President Biden Gives Vote of Confidence to CJCS General Milley
After a news cycle that found General Milley the center of a Bob Woodard book promotion excerpt, President Biden brushed aside concerns about the nations top uniformed officer.
President Biden on Wednesday threw his full support behind the Pentagon’s top uniformed officer, who has come under fire after a new book revealed he privately conferred with his Chinese counterpart to avert armed conflict late in the Trump administration.
“I have great confidence in General Milley,” Biden told reporters at the White House, following calls from former president Donald Trump and his Republican allies on Capitol Hill for the removal of Gen. Mark A. Milley as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Biden’s declaration, coinciding with efforts by the chief spokespersons for the White House and the Pentagon to stage a similar defense of the embattled general, effectively ends speculation that Milley’s assignment may be cut short. But the controversy surrounding his fitness for the job rages on — and thus far is falling mostly along party lines.
According to the book from Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward and national political reporter Robert Costa, Milley spoke with Gen. Li Zuocheng of the People’s Liberation Army twice: once in late October and again in early January, after Trump’s supporters laid siege to the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn his election defeat. The domestic upheaval had shaken the government in Beijing, where leaders, according to the book’s authors, worried that Trump appeared to be acting so erratically that he might order an attack on China, triggering a war.
In their calls, Milley sought to reassure Zuocheng that things in the United States were “100 percent steady,” according to the book, even if “democracy can be sloppy sometimes.” But he later instructed Pentagon officials that he had to be involved in any discussions about launching nuclear weapons, even though it is the president who would give such an order, the authors wrote.
The blowback was instantaneous, with critics of Milley complaining he undercut his commander in chief and violated the principle of civilian control over the military. Trump, in denying he had ever contemplated attacking China, called the general’s actions “treason.”
So, what say you?
Of all the actors who tried to contain Trump behind the scenes, while almost still enabling him, Gen. Milley comes the closest to being an honest hero. The military is strictly forbidden from following unlawful orders, and launching a nuclear attack for political purposes would have been about as political as it came. He did the right thing, consistent with his oath of office.Report
It’s too early to say on any of this stuff. It’s third hand accounting of second hand book reporting that is, itself, likely spun up to make Milleys actions more central and dramatic than they likely actually were.Report
Milley has independently confirmed some of the details . . . .Report
Yeah well Woodward is notorious for being clear on the details but terrible on the context so I prefer to reserve judgement on the matter until the full story becomes clear.Report
Now, North, what would the internet be if everyone thought like that?Report
Well we’d have been spared the endless squeals about Covington at the bare minimum.Report
Nonsense on stilts. With line of ‘thinking’ you should plan yourself a nice vacation to the moon since gravity remains only a theory. You could flap your arms and fly there.Report
Assuming this isn’t muddled by additional information/context I don’t know how anyone can feel great about any of it.Report
The China Call is probably over-blown… I mean, saying we’re not going to nuke you is exactly what we’d say if we’re planning a first strike nuke, and the Chinese would know that Miley was an educated man, so he’d want to put the nuclear strike as far away from him as possible… so they could clearly not choose to strike first… but they clearly would know that Miley knew that they were great fools, so they could clearly not choose *not* to strike first… and so on as it goes with death on the line.
The odd tid-bit is his ‘refusal’ to execute an Afghan evacuation order. On the one hand, of course… such an order on Jan 15 as the president is exiting the office is stupid and designed to sow chaos. And quite possibly Miley is embellishing his ‘resistance’ cred (or Woodward is playing up the drama) such that an order like that is just plain silly in terms of actual execution. However, if presented with such an order (if he was) … his duty is to resign – if it’s really the case that he thought himself doing something heroic. More likely everyone knew you couldn’t even schedule the first con-call to go over the order before the inauguration… so I’m assuming this is all useless guff.
