In my experience, the military has become significantly more political, especially at the higher levels. The selection process for general officers now heavily involves political alliances. It's important to remember that the military's history has been intertwined with politics and politicians for a long time. While this isn't new, it has worsened since around 2009.
Since Trump retook office, some rules of engagement have changed, and those changes are more logical, rational, and better than the ones issued by the previous administration.
For example, if an adversary fires a rocket at you, then drops it and runs away, you can't kill him because he's unarmed. That makes sense, right? This was something the Biden administration imposed on us.
Meanwhile, liberals are acting as if this situation were akin to the night of the long knives. If some generals are being fired or have been fired, so what? They will receive their pensions, write their books, and likely earn $500,000 or more in defense contracting afterwards. It's not worth feeling too sorry for them.
The show of having all generals stand before the man is unprecedented, a somber audience would make sense. They're the generals not the real soldiers. Again remember how political the military is now? The generals are protecting their image at all times, clapping or celebrating out of turn is a bad look… but it's also just not the crowd that's going to be emotional about anything. Trump a kind of missed the mark on that one.
