The selection of John Caine as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff may signal a new emphasis on irregular warfare, covert and clandestine operations, enabling swifter action with fewer legal constraints and less congressional scrutiny, say former military and senior defense officials who have worked in the intelligence community, special operations, the Defense Department, and the White House.
The nomination of Caine—a retired Air Force lieutenant general—and the early dismissal of Gen. CQ Brown were part of an unprecedented purge announced on Friday by President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who also announced their intent to replace Adm. Lisa Franchetti, chief of naval operations; and the judge advocates general—essentially the top lawyers—of the Army, Navy, and Air Force. Hegseth was also reported to have fired his senior military assistant, Lt. Gen. Jennifer Short.
“General Caine is an accomplished pilot, national security expert, successful entrepreneur, and a ‘warfighter’ with significant interagency and special operations experience,” Trump said in Friday post announcing the moves.
An F-16 pilot with more than 150 combat hours and a Distinguished Flying Cross, Caine first moved into special operations when he helped hunt SCUD missiles in Iraq in 2003, CNN reported. Five years later, he was leading the Joint Special Operations Task Force – Air Directorate in Iraq, according to his official bio.
In 2016, he received his general’s star and became assistant commanding general of Joint Special Operations Command, an elite group even among special operators. From 2018 to September 2019, he was deputy commander of Special Operations Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve,
Little is publicly known about Caine’s role in Operation Inherent Resolve, which has been battling the Islamic State since 2014. But the role of air strikes, including clandestine ones, grew after September 2017, when Trump delegated airstrike approval to the operation’s commanders, effectively removing the requirement for White House oversight on such missions. Trump also designated ISIS-held territories as “active hostile zones.” Combined with the use of new sensors and AI-powered data-fusion tools, these developments intensified anti-ISIS airstrikes, according to a 2022 Defense Department review.
In 2019, Caine became the Pentagon’s director of Special Access Programs; two years later, he became associate director for military affairs at the Central Intelligence Agency—essentially, the Pentagon’s top liaison there. Both jobs put him in close proximity to some of the most highly secret missions and operations.
In a post announcing his intent to nominate Caine to be the military’s top officer, Trump called him “instrumental” in the 2019 recapture of ISIS-controlled territory.
“Many so-called ‘geniuses’ said it would take years to defeat ISIS. General Caine, on the other hand, said it could be done quickly, and he delivered,” he wrote.
One former senior White House official said Trump picked Caine for his experience and talent running clandestine operations, his understanding of expanded authorities, and the personal rapport that developed between the men during Trump’s first term as president.
Trump and the expansion of irregular warfare
But some see in Caine’s nomination—along with the ousters of the JAGs and the SecDef’s military advisor and Trump’s own record—a bid to evade legal strictures on the president’s use of military force.
“The JAG firings are actually more worrisome than the senior officer reliefs, because everyone two-star and above serves at the pleasure of the President, but reaching down into the organization to remove the legal constraints is far more insidious,” said Kori Schake, a former senior official at the National Security Council and at the State Department.
The president’s power to use military force is checked under Title 50 of the U.S. Code, which requires the chief executive to notify Congress within 48 hours of sending forces into combat. If that deployment is to last longer than 60 days, Congress must authorize the deployment—at least technically. In recent decades, that has rarely been the case.
But Title 50 also narrows the scope of congressional oversight for clandestine missions. In “normal” circumstances, only the House and Senate intelligence committees must be notified in advance. Under “extraordinary” circumstances, the president need only notify the so-called Gang of Eight—the bipartisan leaders of both houses of Congress and the chairs and ranking members of the two intelligence committees—and in some circumstances, need not do so in advance.
Meanwhile, Title 18 acts as a further check on executive power, by imposing criminal liability on government personnel who commit crimes as part of a mission. For example, a covert or clandestine action that involves assassination, could draw legal challenge under Title 18’s prohibitions against murder, conspiracy, and extrajudicial killings.
