Retired Army Cols reveal in NY Times how Trump is treating the military like 'toy soldiers'

On Monday, Gordon Adams, Lawrence B. Wilkerson and Isaiah Wilson III wrote in The New York Times  that President Donald Trump's latest actions show that he is treating service members like "toy soldiers."

Adams is a professor at American University’s School of International Service. Wilkerson and Wilson are retired Army colonels.

They called Trump's threat to send 15,000 troops to the border to fight the caravan unprecedented.

"The president used America’s military forces not against any real threat but as toy soldiers, with the intent of manipulating a domestic midterm election outcome, an unprecedented use of the military by a sitting president," they wrote.

They added, "The public debate focused on secondary issues. Is there truly a threat to American security from an unarmed group of tired refugees and asylum seekers on foot and a thousand miles from the border? Even the Army’s internal assessment did not find this a very credible threat."

"It’s also not unusual for a president to ask the troops to deploy to the border in support of border security operations. Presidents of both parties have sent troops to the border, to provide support functions like engineering, logistics, transportation, and surveillance," they said.

"But those deployments have been generally in smaller numbers, usually the National Guard, and never to stop a caravan of refugees and asylum seekers," they said.

The concluded that it was all a "stunt."

"The deployment is a stunt, a dangerous one, and in our view, a misuse of the military that should have led Mr. Mattis to consider resigning, instead of acceding to this blatant politicization of America’s military," they wrote.

Read the full article here.