According to multiple reports, President-elect Donald Trump and his choice for secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, are already looking with a jaundiced eye at Air Force Gen. CQ Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Some say that Brown, only the second Black man to hold the highest-ranking job in the armed forces after the late Colin Powell, is too “woke” for the job, purportedly favoring diversity over excellence in the American military.
I think these kinds of allegations against Brown are bunk. At a minimum, the Trump team should consider a few things about Brown, who became chairman last year when Gen. Mark Milley retired, and who would normally be expected to serve as chairman into 2027.
In his previous job as Air Force Chief of Staff, Brown promoted a major new initiative designed to strengthen deterrence of China, known as “agile combat employment.” With this concept in mind, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command gained contingency access rights to about 10 more bases in the Pacific in recent years — most in the Philippines, but in other places as well.
Also to strengthen capabilities against China, Brown, with Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall and Congress, substantially increased purchases of antiship missiles and other precision ordnance over the last half decade. (Trump deserves some of the credit for this from his first term.)
In collaboration with the new Space Force (also a Trump legacy), Brown has championed the overdue move to build more resilient and survivable satellite constellations with many more but smaller satellites than the U.S. usually deployed in the past.
Along with the current service chiefs, Brown as chairman has helped arrest bad years in recruiting (especially for the Army) in 2022 and 2023, as the services made their goals for 2024. Retention statistics for those already serving have remained excellent, belying claims that a “woke” military culture is somehow driving Americans with more traditional values out of the military.
Brown helped in the process that led to Admiral Samuel Paparo, one of the most gifted and brilliant warfighters in the military, being chosen to lead Indo-Pacific Command.
While I admire them both, Brown is a much more reserved officer than Milley, with whom Trump clashed, to the extent that style and personality matter to the incoming administration.
In short, Brown has been a champion of the national security priorities that Trump had in his first term and that he will presumably emphasize in his second. He is also an upright officer and man of integrity who does not play favorites across racial, cultural or gender lines, and who understands the proper nature of civilian-military relations under the Constitution.
It was Trump himself who elevated Brown into the Joint Chiefs as Air Force Chief of Staff five years ago. Trump was right then and should stand by his man today.
Michael O’Hanlon is the Phil Knight Chair in Defense and Strategy at the Brookings Institution and author of “Military History for the Modern Strategist: America’s Major Wars Since 1861.”
