Shanahan is touring Afghanistan and Iraq this week, to show off his as-yet-unseen—and perhaps nonexistent—policy chops. He moved up to acting secretary less than a year and a half as deputy secretary of defense (a very different, strictly managerial position), preceded by three decades as an executive at Boeing, the second-largest U.S. defense contractor.

James Inhofe, the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, is apparently unimpressed. According to Inside Defense, Inhofe recently advised Trump to nominate someone else as secretary, noting Shanahan’s lack of “humility” and his “partisan” leanings to Boeing. This was an odd spectacle. “Humility” is a quality that fits almost no defense secretary in history, very much including Mattis, and while Shanahan’s Boeing background subjects him to enormous conflicts of interest, the rumblings of the military-industrial complex are usually not so bothersome to the likes of Inhofe.

Still, it bodes ill for Shanahan that he is, for whatever reason, disliked by the top senator on the committee that would vote on his confirmation, if he were nominated, and his department’s budget.

The devolution of power inside the Pentagon from civilian policymakers to military officers—essentially a weakening of civilian control over the military—is a separate phenomenon, though it also feeds into Trump’s self-aggrandizing agenda. The trend, which strong civilian defense secretaries have often fought hard to resist, was given a strong push in 2015, when Sen. John McCain pushed through an amendment shifting authority in weapons acquisition away from a centralized office in the Pentagon to the individual military services. McCain’s intent was to streamline the process and make the services more accountable, but it also boosted parochial interests and weakened civilian oversight. The next push came from Mattis, who, as a retired Marine four-star general, was naturally disposed to rely more on fellow officers—the service chiefs and their staff—than on civilians who might never have fought in combat.

These moves, together, led to an exodus of talented civilian specialists and analysts from the Pentagon—and also strengthened Trump’s power, as military officers are trained to salute, not to argue with, the president.

Even this ascension of the brass took a tumble when, in December, Trump announced that Gen. Mark Milley, the Army chief of staff, would be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—almost a year before the term of the current chairman, Gen. Joseph Dunford, is due to expire. This undercuts Dunford’s authority, leaves the unified elements of the military rudderless, and—combined with the other trends put in motion by McCain and Mattis—elevates still higher the status of the separate services: a situation bound to cause more waste, inefficiency, and lax discipline in the military budget and in military operations.

In the spring of 2018, shortly after firing Rex Tillerson as secretary of state and replacing him with the more amenable Mike Pompeo, Trump said, “I’m really at a point where we’re getting very close to having the Cabinet, and other things, that I want.” Soon after came the ouster of H.R. McMaster as national security adviser, succeeded by John Bolton; then Mattis’ resignation, followed, as yet, by a long, demeaning audition process.

But Trump is getting what he wants: a Cabinet of yes men. The Defense Department is an enormous machine: far from well-oiled, but capable of running on its own steam for some time without breaking down or ripping out of control. But if there’s another war or a crisis, or even some situation that could use some smart, fairly independent military advice, Trump will be in more trouble than he knows—and so will the rest of us.

Correction, Feb. 12, 2019: This article originally misstated that Patrick Shanahan had served just five months as deputy secretary of defense. He held that position for one year and five months. 

• Donald Trump
• James Mattis

(责任编辑：资讯)