Unless Miley believes his own bullshit… in which case, he needs to be removed. If however, he knows it’s all bullshit but still played himself up to Woodward, he needs to be removed. The only reason he stays? Woodward made it all up. And even then, he probably should be removed for the Passive Aggressive bullshit he pulled on the Afghan withdrawal. And we can remain silent/agnostic on Lafayette park or Jan 6. But honestly, can’t see why you’d keep Miley around as Commander in Chief.
But as I said before, Joe is an institutionalist and isn’t interested in fixing broken things… just doing more of what Joe thinks needs doing.Report
Lol, libs.
The recent debacle in Afghanistan couldn’t have been Joe’s fault. Several regular lib commenters here persuasively argued there was going to be a parade of brass and intelligence types marched out of the Pentagon and Foggy Bottom into forced early retirement Any Day Now. I have no doubt that’s going to happen just as soon as OJ finds the real killers and brings them to justice.Report
I don’t know about my fellow libs but I think there -should- be a lot of firings. I don’t think there will be. Cleaning house isn’t politically expedient for most administrations.Report
Trump fired or lost, like, 3 administrations worth of personnel between his own firings and the rampant washouts from naked corruption. Not a standard to seek to emulate.
And cleaning house in this case wouldn’t be going after the Secretary in charge- it’d be firing and demoting whole rafts of the actual DOD and pentagon folks who made their careers on Afghanistan. The blob and their media handmaidens would fight back furiously. As with Obama and the W Torture mess the current President has to choose between getting stuff done, or cleaning house. The voters don’t usually reward the latter and have a chance of rewarding the former.Report
Koz is referring to me.
I expect there will be some “invited” retirements fairly soon, which won’t be binned as such by the media. but they will wait until the minor dust up dies down before writing those memos for people to sign. The process will be hastened if anyone in the media gets credible evidence that someone with stars on their shoulders knew it was going to go bad fast and didn’t pass that along.Report
Tbh, there’s not a huge point in being coy. I was actually thinking of North as I wrote that, but like I wrote, there was more than one, and you fit the bill decently well enough.
In any event, you, North et al repeatedly tried to deflect the blame for the Afghanistan debacle away from the President and towards the brass and other deep state types. “The housecleaning is coming soon, yesiree” But that was a crock from the get-go, and there is no housecleaning.Report
You still haven’t cited anything proving that the brass, deep state etc anticipated and warned the administration that Afghanistan would implode within a matter of days when we withdrew.
We also hashed this out at length and, in the end, all you had was some armchair quarterbacking saying that if more troops has been piled into that place it wouldn’t have collapsed as quickly or suffered as many American casualties. That’s all well and good except that it is equally (or more) likely that a larger troop footprint would have done nothing except boost American casualties more.
As to housecleaning the DoD and the Pentagon? I absolutely think it should be done but I don’t recall ever saying it would be done.Report
The difficulty for the Never-Democrats is that there really isn’t any angle of attack here.
Saying that Biden should known they would collapse immediately is to admit the war was unwinnable which leaves an embarrassing 20 year long paper trail of those very same people telling us that victory was in sight.Report
Saying that Biden should known they would collapse immediately is to admit the war was unwinnable which leaves an embarrassing 20 year long paper trail of those very same people telling us that victory was in sight.
“We had been lied to for many administrations by people who turned war into a racket.”
“BUT TRUMP FELL FOR THE LIES TOO! AND BUSH!”
“Yeah.”Report
I mean, what’s the follow up?
“THAT MUST REALLY BE EMBARRASSING FOR YOU!”
“Yeah. It is. I bought the bullshit about feminism too.”Report
“You still haven’t cited anything proving that the brass, deep state etc anticipated and warned the administration that Afghanistan would implode within a matter of days when we withdrew.”
Well yes, I have not demonstrated that. I don’t think we should conclude that such warnings didn’t exist. If they did, they would be conveyed through channels that Republicans have no access to, so we’d be at the mercy of leaks, and if there aren’t any leaks, there wouldn’t be anything to cite.
But that’s frankly secondary anyway. I haven’t tried to argue that mostly because I didn’t think I needed to, as a premise toward the conclusion that Biden is incompetent and that the debacle is mostly his fault.
