They Don’t Make ‘Em Like They Used To: America’s Greatest Old Generals, And Their Sorry Modern Replacements

It was an understandable mistake, though. When Donald Trump was a boy, America had never lost a single war. The country’s World War 2 commanders were living legends who in less than four years built the U.S. military into the mightiest fighting force to ever exist and crushed powerful foes on the far side of two vast oceans.

Sadly, the generals of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria are for the most part not as venerable as their forebears. America has a great military history filled with incredibly gifted men, and the shadow they cast today only exposes the humiliating depths the U.S. military command has fallen to today. To emphasize this important contrast, Revolver would like to present four of America’s most impressive generals, and four of its worst modern ones.

George Washington 

No list of this nature is complete without the father of the country himself. Critical race theorists prefer to target Washington the slaveholder, while armchair history enthusiasts like to bash Washington as a commander who lost most of his battles and needed French help to win the American Revolution.

All of this does a hideous disservice to America’s first commander-in-chief.

Washington is the polar opposite of America’s current military leaders. Today’s leaders have virtually unlimited money, an Air Force and Navy more than twice the size of any rival, and so many tanks that some of them are simply dumped in the desert while generals beg Congress to stop making so many. And with all that, today’s commanders flail about in Afghanistan and other conflicts, unable to either win them or extricate the U.S. from a quagmire. They have inherited the strongest military force to ever exist and are gradually turning it into a sick joke.

With inferior weaponry, inferior numbers, inferior training, and no money except the hyper-inflated and nearly worthless Continental currency, Washington kept his army alive. With his daring winter attack across the Delaware River at Trenton, he kept his force’s morale up so that it didn’t disintegrate. Washington was a skilled spymaster, whose personally-commanded Culper Ring detected several British plots, including Benedict Arnold’s attempt to betray West Point. As the leader of a flimsy army from a colonial backwater, Washington lasted long enough to upset a vast, wealthy, and determined imperial enemy. Today, America is the vast and wealthy empire, losing to forces even more ragtag than Washington’s.

Washington wasn’t just a great general in war, but also in peace. With America’s independence won, Washington was strong enough, and popular enough, that he could have dissolved Congress and made himself a dictator or even a king. Instead, Washington presented himself to the Continental Congress and, the war being over, resigned his commission to return home to Mt. Vernon. Historian Gordon Wood called it the greatest act of Washington’s illustrious life. Another historian, Thomas Fleming, called it the single most important act in American history. Washington set the norm that, no matter how much glory a general wins on the battlefield, in America it is the civilian government, the government of laws and elections, that rules, not the naked power wielded by men with guns.

Mark Milley

Let’s start off our modern list with the man of the hour himself. While Washington became the greatest man of his generation by foregoing political power, Milley embodies the modern military man with his craven pursuit of it.

By now, most Revolver readers have seen Milley’s embarrassing paean to books about “white rage.” Milley boasts that he reads books advocating radical leftism, as well as books the radical left writes about its enemies, and thus he is a splendidly well-rounded warrior and philosopher. MSNBC talking heads line up to worship him.