Donald Trump’s image was flickering on the oversized TV screen in the private cabin of the Air Force jet that was flying General Mark Milley, Trump’s handpicked chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, back to Washington, after a round of meetings in Colorado. Just the day before, Trump had told Steve Hilton, of Fox News, that he had been so worried about the prospect of violence in Washington on January 6th that he had ordered the military to deploy ten thousand troops there, only to be rebuffed by “the people at the Capitol.”
Even as Trump said it, this new excuse from the former President who had incited a mob to march on the Capitol seemed flagrantly untrue. Not only were there no National Guard troops—none at all, never mind ten thousand—ordered to defend Congress but, once it was besieged by the pro-Trump crowd, Trump himself had done nothing to stop the rioters in their vain, and ultimately deadly, attempt to block the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s victory. Throughout his impeachment for his role in the insurrection, Trump and his lawyers had never mentioned this supposed order. Why would Trump and his former advisers—such as the ex-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and the ex-White House press secretary Kayleigh McEneany—start bragging about it now, seven weeks later?
When I asked Milley about what Trump had said, his reply was clear. “As the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, if there was an order for ten thousand National Guardsmen, I would like to believe I would know that,” he said. “I know that was never transmitted to me by anyone—the President, the Secretary of Defense, or anyone else—for the 6th of January.”
Milley is a brawny four-star Army general with years of combat experience in both Afghanistan and Iraq. When we spoke on his plane, he was wearing standard-issue Army camouflage fatigues and—until he started talking—you could imagine how Trump had once imagined him to be another one of “my generals,” a blunt tough guy from Irish Boston who would provide the macho displays of military might that Trump loved.
In 2018, Trump picked Milley to serve as chairman instead of David Goldfein, the Air Force general preferred by the then Defense Secretary, Jim Mattis, who would soon quit over that and other disagreements. But Milley proved no more a Trumpian than the austere, bookish Mattis. A history-obsessed Princeton graduate, Milley ended the Trump Presidency profoundly offended by Trump’s efforts to politicize and co-opt the military on his behalf. Milley’s views became publicly evident after a disastrous photo op, on June 1st, in which Milley and Mark Esper, then the Secretary of Defense, walked alongside Trump through Lafayette Square minutes after it had been forcibly cleared of nonviolent Black Lives Matter protesters. Milley quickly apologized for his presence there and resisted calls from Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, in order to call in active-duty troops to quash the protesters. In the final months between Lafayette Square and the end of Trump’s tenure, Milley repeatedly spoke in public about the military’s constitutional obligation to remain free from the entanglements of domestic politics.
Then came an actual insurrection. Milley told me and two other reporters travelling with him this week that he was shocked at what the attack had revealed. “For me, January 6th clearly and unambiguously exposed a domestic extremist threat that I didn’t realize the size, scale, and scope of,” he said. “People are entitled to believe what they want,” he said, “but you can’t act out on it. And you can’t go smash windows at the Capitol. You can’t break into buildings. You can’t put bear spray into a police officer’s face. You can’t bash him with a stick. You can’t commit violence or other acts.” He warned that such crimes undermine “the very essence of what this Republic is all about.”
Milley’s comments were his first about the storming of the Capitol, and much was made this week of his statement that the National Guard had acted with “sprint speed” deploying troops to Capitol Hill once the order was given—a turnaround time of fewer than three hours, which, according to Milley, is as fast as the military’s most élite commandos. “For the Pentagon, that’s super fast,” he said. (The Pentagon’s time line of the day shows that Milley was present at the meeting in which the acting Defense Secretary, Christopher Miller, authorized the emergency deployment of the D.C. National Guard, at 3 p.m. Milley was not involved in a still-disputed back-and-forth that led General William Walker, the D.C. Guard’s commander, to testify this week that he was not given a final approval to deploy until after 5 p.m. on that awful day.)
The sad truth, though, as the conversation with Milley makes clear, is that, as we wait for investigators to definitively establish what the Pentagon did or did not do on the afternoon of January 6th, the troops controlled by America’s civilian leaders were not ready in advance—a state of affairs that could have allowed them to actually stop the storming of the Capitol. And, for that, it’s hard not to blame Trump and his months-long toxic attack on the institutions of democracy, including the sanctity of a principle that Milley holds dear: an independent, “apolitical military,” with officers who swear an oath to the Constitution, not to a man. The oath, not incidentally, also pledges officers to combat enemies “foreign and domestic,” and it’s the latter problem, I fear, that poses a challenge for which the U.S military—built to reckon with Vladimir Putin but not Donald Trump—is ill prepared.