We know already that the brass told him not to draw down and abandon the airfield, I cited for that in the prior thread. It obviously wasn’t the brass who made him tell George Stephanopolos that we could ignore people dying by falling off the outside of American military aircraft midflight because it happened for or five days ago (Narrator: it wasn’t).
But even as to the supposed misinformation and bad intelligence the President received, even that doesn’t hold up as an excuse. Does President Biden not have access to (or create) any other information channels? Is he not capable of thinking for himself? Are the people responsible for that bad info, are they uncontrollable or in some way not accountable to the President?
The answers are pretty clear, and not flattering to the President.Report
Ah well the Brass and the Blob are pretty ticked about Biden taking away their sandbox. I have no doubt that if they’d made such a dire prediction to the administration in advance that fact would have been leaked as part of their furious effort to cover their collective posteriors. That they haven’t leaked it suggests very strongly that the prediction was never made. It also parses with what we know about the DoD and other Afghan war boosters. The regular suspects were publicly warning that the Afghan government could go down in a year or so if Biden pulled the US out. Their public “pessimistic” pronouncements proved ludicrously optimistic. So, what they said publicly jives with what they said privately. They had no clue they’d spent 2 trillion bucks, thousands of American lives and tens of thousands of Afghan lives to produce a Potemkin village that wouldn’t even match up to what the Soviets accomplished in Afghanistan. Until/unless an inquiry or a leak demonstrates that the Afghan war boosters predicted and warned the Admin in advance of exactly how quickly their fake army would fold then the speed at which it folded is on them.
I will readily grant that Biden did not anticipate that Afghanistan would implode in a matter of days. What I don’t grant is this crazy idea that he could have been expected to. No one else did, inside or out of the administration. The idea that Biden, or any admin, could walk into the joint, wave a magic wand and conjure alternative “information channels” is ludicrous. Should the Admins worst case plans have been even more pessimistic? Captain Hindsight says yeah, sure. Is that indefensible? No. We’re out. We took over a hundred thousand refugees with us and we’re done with it now.
I don’t think Biden’s going to come out of the Afghan mess with a lift but I deeply doubt that history or the public will look poorly on what he accomplished over August in the medium or long run. We’re out of that sucking morass which is more than two Republican and one previous Democratic Administration could accomplish.
As for the Brass? Heads should roll. But doing that spends a lot of political capital that may be better spent elsewhere. Should there be a reckoning? I think there should. Do I think there will? No. I don’t think Biden willReport
Really? What have you seen relating to this. Frankly, I haven’t seen very much. It seems like you’re just guessing at this without any basis in fact.Report
This is a useful resource, I think:
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R46670
though it’s from CRS, not really the either the brass or the spooks. But from your pov then, it ought to be even more credible as it pertains to the negative consequences of the troop drawdown.
But like before, this is still a wild goose chase. We don’t have to know that Biden was warned a priori that if he drew down the troop strength below 2500 that the Afghan gov’t would imminently fall. I’m pretty sure I’ve never argued that on these threads. We can more or less definitively conclude that Biden is a disaster without knowing that.
This is why in my prior correspondence to you I’ve emphasized the concepts of mission, capacity, and leadership. If you can keep those things in your head you won’t get distracted by these risible deflections.
If we have an airbase, if we have intelligence assets, if we have equipment in theater, it means we have options. We don’t have to carry a rabbit’s foot for the Afghan gov’t. We can react to events in nimble and time-effective ways.
And because we have, hypothetically, maintained our capacity to react, it’s at least plausible that the Afghan government would still be in power because the Taliban would be afraid of provoking us.
Whereas Joe Biden’s way, we bombed an American asset and his seven children with some super-cool new munition the army just invented as a retaliation for the suicide bomb against us. Some retaliation. That’s a disgrace for Biden of course, but it’s mainly borne of the reality that Biden managed this withdrawal in such a way as to nearly guarantee that there wouldn’t be any better options.Report
All this is still just armchair quarterbacking with the benefit of hindsight. Heck, Biden is managing our withdrawal from Afghanistan cheaper than Saint Reagan managed our withdrawal from Lebanon and you don’t claim he was some disaster President.
