Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley hangs up his uniform
Jamie McIntyre
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Gen. Mark Milley might well have retired a few years ago and perhaps been remembered as the visionary Army chief of staff who established the Army Futures Command, which is charged with adapting and equipping the military branch to fight future wars expected to be dominated by robotic systems and artificial intelligence.
Despite his long record of combat command in places including Panama, Bosnia, Iran, and Afghanistan, Milley would not have been chosen as the 20th chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff but for former President Donald Trump’s festering antipathy for his first secretary of defense, legendary Marine Gen. Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis.
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Mattis was pushing for the Air Force chief of staff to be promoted to chairman, but Trump, as a rebuke to Mattis, picked the barrel-chested Princeton graduate Milley to be his chairman, largely because, essentially, he believed Mattis hated him.
And to rub it in, Trump announced his choice nearly a year ahead of time at the 2018 annual Army-Navy football game.
Milley, who had told Trump he would faithfully carry out any legal order, would soon discover that serving under this president would not be a matter of simply saluting and saying, “Yes, Sir.”
Milley was a strong believer in civilian control of the military and the core tenet that members of the armed forces should be strictly apolitical. But he found those bedrock principles tested serving Trump, a president who valued loyalty above all else and had little appetite for unwelcome advice.
The biggest test would come exactly eight months into the job when Milley found himself in the Oval Office with Trump raging about the Black Lives Matter protesters who had gathered across from the White House in Lafayette Square.
Trump wanted to send 10,000 active-duty troops into the streets of Washington, and he wanted Milley to lead them.
“I want you to be in charge of this, General,” Trump barked at Milley, according to former Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s 2022 memoir, A Sacred Oath.
“I’m an adviser, Mr. President. I don’t command troops. I’m not in an operational role here,” Milley replied wide-eyed, hands up in a “don’t shoot” gesture, according to Esper.
It was a reminder that Trump had little understanding of the role of the chairman, which is to serve as senior adviser to the president and secretary of defense, but who lacks any command authority.
“You are all f***ing losers!” Trump yelled and then tuned to Milley, “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?”
That was followed by the fateful walk with Trump across Pennsylvania Avenue, which Milley and Esper were told was to check on the National Guard troops and law enforcement who had been protecting the White House.
Instead, Trump walked across the park to the Episcopal church on the north side where a small fire had been set earlier and then posed holding a Bible, with Milley in among the group in his battle dress uniform.
“I knew instantly once I realized that it was a political event that I shouldn’t be there in uniform,” Milley told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria in one of a series of exit interviews he gave this month. “As soon as I recognized it, I walked away.”
But it was too late. Photos had been taken.
“The mistake I made was I walked into a political event, unwittingly, but a political event nonetheless. And I was in uniform. So that shouldn’t happen,” he said.
Milley, who publicly apologized 10 days later, blames himself, not Trump, for the transgression.
“President Trump is a politician. He can do whatever he wants to do. But as a soldier, I should never enter into politics,” he said.
In the months that followed, and especially after Trump refused to acknowledge his election loss, Milley became increasingly concerned that Trump might misuse the military to stage a coup or start a war with Iran to spark a crisis to remain in power.
“We do not take an oath to a king or queen, a tyrant or dictator. We do not take an oath to an individual. … We take an oath to the Constitution,” Milley said a week after the 2020 election was declared for Joe Biden.
While Milley has studiously avoided any public criticism of the previous or current occupant of the White House, he admitted in Senate testimony that he has spoken extensively to journalists on a not-for-attribution basis, providing many of the inside details in books including Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s Peril and Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker’s I Alone Can Fix It.
Asked if the accounts in those books are accurate, his answer was, “I haven’t read any of the books, so I don’t know.”
Milley did recently break his silence over the account included in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents indictment in which Trump appears to be showing off war plans for attacking Iran and claiming it was all Milley’s idea.
“I don’t know the document they’re talking about. I’ve never seen, you know, no one’s presented me,” Milley told CNN. “But I can tell you with certainty that this chairman never recommended a wholesale attack on Iran.”
Milley went to the mat several times with Trump and contemplated resigning in protest more than once, including to protest Esper’s firing in November 2020 and a post-election order to withdraw all 4,500 remaining troops from Afghanistan by Jan. 15 before Biden took office. If Milley thought with Trump gone that he could get back to just worrying about winning wars and modernizing the military, he would soon find himself a reluctant warrior in the intensifying culture wars.
During congressional testimony in the summer of 2021, Milley was grilled about the teaching of critical race theory at West Point, which he defended even as he admitted he knew little about it.
“What is wrong with understanding, having some situational understanding about the country for which we are here to defend?” he testified before the House Armed Services Committee.
“I’ve read Mao Zedong. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist,” he said.
“It is important that we train and we understand,” Milley said. “I want to understand white rage. I’m white, and I want to understand it.”
Because he’s required to speak truth to Congress, Milley has admitted he recommended against Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and when questioned about drag queen story hours on U.S. military bases volunteered, “I don’t agree with those.”
But Milley still bristles at the criticism that the Pentagon’s policies under the Biden administration, including congressionally mandated initiatives to increase the racial diversity of the force, are too woke.
“I’m not even sure what that word truly means. But I would tell you that the military I see is a military that is exceptionally strong,” he told CNN. “This is a military that’s dedicated to maintaining our readiness or capabilities or lethality. … This military is a lot of things, but woke it is not. So, I take exception to that. I think that people say those things for reasons that are their own reasons. But it’s not true. It’s not accurate.”
Milley, 65, is unsure what he will do after he moves out of Quarters Six, the red brick official residence of the chairman, situated on a hill overlooking the Potomac.
He’s joked that he told his wife of 38 years, Hollyanne, that they could just go to Dick’s Sporting Goods and get a tent. “I’m good. I’ve lived in a tent before.”
What he won’t do, Milley insists, is write a tell-all memoir or go into politics.
“I’ll probably write some things in the future. A tell-all is probably not something that a chairman or a general officer should be doing,” he says.
“In uniform or out of uniform … I’m always a general officer,” he told ABC’s Martha Raddatz. “It’s a professional ethic. And the American people will be the deciders of who they elect as a president. It’s not going to be a general; it’s not going to be someone in uniform.”
But unlike some doomsayers, Milley does not believe American democracy is in peril.
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“There’s a term I’ve talked to people about, ‘the conceit of the present,’ where people think that the present is always the worst. Well, it’s not always the worst,” he said.
“If you go to the 1930s,” he added, “there were 25,000 people in Madison Square Garden saying ‘Sieg heil.’ … I was 10 years old in 1968 when Bobby Kennedy was shot, Martin Luther King was shot. And there was a riot right here in D.C. that killed 38 people. So, we’ve been through some tough times; this is not the toughest time. America will prevail, it will come through stronger on the other end, and the American people are going to be just fine.”