon leadership for its inclusion efforts and has said that women should not serve in combat roles. Of the nation’s 1.3 million active-duty troops, 230,000 are women, and more than 350,000 are Black.

In his book, “The War on Warriors,” Mr. Hegseth refers to Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the chief of Naval Operations and the first woman to serve on the Joint Chiefs, as “another inexperienced first.”

Admiral Franchetti has served in the Navy for 40 years and commanded aircraft carrier strike groups.

Mr. Hegseth has also called for Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., who succeeded General Milley, to be fired. General Brown is a four-star fighter pilot with 130 combat flying hours, and multiple command tours in the Asia Pacific and the Middle East during his four decades of service.

“If you want to figure out a way to decimate the military, start wiping out its leadership,” Admiral Mike Mullen, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs under President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama, said in an interview.

On Wednesday, the new Defense Department team held its first news conference to announce that it was sending 1,500 active-duty troops to the border to help stop migrants from entering the United States. They will join about 2,500 troops who are already there doing logistical and bureaucratic jobs like vehicle maintenance and data entry.

During his first term, Mr. Trump declared a national security emergency at the southern border and ordered thousands of active-duty American troops to deploy there.

Pentagon officials say Mr. Trump’s order is a misuse of a military that is supposed to be training to fight wars. The Posse Comitatus Act, a 146-year-old statute, forbids the use of armed forces for law enforcement purposes on U.S. soil unless Congress or the Constitution expressly authorizes it.

This is the same logic General Milley and other senior national security officials used during the first Trump term when they advised the president not to use the Insurrection Act to deploy active-duty American troops to quell Black Lives Matter protesters.

Each of the armed services was ordered on Tuesday to comply with Mr. Trump’s various directives. The Army, for instance, received about two dozen orders. In each case, Army officials were directed to freeze funding, create a review panel and report back in 30 days on how the Army intends to deal with the directives.

The orders targeted diversity offices and initiatives, transgender issues, climate change and funding for service members to travel to states for abortions or other reproductive health services if they are posted to bases in states where abortion is now banned.

At the Pentagon, one soldier on Wednesday noted that there was a repetitive quality to the new administration’s actions toward the military so far, including sending troops back to the border and promoting white men over women and members of minority groups.

There is even precedent, the soldier said, for taking General Milley’s portrait down. Back in 2019, the Trump White House asked the Navy to hide a destroyer named after Senator John McCain in order to avoid having the ship appear in photographs taken while Mr. Trump was visiting Japan. (Mr. Trump did not like the Arizona senator.)

As of late Wednesday, another portrait of General Milley was still hanging in the Pentagon, several hallways and a floor away from the now empty space where his other portrait once was.

It is of the general when he was the Army chief of staff, a job he left in August 2019, after Mr. Trump promoted him to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At the Pentagon, there was some talk about when the new Trump team would notice.

Eric Schmitt and John Ismay contributed reporting.