So just what does national security mean anymore, in the age of Trump and his rampaging white supremacists? Or, for that matter, during a pandemic that has claimed more than five hundred thousand American lives—more than all the American battlefield deaths in both world wars and the Vietnam War combined?
I kept coming back to this question as I spent a week travelling with Milley, from the Pentagon to the headquarters of the new U.S. Space Command, in Colorado Springs, to a nuclear-submarine base in Washington State. Much of the chairman’s time was consumed, not surprisingly, by meetings on China and Russia, the U.S.’s two “peer competitors,” in Pentagon speak, and how to counter these great-power adversaries in the artificial-intelligence-fuelled, cyber-lethal combat of the future. Milley, who set up the Army Futures Command when he was the Army’s chief of staff, frequently talks in his speeches about the “changing character of war,” a challenge for which he believes a fundamental restructuring of the military, akin to its post-Vietnam War revamp, is immediately required.
While we were travelling, the Biden Administration unveiled its first crack at an interim national-security strategy, which, like Trump’s, prioritizes the global rivalry with China—“the biggest geopolitical test of the twenty-first century,” as Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, in a speech on Wednesday—while placing new emphasis on issues, such as climate change, public health, reinvigorating alliances, and rising authoritarianism, that Trump left off his list. On Russia, Biden has signalled a more confrontational approach, after Trump’s years of flattering public statements toward Putin. The new Administration formally issued sanctions this week against several high-ranking Russian officials for their role in the poisoning and arrest of the political dissident Alexey Navalny.
Multiple unresolved issues from previous Administrations confront Biden: Should he stick to Trump’s deal with the Taliban and pull out the remaining twenty-five hundred U.S. troops from Afghanistan, despite pleas from the Afghan government to remain? And what about his own campaign-trail promise of accountability for the killers of the Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which now seems to have collided with the Realpolitik imperative of not offending a powerful ally’s Crown Prince? On the economy, Biden promised less of the enthusiastic free-trading globalization of Democratic predecessors Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, but it is not clear whether he will keep in place Trump’s protectionist tariffs on China and the European Union. More broadly, Biden and his team promise a relentless focus on China, but will this Administration, the third in a row to promise that it will “pivot to Asia”—as the then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote, in an article I published in Foreign Policy magazine, in 2011—actually be able to do so when the entanglements of the Middle East still remain a focus of so much day-to-day crisis and controversy?
It was hardly lost on anyone that Biden’s first known military action was in Syria, where the U.S. carried out limited airstrikes late last month against an Iranian-backed militia, in retaliation for attacks against a U.S. facility in Erbil, Iraq. The White House decision-making, as Milley described it in one of our conversations this week, seemed like a return to the past in that the Middle East, once again, asserted itself as a national-security preoccupation that will not allowed itself to be pivoted away from. In terms of how policy choices are made, Milley was diplomatic on the stark contrast between the Trump Administration and the new Biden team. But his sense of relief that old-fashioned process—“regular order,” he called it—has returned to the business of national-security policy is palpable. When asked about the Biden Administration’s approach, the words he used were “disciplined,” “thoughtful,” “deliberative,” and “inclusive.” “I perceive rational discussion and legitimate points of view being presented in a rational, mature way on very serious topics of national security,” he said. “Anytime you use lethal force is a very serious undertaking—it ought to be very thoughtful and thorough.”
The chairman did not mention explicitly Trump or his team. He did not need to. I thought back to Trump’s first military strike, also on targets in Syria, four years ago this April. Trump had been at his Mar-a-Lago club, in Florida, hosting the Chinese leader Xi Jinping for an introductory summit. Trump famously told Xi about the attack in the Mar-a-Lago dining room, as dessert was being served. Trump’s Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, later described the moment as “in lieu of after-dinner entertainment”—offering the image of military force as sheer and largely pointless Trumpian spectacle. The contrast could not have been clearer: a return to “regular order,” even if the world still feels as though it’s been turned upside down.
