Chairmen Of The United States Joint Chiefs Of Staff

"Milley knew that history moves slowly but then often without warning lurches suddenly forward so it seemed impossible to stop. Whether the country was witnessing the end of Trump or the next phase of Trump would only be known in retrospect. Trump was not dormant. He was out holding campaign-style rallies across the country in the summer of 2021. More than 10,000 people in Trump hats and waving signs that read "Save America!" attended his June 26 rally in Wellington, Ohio. "We didn't lose. We didn't lose. We didn't lose," Trump told the crowd. "Four more years! Four more years! Four more years!" they roared. "We won the election twice!" Trump said. This was the latest way to claim he had beaten Biden. The crowd erupted. "And it's possible we'll have to win it a third time." About 90 minutes into the rally, Trump whipped them up again. This was not farewell. "We will not bend," Trump said, adopting a Churchillian cadence. It was a war speech. "We will not break. We will not yield. We will never give in. We will never give up. We will never back down. We will never, ever surrender. My fellow Americans, our movement is far from over. In fact, our fight has only just begun." Milley wondered, was this just Trump's desire to project strength? Or a desire for absolute power?"

"As senior leaders, everything you do will be closely watched, and I am not immune. As many of you saw, the result of the photograph of me at Lafayette Square last week, that sparked a national debate about the role of the military in civil society. I should not have been there. My presence in that moment and that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics. As a commissioned uniformed officer, it was a mistake that I've learned from, and I sincerely hope we all can learn from it. Embrace the Constitution, keep it close to your heart. It is our North Star."

"George Floyd's death amplified the pain, the frustration and the fear that so many of our fellow Americans live with day in and day out. I have many policemen in my family, and I am personally outraged by George Floyd's brutal and senseless killing. The protests that have ensued not only speak to this injustice, but also to centuries of injustice towards Black Americans. We, as a nation and as a military, are still struggling with racism, and we have much work to do."

"We who wear the cloth of our nation understand that cohesion is a force multiplier. Divisiveness leads to defeat. As one of our famous presidents said, 'a house divided does not stand.'"

"Equality and opportunity are matters of military readiness, not just political correctness."

"Since the protests began, I sought information to help me assess the ability of federal, state and local authorities to handle situations under their responsibility. I continually assessed and advised that it was not necessary to employ active duty troops in response to the civil unrest occurring in our nation. It was my view then, and it remains so now, that local, state and federal police backed up by the National Guard under governor control, could, and continually can, effectively handle the security situation in every case across the country."

"We have challenges to be sure, but the military has been and remains the largest meritocracy in the world. We promote, we advance and we select based on your knowledge, your skills, your attributes and the content of your character. We are stronger together. Diversity builds a better team and readiness."

"The 6th of January was one of the days of high risk. Neither I, nor anyone that I know of, to include the FBI or anybody else, envisioned the thousands of people who assaulted the capitol. To basically encircle the Capitol and assault it from multiple directions simultaneously, and to do what they did, that was something else. The 6th was pretty dramatic. That's about as dramatic as you're going to see it, short of a civil war... What you might have seen was a precursor to something far worse down the road."

"Opportunity in our military must be reflective of the diverse talent in order for us to remain strong. Our nation is ready to fulfill the promise of our Constitution to build a more perfect union and to ensure equal justice for all people, and it is your generation that can and will bring the joint force to be truly inclusive of all people."

"[You] have become a team. And you're going to be drawing upon each other for the rest of your lives."

"You are what makes the United States undaunted by the difficult, and motivated by the impossible."

"We are facing, right now, two global powers: China and Russia, each with significant military capabilities, and both fully intend to change the current rules-based order."

"[And in Ukraine, we are learning the lesson that] aggression left unanswered only emboldens the aggressor. Let us never forget the massacre that we have just witnessed in Bucha. Know the slaughter that occurred in Mariupol. And the best way to honor their sacrifice is to support their fight for freedom and to stand against tyranny."

"The nature of war is not going to change. It's still a political act. It's a decision by humans to impose their political will on their opponent by the use of violence."

"You're entering a different world. The United States is under significant challenges in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Europe. We see revanchist Russia, as we have just witnessed another invasion in Ukraine. In Asia, we are in the third decade of the largest global economic shift in 500 years, resulting in a rapidly rising China as a great power with a revisionist foreign policy backed up with an increasingly capable military."

"You'll be fighting with robotic tanks, ships and airplanes. We've witnessed a revolution in lethality and precision munitions. What was once the exclusive province of the U.S. military is now available to most nation states with the money and will to acquire them."

"And finally, there is the mother of all technologies — artificial intelligence — where machines are actually developing the capacity to learn and to reason. These rapidly converging developments in time and space are resulting in that profound change — the most profound change ever in human history. And whatever overmatch we, the United States, enjoy militarily … the United States is challenged in every domain of warfare: space, cyber, maritime, air and land."

"In your world, you're going to have to optimize yourselves for urban combat, not rural combat. That has huge implications for intelligence collection, vehicles, weapons design, development, logistics, camo and all of the other aspects of our progression."

"Globally, there's an increase in nationalism and authoritarian governments, regional arms races and unresolved territorial claims, ethnic and sectarian disputes and an attempt by some countries to return to an 18th-century concept of balance of power politics with spheres of influence."

"As you march into your future, have the vision to change and to prevent war from happening in the first place. By maintaining peace through the strength of the U.S. military, and the example of our values, it is up to you, today."

"We are proud of you. You have a difficult and dangerous road ahead, and no one should underestimate it. But you also have the opportunity to navigate those dangerous roads ahead and to lead our nation's most precious resource: the young men and women who don the cloth of this nation, the American soldier."

