Are Generals Looking Out For The USA?


Show Notes

By Joe Duffus

General Milley’s testimony before Congress this week answered some questions about the hurried and botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, but left a larger question hanging: Do our military leaders still have America’s best interests at heart?

As Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Milley is America’s highest-ranking military member. Yet in a recent book, journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa detail two calls Milley made to General Li Zuocheng of the People’s Liberation Army in October and in January. They quote Milley as being “fearful of Trump’s actions in his final weeks as president,” and therefore he “twice called his Chinese counterpart to assure him that the United States was not going to attack China,” the book reported.

According to the Associated Press, Milley’s second call “was meant to allay Chinese fears about the events of Jan. 6. The book says Li remained nervous, even after Milley assured him: ‘We are 100 percent steady. Everything’s fine. But democracy can be sloppy sometimes.’”

Given the turmoil of Jan. 6, it is understandable that the most senior military leader in the US might reassure an adversary through back-channels not to worry, during peacetime. Of course, during wartime this same action would be considered treason.

Joining Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers on the latest episode of the Drill Down podcast is author and US Navy veteran Jack Posobiec to talk about the chain of command and the importance of civilian control of the military.

Posobiec, senior editor at Human Events, notes that the Chinese read “layers of meaning” into our various statements, rather than taking them at face value. As Americans, “we know there is a split between Milley and Trump. But that doesn’t mean the Chinese” understand the distinction, which does not exist between the military and the politicians in China. Posobiec asks: “Could they have miscalculated? Could they have viewed Milley’s statement to them as itself a threat?”

Milley has undermined civilian authority over the military throughout his career. In 2013 he had praised the Afghan government forces and delivered rosy assessments to Congress about the progress of the war. Yet in November 2020, according to an investigation by Axios, Milley was appalled at Trump’s directive to complete the military withdrawal from Afghanistan by January 15, 2021, five days before the end of his term. Milley worked behind the scenes to derail the effort, forcing Trump to push back the planned withdrawal deadline to May.

When Trump’s national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, said that the president was going to reduce the troop levels from 4,500 to 2,500 before leaving office, Milley publicly challenged the words of the president’s senior adviser, saying: “I think that Robert O’Brien or anyone else can speculate as they see fit.”

Eric and Peter ask Posobiec about the careerism in the military. He sums up what he observed from his time in the intelligence side of the US Navy and seeing the actions of the senior echelon at the Pentagon.

“Eventually, you get people who after many years in DC have completely lost the idea of why they ran for public office, why they committed themselves to public service, or why they joined the military in the first place,” Posobiece said. “They become totally lost within the trappings of the system, and they are more worried about what they can get out of the system than actually serving the people that are governed by it.”

Peter echoes that with a saying he heard from former Louisiana congressman Bobby Jindal: “When you first get to DC, it feels like a cesspool. But you stay there for a while, it starts to feel more like a hot tub.”