Author's note. I posted this on Facebook on September 8, 2026. The thread ran 544 comments in the first fifteen hours. As I close this essay on September 11, it sits at 571. I read every comment. Every commenter is anonymous in what follows. The pattern is what I brought to the piece.
In March 2025, Joe Kasper, chief of staff to the Secretary of Defense, prepared a card. Six facts, drawn from the personnel record of General Chris Donahue, the officer his boss was about to remove. Each fact answered a charge that had been floated against Donahue. Kasper handed the card to the Secretary in a car ride. The Secretary looked at the card. He looked at Kasper. He said three words.
“I don’t care.”
The New York Times filled in the car ride on September 8, 2026. I had published the underlying argument on this Substack ten weeks earlier, on June 24. I did not know then about the car, or the card, or the reply. What I knew was what warrior ethos means. The piece was called “What Do You Mean by Warrior Ethos?” It examined the space between what the Secretary said his standard was and what his standard actually was. The removal of a four-star general who had commanded the perimeter at the Kabul airport made that space visible.
The Facebook thread went to work on Donahue too. He was called a careerist. A Milley protégé. A political general. A DEI project. None of the labels touched what the record says he did on the ground for over twenty years. All of them tried to make the removal about the general’s character instead of the Secretary’s.
The car and the card are the receipts.
The two standards
Leaders listen to the argument. Pseudo-leadership avoids it, calls it names, discredits it. The concept comes from Bernard Bass and Paul Steidlmeier’s 1999 study of transformational leadership, which named the pattern: the trappings of authority used to serve the leader rather than the office, dissent suppressed rather than answered. The Secretary’s three words are a specimen.
Let me say what this essay is and what it is not.
It is not a claim about the Secretary’s legal authority to remove senior officers. He has it. Civilian control is bedrock. Every Marine and every soldier is trained on why. I am not arguing the authority.
I am arguing the ethic under the authority.
My claim is narrow. The Secretary publicly named warrior ethos as his own standard. The ethic he applied in the car, six exculpating facts answered with three dismissive words, is not warrior ethos. It is what a warrior ethos was built to prevent.
That is the argument. And it is what a public can hold to account.
Joe Kasper did what a chief of staff is supposed to do. He prepared the correction. He delivered it. When the correction stopped at “I don’t care,” the case moved from the inside of the department to the outside. That is why publics like this one exist.
By “public,” I mean what Hannah Arendt named in The Human Condition (1958). Not an audience. Not consumers. Not a demographic. A public is the space where citizens appear to one another and make meaning together in view of the record. When Kasper’s correction stopped at “I don’t care,” the case moved into that space. What a public does with a record is what a republic is.
The frame we forgot we were running on
Samuel Huntington’s The Soldier and the State, published in 1957, framed American civil-military relations around a specific bargain. Huntington called it objective civilian control. A professional military serves whichever civilian leadership the electorate hands it. In exchange, the military stays politically neutral as a body. The professional military does not owe the president personal loyalty. It owes the office competent service and the law obedience. That is the standard we have run on, formally, since Goldwater-Nichols in 1986.
Huntington named the failure mode. He called it subjective control. In subjective control, civilian leaders demand personal loyalty from senior officers as the price of continued command. When that demand becomes the operating standard, the professional military is no longer serving the office. It is serving the person in the office.
The guardrails against subjective control are specific. Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice restricts what officers can say publicly about civilian leaders and protects the officer from being punished for lawful private counsel. Senate confirmation of senior officers is a check on the executive’s power to install loyalists. The conventions of the Joint Chiefs are the operating protocol: dissent in private, execute in public. Together they are the fence Huntington told us we would need.
When those guardrails go, we are inside the failure mode we were told to design against.
Senator Joni Ernst is a Republican from Iowa who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee and retired from the Iowa Army National Guard as a Lieutenant Colonel. General Donahue asked her whether the Secretary would work with him if he took the Army chief of staff job. Her answer, on the record, was “Honestly, no.”
That is a guardrail speaking in the voice it was built in.
What the thread did with the record
I posted a Facebook version of the June essay on September 8, 2026. Five hundred forty-four comments in fifteen hours. I read every reply. When the volume outpaced my ability to reply, I decided to code the pattern.
What follows is a description of what came at a documented case when it met a public. I have not named a single commenter. The pattern is the point.
The gates. “No tab Pete.” “You never held the positions you describe.” A gate is a way to disqualify the speaker without touching the argument. One commenter said a critic of a Secretary of War should have a Ranger tab. I am a Marine. I do not know much about the Ranger tab. What I know is what the record says.
