A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense During Extraordinary Times – An Instant New York Times Bestseller: A Pentagon Insider's Tumultuous Years Under President Trump

by Mark T. Esper

My biggest concern was that Congress, ever the political body that it was, might include language in the base-renaming provision that risked politicizing the military by, say, keeping open the door to name bases after political persons from the right or left. We needed to keep politics out of the military space. But to have a shot at doing so, we needed to share the views of the Department, and especially of the uniformed leaders, with Congress in advance. This was how things worked. A few weeks earlier, on October 16, I met privately with Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy and Army Chief of Staff Jim McConville about this matter. The Army had ten bases named after Confederate military leaders: Fort Hood, Fort Bragg, Fort Benning, Fort Gordon, Fort Lee, Fort A. P. Hill, Fort Polk, Fort Rucker, the Virginia National Guard post Fort Pickett, and the Louisiana National Guard’s Camp Beauregard. Both leaders were anxious to rename the bases, and they were concerned about how Congress might tell them to change the names. Milley couldn’t make it to the meeting, but he shared all these same views as well.