The report you put up has an excellent space to say “The country will collapse immediately if we withdraw”, it’s on page 9-10. They don’t. Just some vague assertions that it’ll be bad. In hindsight the report reads like the chirping of some blood drenched Pollyannah.
You ask why the fact that no one anticipated the country would collapse immediately upon withdrawal is significant. It is significant because the same war boosters who failed to anticipate or predict the speed at which their little project collapsed are the exact same actors who are now squalling that the withdrawal was a fiasco, that staying in the country would have been cheap and easy and/or that with more soldiers withdrawal could have been cheaper and easier. Considering their record if these clowns told us the sky was blue we’d be well advised to take a look out and up from the window- twice.
The basic facts are that at the unfortunate cost of a small number of servicefolks lives and a larger number of lives of Afghanis we are now free of Afghanistan. It bears noting that that cost in lives is trivial compared to the likely cost of staying. That makes withdrawal a bargain.Report
This is silly and vague. The idea of armchair quarterbacking is that we should be reticent about criticizing say, Kirk Cousins, because even if at some level he sucks he is still way better than we would do in his position and might very well have decent reasons even for his bad decisions.
None of this applies to President Biden who is making mistakes any person of a modest amount of intelligence and initiative would avoid. Let alone a particular good executive, who we ought to be able to get for that job considering our stature as a nation.
No, at some point (ie, now) we have to hold the President accountable for the nature and the stature of the job that he has. “Well, nobody told me that the gov’t would fall like a house of cards as soon as our troops left” Yeah, that works for the fry cook at McDonalds, not the President of the United States. So if Joe Biden were a fry cook at McDonalds we could give him a pass, but even then he should just be staying home and collecting Social Security because if he kept going to work he’d just burn himself with that 1000 degree cooking oil.
Btw, that report I linked to was from February and most of the drawdown stuff was about the Trump-era drawdown _to_ 2500. It was the Biden drawdown _from_ 2500 that was especially obscene and frankly from everything I’ve seen the brass has been pretty quiet and matter-of-fact about the whole thing, perhaps admirably so given the scale of the incompetence involved.Report
Come on North, this trillions and thousands thing has little or no relevance since the beginning of the Trump Administration (ie not just since the withdrawal agreement).
I’ve pointed this out to you before, more than once I think, and you had nothing. Why is this any more persuasive now?Report
It’s entirely relevant because the maroons making all these risible claims are the same idiots who oversaw or cheered the Afghanistan war for 20 failed years. Which is not to say they have zero credibility; they actually have negative credibility.Report
Yeah yeah yeah put up or shut up, who are these maroon war boosters and what are these risible claims?Report
Really? Like there’s nobody left Afghanistan we might want to get out, like hundreds of stranded Americans for example? Or that 100K Afghan refugees might have problems settling in the US, or any other country for that matter?Report
Odd that the Taliban haven’t slaughtered all these hundreds of stranded helpless Americans.Report
Like they had no warning the US was leaving and failed to act? Cause I’m pretty sur e the trump Administration told them well over a year ago they needed to start heading for the exits by inking initial withdrawal agreement. ANd the the Biden administration told them 9 months ago by saying we intend to honor it. And then the Biden administration spent a month – AFTER increasing troop strength ABOVE what Trump left – airlifting pretty much anyone who showed up out of the country. Those Americans clearly did not want to leave, and so the only way to have removed them would have been to have rounded them up by force – something I don’t believe we do to our own citizens.
I am … bemused … how the Right loves personal agency when it come to masks and vaccines and personal firearms but rejects it when it comes to leaving a war torn country.Report
Afghanistan was labeled as bad as Israel exactly when?
That’s right, you don’t know.
Look it up, I can wait.
End of April, this year. Before that, we can assume it was “less of a bad place to travel” than our ally Israel.