One former senior intelligence community official and one former senior defense official said that Caine’s rise, following Trump’s previous actions enabling an expansion of secret activity, portends far greater use of irregular, covert and clandestine operations.
“Stuff like turf wars over [Title 50 and Title 18] and funding lines are less likely to drive the bus in the next four years,” said the former intelligence official.
Moreover, Trump has been installing secret-warfare operators in key positions. The list includes National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, a former Green Beret who also served as the former vice president Dick Cheney’s counterterrorism advisor. Another is Ron Johnson, a former CIA science and technology liaison to U.S. Special Operations Command, who is awaiting confirmation as Trump’s ambassador to Mexico.
The former intelligence official said those selections point to better interagency collaboration and coordination, which would be a good thing.
“Can’t have intel, mil, diplomacy…operating in silos when the threats are both foreign and domestic. My bet is that this whole admin will look to use whatever department or agency-level authorities and resources are best suited to fulfilling the commander-in-chief’s stated intent.”
But the former defense official said that Trump appears to want to rely far less on traditional large-force deployments, in part because such deployments require congressional oversight and approval. New authorizations for the use of force are unlikely, the official said.
All of that will factor in potential engagements against Mexican drug cartels, which Trump has designated as foreign terrorist organizations.
One constitutional legal expert with deep expertise in national security and classified work said the selection of Caine, coupled with the removal of top service lawyers who would likely object to Trump’s personal interpretation of presidential war powers, means “if the Trump White House is looking to wage a covert war in Mexico, they certainly could.”
A new era of irregular and secret warfare
On the one hand, lawmakers from both parties have said that the United States should make irregular warfare a higher priority. And Russian and Chinese grey-zone activities have been a mounting challenge for the United States and allied militaries, especially since neither country need work through legal restrictions or processes in employing such capabilities.
The former intelligence official welcomed the selection of Caine and what they saw as the likely new focus or emphasis on irregular and secret operations, describing it as “refreshing to see some potential for a tightly-integrated national security apparatus across all elements of presidential power. The country has some very significant challenges ahead.”
But history suggests that secret operations do not always achieve the desired results, especially when treated as a panacea solution rather than a tool to be employed among other implements of institution-building.
Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, for instance, famously championed a sort of irregular-warfare doctrine against adversaries in the Middle East, marked by the use of high-tech weapons and agile special-ops missions. But that fast-in, fast-out approach didn’t account for the changing social dynamics on the ground, which grew increasingly unstable in places like Iraq. And Rumsfeld was averse to the sort of long-term civil and military engagement that might be described as “nation-building.”
Vietnam-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was also fond of secret operations to put down the North Vietnamese forces. But this strategy of incremental escalation eventually provoked North Vietnamese activity around the Gulf of Tonkin, leading to more U.S. military involvement.
The constitutional law expert said, “Trump’s particular affinity for this type of force projection is consistent with his Hollywood-esque view of national security. Secretive, limited oversight, and deadly.”
Several of the officials we spoke to either knew or interacted with Caine, personally. They all described him as intelligent, well-liked, and highly respected among both the military and intelligence communities.
But his installation by Trump suggests that the president expects little of the pushback that his last appointee—Gen. Mark Milley—ultimately gave him. The former defense official said Trump has systematically “taken out people who were able to restrain him.”
The removal of members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff not for cause but simply to install a new president’s pick is unprecedented, and counter to the intent of congressional action, said Charles Stevenson, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies and author of SecDef: The Nearly Impossible Job of Secretary of Defense.
“Yes, it’s precedented for an administration to replace military people, but the Congress, first in the 1960s, and then again just a few years ago with regard to the chairman, instituted set terms. They wanted to insulate the senior officers, members of the chiefs, from turnover with the new administration. That’s why they wrote the laws that way,” Stevenson said.
And not just Trump, but Hegseth, he added.
“The JAG [firing] looks as if he is emphasizing: ‘I want people who have my interpretation of the laws of war, not the established traditional ones.’ That’s kind of shocking,” Stevenson said.
Bradley Peniston contributed to this report.
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