Mark Milley: American Kommissar
These are the rules of the game and he’s simply playing by them.
It comes as no surprise:
General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has yet to comment on the use — or abuse — of Marines in President Joe Biden’s speech Thursday attacking “MAGA Republicans,” after Milley complained about Trump’s march across Lafayette Square.
Biden delivered a diatribe against Donald Trump and the political opposition in general, standing in front of Independence Hall as it was bathed in red light, and flanked by Marines who had been deliberately positioned, the White House said, in staging the address.
In 2020, Milley joined Trump in a march across Lafayette Square in front of the White House to a church that had been burned by Black Lives Matter rioters. It was a a demonstration that the elected government was still in charge of the country — not the mob.But Democrats and the media falsely claimed that Trump had used tear gas to clear protesters from the park for a “photo-op” — a claim debunked by an official investigation — and Milley issued a statement in which he apologized for his presence in uniform:
Not only has anyone at the Department of Defense or the military had nothing to say about the matter, neither has the coterie of civil-military experts, all of whom became known for their hand-wringing over former President Donald Trump’s supposed violations of civil-military norms. I say “supposed,” because the rules which applied to Trump apparently don’t apply to current President Joe Biden.
Oddly enough, the usually Biden-friendly media has proven themselves the voice of accountability and reason on this issue:
That said, I don’t expect Milley or anyone at the Pentagon to say a word about this incident. The Biden administration is arguably the most powerful in a generation and will likely be able to wait out the controversy until the next big story (likely involving Trump) dominates the news cycle.
But if you were one of the 64% of Americans who still trust the military, if this doesn’t shake your confidence in the institution charged with exercising violence on our behalf in defense of the nation, I don’t know what will. The military killing your fellow Americans?
If you have a problem with what I just said, before you get angry or stop reading, just take a short moment and focus. FOCUS. This is exactly why you, of all people, should be concerned at what President Biden did and why you should expect Milley to speak out!
If we think of civil-military relations as a spectrum, where on one end, you have an autonomous, independent institution existing as a completely separate society on one end and a force which has become inseparable from the civilian political leadership on the other end, the U.S. armed forces are trending dangerously towards the latter. The world’s largest military, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA), is technically a paramilitary force because it’s loyalty is not to the Chinese society nor even the state, but to the Communist Party. Some might say this is a distinction without a difference, since the CCP is effectively the state, but this misses the point: when forced to choose, the PLA will side with the party, because that’s whom it owes its allegiance to.
The U.S. military isn’t too far off from becoming the Democratic Party’s armed wing, the same way the PLA is the Communist Party’s armed wing. Mark Milley’s well-documented attempts to thwart and oppose the Trump administration while, at least publicly, daring to show no daylight between him and the Biden administration. I can’t imagine even Milley nor Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin agrees with everything Biden does or says, but the fact they’re unwilling to undermine their commander-in-chief doesn’t suggest obedience or proper observance of civil-military norms, but political loyalty. In a properly structured system of civilian control of the military, who the commander-in-chief is or how the commander-in-chief conducts themselves should have no bearing on the military’s obedience or observation of norms. The lines should be absolutely clear, largely free of ambiguity.
If the commander-in-chief’s behavior or identity is enough to affect the manner in which military leadership conduct themselves, this suggests the military has become far too politicized to an unhealthy degree. Clearly, this was an issue before Trump, his time in office merely exposing civil-military relations in the U.S. for what they really are. If not outright partisan, politics plays a role in the services, at least at it’s highest levels, far more than the military would like to admit.
The reality is the military has always stood within earshot of politics. The idea of an apolitical military is wishful thinking, because war is, as a famous Prussian general once said, “war is a continuation of politics by other means.” This is why drawing those boundaries and enforcing strict standards of professionalism are so important to avoid becoming compromised: you can only be compromised once! It’s not enough to say, “As long as you don’t utter the words ‘Democrat’ or ‘Republican,’ you’ll be fine.” Politics encompasses more than just party identification. It also encompasses policies, rhetoric, and worldviews. The trend in the last 10 years, going back to the Barack Obama administration, seems to have been to gradually expose the military to higher levels of politics in the interest of helping them to better-navigate such an environment, but did anyone really think this wouldn’t result in the military becoming more politicized? You stay above the fray by staying out of it completely, not by dipping your toes into it and expecting someone else to stop you from going too far.
Mark Milley rose through the ranks during a period of rapidly increasing military politicization and became Chairman when someone in his position was expected to be the so-called “adult in the room,” i.e., act as a foil for a democratically-elected president who wasn’t the choice of the real people in charge: the managerial state, the Regime. Once Biden was elected, the real people in charge had their president in the White House, and now Milley is expected to conduct himself as a professional soldier and expose no differences between himself and the commander-in-chief, even when he uses the military in a blatantly partisan political manner.
Now, I can’t say Mark Milley was wrong in anything he’s said or done thus far. If I were in his shoes, I would’ve probably done the exact same. These are the rules of the game and he’s simply playing by them. But he shouldn’t expect to be celebrated for it. After all, he’s exposing himself not as a protector of a nation, but as the protector of a party, a political force, a regime. The Democratic Party and Woke Leftism owes him their gratitude, not the American people.
The only question remaining: how far is Milley willing to go for Biden and the Regime? Milley made clear he was willing to fight President Trump - all indications suggest he’s not interested in doing the same with Biden. If the current president were to give the order to, say, deploy the military against peaceful right-wing protestors, however, would Milley object as he did with Trump?
Milley’s silence speaking volumes, I’m not confident he would. And that ought to worry us all.
Edward Chang is a defense, military, and foreign policy writer. Follow him on Twitter at @Edward_Chang_8.
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