Donald Trump does not understand how military works, sacked Navy secretary says

In the op-ed, Spencer blasts Trump's "shocking and unprecedented intervention" in the infamous case of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, who was accused of several war crimes before ultimately being convicted of posing with the corpse of an ISIS fighter. Spencer said he believes Trump's interest in the case stemmed partly from the way Gallagher's defense lawyers and others "worked to keep it front and center in the media".

"That was, I see in retrospect, a mistake for which I am exclusively responsible, " he wrote.

"The President has very little understanding of what it means to be in the military, to fight ethically or to be governed by a uniform set of rules and practices", Mr Spencer wrote in a piece published by the Washington Post on Wednesday. An image of white nationalist Spencer was accidentally shown in place of the former military leader.

"Americans need to know that 99.9 percent of our uniformed members always have, always are and always will make the right decision, " he wrote.

[.] The trail of events that led to me being fired as secretary of the Navy is marked with lessons for me and for the nation. In August, the president even urged the US Navy to Gallagher's military prosecutors of their medals, arguing that they had performed poorly on his case.

SAN DIEGO - The Navy on Wednesday canceled a peer-review process that would have determined if three Navy SEAL officers who supervised an enlisted SEAL convicted of posing with a dead teenage captive in Iraq should remain on the elite force.

The Navy had planned to let an administrative board review the question, but Mr Esper chose to stop that process and let Officer Gallagher retire as a SEAL, as Mr Trump had ordered.

Thomas Modly who became acting secretary of the Navy this week said in a statement that neither the Navy nor the SEALs.

Trump made no mention of the three SEAL officers also ordered to be reviewed.

A review hearing scheduled for early December will determine whether Gallagher can continue to be a SEAL, Navy Captain Tamara Lawrence told Reuters.

But Modly talked about there were better ways to accommodate any "failures in conduct, efficiency, judgment, or professionalism exhibited by these officers".

The now-terminated reviews of the three remaining Seals - Lieutenant Jacob Portier, Lieutenant Commander Robert Breisch and Lieutenant Thomas MacNeil - had received far less attention than the Gallagher case.