The whatabouts. Past Secretaries of Defense. Milley. Austin. Biden. Obama. DEI. Afghanistan. A specific critique of the current case was met, over and over, with a demand to litigate a different case first. This was the single most common deflection across the thread. The audit was proposed as a substitute for the record. The substitution changes the subject. That is what it is for.
The cascades. The claim that Trump’s Doha agreement forced the release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners and produced Abbey Gate. The claim that a Toyota gun-truck belonging to the enemy was flown out on a C-17 while Americans were abandoned on the ground. The claim that someone other than General Donahue was the true last U.S. service member off the tarmac at Kabul. Each is false or badly distorted. Each arrived in the thread from multiple commenters in near-identical wording. Task & Purpose reported the truck story out of the record. The last person off the tarmac was General Donahue, on August 30, 2021, at 11:59 PM. When a public prefers a meme to a fact that a five-minute search returns, the failure is not just the meme’s.
The frame swaps. “Careerist.” “TDS.” “Paralysis by analysis.” Each of these takes the argument about the Secretary’s stated standard and replaces it with an argument about the writer’s motives, the reader’s politics, or the general’s temperament. Each is a way of not reading the record.
The loyalty ceiling. Some commenters argued, quietly and often thoughtfully, that a public cannot judge the removal because it lacks classified context. This is real epistemic caution. It is also a way to close the public case entirely. The public case is public. The car ride is public. Kasper’s card is public. Ernst’s “Honestly, no.” is public. Reading what is public is what publics do.
The public we are
Every strategy above is a version of the Secretary’s reply. Avoid the argument. Call it names. Discredit the source. The aggregate of the thread mirrored the aggregate of the car ride. Pseudo-leadership is contagious. A public that runs the same three plays becomes the mirror the leader deserves, or perhaps wants.
The aggregate is not everyone. Some veterans on the thread tested the frame carefully. Some retired NCOs pushed back with substance. Some officers ran the coding argument hard. A Ranger who pushed on DEI as the real mechanism engaged the argument on its merits. Two commenters — one with a Public Ethics loyalty frame, one a 36-year Army officer — ran fourteen turns of real democratic exchange in a subthread before the meme wave rolled over it. That is what a public reading carefully looks like, when it happens.
The aggregate pattern was different. When a public was shown a documented case, the most common counter redirected to a different case. Or ran a gate. Or delivered a meme. Or swapped the frame.
The failure is bigger than the Secretary. What the thread showed was Richard Dawkins’ work operating in real time on a Facebook feed. In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins coined meme to describe a unit of culture that propagates by imitation and lives or dies by how well it copies. The Doha claim, the truck claim, and the last-person-off claim are memes in that original sense. They arrived from multiple commenters in near-identical wording because they copy well. When enough of us pass a meme forward without opening the record it replaces, the meme becomes the story. Democrats did it. Republicans did it. Independents did it. Veterans and non-veterans did it. The finding is civic. Culture is what we let replicate.
What I remember about the day
I remember the day the standard we are now abandoning was being written.
September 11, 2001. Staff Sergeant. Marine Officer Selection Assistant, University of Texas at Austin. Twenty-seven years old, eight years into a career that would run fifteen more. I was on my way to campus when the first plane hit the North Tower. By the time I reached the food court above my office, the second one had gone in. I stood there in uniform. People looked at me. I remember thinking, in the plainest words I had: what is going on.
I did not know then that the twenty-year war ahead would be run on the ethos being written that hour. I did not know I would be in Anbar Province by early 2003, and back again by the end of that year. That Anbar would take me again in 2008 with MNF-WEST. That Helmand would take me in 2011 and again in 2013. That a general who walked off the tarmac at Kabul as the last U.S. service member out in the summer of 2021, in a country I had walked, would have his record pulled into a car in March 2025 so a Secretary of War could answer six exculpating facts with three words.
None of us knew.
What we know now is what the record says. The standard we built in the years after that food court is being answered, at the top of the department that carries our name, with a reply we do not accept from a private on his first day.
Meaning Repair happens one word at a time, in front of an audience that reads carefully. Vote every race, every proposition, every judge, on the same discipline you would read the record. That is the practice.
Jerry W. Washington, Ed.D., is a retired Marine Corps Master Sergeant (23 years, MOS 1371 Combat Engineer, 1993–2016), USC Rossier School of Education graduate, Instructor at UCI Division of Continuing Education, and independent researcher. He writes What Time Binds on Substack.