(This, naturally, says more about Pfizer than about the Stan)Report
April to August is still plenty of time to leave, especially when your own government has told you they intend to change the situation on the ground.Report
Unfortunately, there are still those who trust the US government’s intelligence…
The type of folks who believe we have a severe problem with domestic (right-wing) terrorists.Report
I actually blamed the brass *and* explicitly said that Joe would *not* fire them for the debacle.
We know who Joe is… and there’s absolutely nothing surprising about that.Report
Ok, let’s stipulate to that. From there, it seems much better to conclude that we should be blaming President Biden as opposed to exonerating him.Report
Sure, I’m blaming him for not firing incompetent brass.
I blame the brass for the things the brass should have done better.Report
Great. Then if all President Biden is capable of is blindly following whatever he’s been told by his subordinates (and given what we’ve seen so far that seems to be a fair assessment) then he should have heeded what the brass told him about the drawdowns. All those marines and Afghans would still be alive today, and we’d still be in Afghanistan.Report
…and we’d still be in Afghanistan.
Indeed.Report
Yes, still in Afghanistan with far far more marines, Afghans and other servicefolk dying as the Taliban ended the cease fire that Trump bought from them with the promise that the Americans would depart.Report
No North, not at all. Casualties and footprint were light in Afghanistan during the Trump Administration _before_ he signed the withdrawal agreement. If we reverted to that, we’d be way better off than losing a dozen marines and some hundred Afghans at a pop.Report
It is not our job to make over countries in our likeness.
It is not our job to settle internal civil wars in other places.
It is not our job to waste a trillion dollars and soldiers lives AFTER achieving our strategic objectives.
All those things would have attained had we stayed. We are out. And that’s the best possible outcome.Report
Timeline in Afghanistan:
2001-11: Invade and hunt for Osama bin Laden.
2011: Find bin Laden not in Afghanistan.
2011-2021: Putter about Afghanistan propping up regime that falls the instant Americans stop fighting,Report
Yeah, the last ten years are the baffling ones.
If you wanted to argue that, for the first 10 years, we showed what life could be like without a Taliban doing Austere Religious Scholar kinda things in our effort to get the guy who planned 9/11, it’d be easy to do that.
The last 10 years? The last two months indict the last 10 years.Report
Heheh, prior to Trump promising to leave the country was steadily sliding away into the grip of the Taliban and casualties like Biden suffered during the withdrawal could have happened at any time. But that is a classic neocon position. We’d no doubt have been greeted as liberators too if we’d stayed.Report
Mutinies are interesting in that, however strong the taboo against them is, there is always the underlying question of whether there was some justification for them.Report
On three occasions that we know of, once during the Cuban Missile Crisis and twice during the 80’s, two Soviet and one American military officers — not even generals — made independent decisions outside their purview that prevented nuclear war. We can debate how appropriate that was, except that if they hadn’t done it we wouldn’t be here to debate it.
As far as breaking the chain of command is concerned — which didn’t actually happen here — if the current Commander in Chief is OK with what Milley did, that should be the end of the matter.Report
What were the two 1980s incidents?Report
I misremembered one. It happened in 1995, not the 80’s. The 80s incident was a 1983 war scare when the Soviet early warning system reported a single missile heading from the US to Russia. This happened at a very tense time when the US was engaging in war games and other provocative acts — provocative, at least, from the Soviet point of view. Although required to send the warning up the chain of command immediately, Colonel Stanislav Petrov, realizing that the US would not launch a single missile against the USSR, waited a while and confirmed that it was a false alarm. For having used his brain and judgment and likely saved the world from nuclear war, he was severely disciplined.Report
The only winning move is not to play.Report
SO, when do we have the discussion about WHY Gen. Milley did what he did? I mean, having to tell China we aren’t going to nuke you even if the President says so isn’t saying good things about the President in question, no matter what you think of Bob Woodword (who is definitely no saint).Report
“The general called China to let them know our President had gone mad and might order a nuclear strike, but the general promised not to follow that order.”
…
“The general did what now??”Report