Defense Secretary summons every general and admiral at the rank of brigadier and up to a single room in Virginia; the agenda is not announced.

Pay attention. Eight hundred. That is the number. Eight hundred American flag officers. Generals and admirals. One-stars and up. Every theater command. Every fleet. Every continent. The whole top of the chain.

The summons came Friday. The location: Quantico, Virginia. The Marine Corps base. The date: Tuesday, September 30. The advance notice: less than seventy-two hours. The agenda: not provided. The travel justification on the official cable: meeting with the Secretary.

Buddy. Three problems. Three.

Problem one. You do not summon every flag officer to one room. Especially not on this kind of notice. The reason you do not is operational. The four-star command of the Pacific theater is supposed to be in the Pacific. The four-star at EUCOM is supposed to be in Stuttgart, watching the Russians. The four-star at CENTCOM is supposed to be in Tampa, watching the Middle East, which is, as of Tuesday, literally on fire in Doha. You do not take all the four-stars off station at once unless you are announcing something so big it justifies the operational risk.

Problem two. Nobody knew what the meeting was for. As of Sunday afternoon, three former Secretaries of Defense had publicly said they could not figure out the agenda. Career Pentagon staff were calling reporters off the record asking what the meeting was about. The Secretary’s office did not return calls. The summons was vague on purpose, or vague by accident; the result was the same. Eight hundred officers boarding eight hundred flights not knowing why they were being asked to board.

Problem three. The President. The President was not on the program. The summons was the Secretary’s. By Sunday morning, after the story had broken in the papers, the President added himself to the program. The press shop’s framing: this would be a really nice meeting about how well we are doing militarily. He used the words good message.

A good message, in the military, is delivered through the chain. The chain exists for this reason. You do not need to physically assemble every flag officer to deliver a good message. You can write the good message in a memo. You can post the good message on the SIPRNet. You can have the Secretary fly to Stuttgart, to Tampa, to Honolulu. The purpose of flying everyone to one room is not the message. The purpose of flying everyone to one room is the assembly itself.

I have been arguing with televisions for thirty years. This one I am arguing with at low volume because it is the kind of thing you do not shout about. You watch it. You take notes. You check who did not show up and what they say afterward.

I’m arguing with the television. The television is showing the assembly. The assembly is happening Tuesday.