from Hacker News

Appeal to the Congress from Former Secretaries of Defense [pdf]

by martialg on 3/22/25, 4:00 AM with 4 comments

• by yawpitch on 3/22/25, 4:39 AM

  If only Congress was structurally capable of listening to reason.

• by tmshapland on 3/22/25, 4:15 AM

  Thank you for posting this.

• by hayst4ck on 3/22/25, 4:23 AM

  Everyone in every position of power wants someone else to be the one to fight, not write letters, not ask nicely, but to fight. To not accept excuses on why an outcome is unachievable, but to make that outcome happen despite resistance, just like republicans do. It is the American way.

  Everyone should read Mattis's, a republican and second in the US military chain of command, letter on Trump during his first term: https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000172-7c37-d3d2-ab7a-7f376...

  James Madison wrote in Federalist 14 that “America united with a handful of troops, or without a single soldier, exhibits a more forbidding posture to foreign ambition than America disunited, with a hundred thousand veterans ready for combat.” We do not need to militarize our response to protests. We need to unite around a common purpose. And it starts by guaranteeing that all of us are equal before the law.

  Instructions given by the military departments to our troops before the Normandy invasion reminded soldiers that “The Nazi slogan for destroying us…was ‘Divide and Conquer.’ Our American answer is ‘In Union there is Strength.’” We must summon that unity to surmount this crisis—confident that we are better than our politics.

  Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try.

  Instead he tries to divide us.

  Again that was written by the second in Americas chain of command. The appeal to congress in this post is written by people who have been second in the chain of command to America's military.