Trump Taking Heat For Referring To The Military As "My Military"

Business Insider — “Everybody knows exactly what happened. What I do is I authorize my military,” Trump said. “We have the greatest military in the world and they’ve done a job as usual. So we have given them total authorization.”

The phrase “my military” stuck out to members of the defense community, some of whom did not appreciate Trump’s use of the possessive pronoun. Chief among them was Leon Panetta, a former defense secretary and CIA director who served under President Barack Obama.

“When it comes to the military, the military belongs to the country. Our defense system belongs to the country. And it’s not the president’s military, it’s the military of the United States of America,” Panetta said on MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews.”

“He has responsibility obviously, as commander in chief, to be able to make decisions with regards to our military. But I think if you ask the men and women in uniform who they are responsible to, I think their answer would be, ‘We’re responsible to the United States of America.'”

Obviously I’m not a military guy. I love the military, just never served in it. So I can’t speak to how actual military personnel feel about the President saying “my military” when referring to it.

But what I can tell you is how this civilian feels about it: I don’t mind it at all. The guy’s the Commander In Chief. The buck stops with him. If you’re going to place the blame on him when militaristic decisions go wrong, then you can’t chastise him when he refers to the military as his.

And spare me the whole “omg the military is responsible to the country, first” routine. That’s just politicization 101. “The country” elects a President and they do it knowing that that President is in charge of the military. You can phrase it however you want, but the Commander In Chief runs the military so it is, in turn, his military.

It was Obama’s military when he decided to take out Osama in Pakistan. It was Obama’s military when he decided to conduct airstrikes in Libya. It was George W’s military when he decided to invade Iraq. It was FDR’s military when he decided to invade Europe, Truman’s when he decided to drop nukes on Japan…

…and it’s Trump’s military when he decides to drop the mother of all bombs in Afghanistan or conduct raids in Yemen. That’s just a fact. That’s the nature of electing a Commander In Chief.