"Milley: Look, I'm a soldier. I've been faithful and loyal to the Constitution of the United States for 44-and-a-half years. And my family and I have sacrificed greatly for this country, and my mother and father before them. And, you know, as much as these comments are directed at me, it's also directed at the institution of the military. There's 2.1 million of us in uniform. And the American people can take it to the bank that all of us, every single one of us from private to general, we're loyal to that Constitution and we'll never turn our back on it, no matter what the threats, no matter what the humiliation, no matter what. If we're willing to die for that document, if we're willing to deploy to combat, if we're willing to lose an arm, a leg, an eye, to protect and support and defend that document and protect the American people, then we're willing to live for it, too. So, I'm not going to comment directly on those things, but I can tell you that this military, this soldier, me- we'll never turn our back on that Constitution. Milley: But for the record, was there anything inappropriate or treasonous about the calls you made to China? Milley: Absolutely not. Zero. None. O'Donnell: It almost seems odd to ask this question. Because the former commander-in-chief seems to be calling for your execution. Are you worried about your safety? Milley: I've got adequate safety protection. I wish those comments had not been made, but they were, and we'll take appropriate measures to ensure my safety and the safety of my family."

"Trump, the Napoleon of Mar-a-Lago, knew little about history. But like the French emperor banished to Elba, his aspirations for a comeback could not be ruled out. History is full of similarly improbable might-have-beens. Just because no American president before or since Grover Cleveland has managed the feat of returning to office once cast out of it does not mean it cannot happen. After Napoleon reclaimed the throne and was finally defeated once and for all at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the victorious British general, the Duke of Wellington, summed up the twelve-hour fight. It was, he wrote a friend, "the nearest-run thing you ever saw." John Kelly thought of Waterloo when he would tell the story about the time Trump almost blew up the NATO alliance at a Brussels summit less than twenty miles away from where the famous battle took place. "That was a very close-run thing," Kelly would say. Mark Milley thought of the famous quote about Waterloo when he considered how nearly the country came to losing its democracy altogether. "It was a very close-run thing," he told an associate. After it was all done and over, Milley believed that Trump had tried something never tried before in the 230 years of the republic- to illegitimately hold on to power."

"Speaking of the seven-week war in Ukraine ignited by Vladimir Putin, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is warning us to expect a war that lasts for years. “I do think this is a very protracted conflict … measured in years,” Milley told Congress. “I don’t know about a decade, but at least years, for sure.” As our first response, said Milley, we should build more military bases in Eastern Europe and begin to rotate U.S. troops in and out."

"What can I add that has not already been said? A person [Trump] that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all 'suckers' because 'there is nothing in it for them.' A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because 'it doesn't look good for me.' A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family – for all Gold Star families – on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America's defense are 'losers' and wouldn't visit their graves in France. A person who is not truthful regarding his position on the protection of unborn life, on women, on minorities, on evangelical Christians, on Jews, on working men and women. A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. A person who cavalierly suggests that a selfless warrior who has served his country for 40 years in peacetime and war should lose his life for treason – in expectation that someone will take action. A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law. There is nothing more that can be said. God help us."

"The former president is inciting violence against the nation's top general. America’s response is distracted and numb."

"Late Friday night, the former president of the United States—and a leading candidate to be the next president—insinuated that America's top general deserves to be put to death. That extraordinary sentence would be unthinkable in any other rich democracy. But Donald Trump, on his social-media network, Truth Social, wrote that Mark Milley's phone call to reassure China in the aftermath of the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was "an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH." (The phone call was, in fact, explicitly authorized by Trump-administration officials.) Trump’s threats against Milley came after The Atlantics publication of a profile of Milley, by this magazine's editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who detailed the ways in which Milley attempted to protect the Constitution from Trump."

"General Mark Milley is a big boy. When he isn’t selling out America to the Chinese, lying about the murder of random Afghan civilians, and undermining the elected president of the United States, it is clear the man enjoys a lap or two (or three) around the nearest all-you-can-eat buffet."

"Mark Milley, who led perhaps the most embarrassing moment in American history with his grossly incompetent implementation of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, costing many lives, leaving behind hundreds of American citizens, and handing over BILLIONS of dollars of the finest military equipment ever made, will be leaving the military next week. This will be a time for all citizens of the USA to celebrate! This guy turned out to be a Woke train wreck who, if the Fake News reporting is correct, was actually dealing with China to give them a heads up on the thinking of the President of the United States. This is an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH! A war between China and the United States could have been the result of this treasonous act. To be continued!!!"

"Milley continued to be hounded by the events of June 1. His critics were everywhere: on cable news channels, on social media, on op-ed pages. Milley understood the ridicule. He had been photographed in battle fatigues alongside a president who was intent on politicizing the military. It was a fiasco. He called many of his predecessors to seek advice. "Should I resign?" he asked Colin Powell, who had been the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989 to 1993 under President George H.W. Bush. "Fuck no!" Powell said. "I told you never to take the job. You should never have taken the job. Trump's a fucking maniac." Milley received similar, although less colorful, advice from a dozen former secretaries of defense and former chairmen. Milley decided to apologize publicly but did not give Trump advance warning... Several days later, Trump stopped Milley after a routine meeting in the Oval Office. "Hey, aren't you proud of walking with your president?" Trump asked. "To the church?" Milley asked. Yes, Trump said. "Why did you apologize?" "Mr. President, it's got nothing to do with you actually." Trump looked skeptical. "It had to do with me," Milley said. "It had to do with this uniform. Had to do with the traditions of the United States military and that we are an apolitical organization. "You're a politician," Milley said. "You're a political actor. For you to do it, that's your call. But I cannot be part of political events, Mr. President. It's one of our long-standing traditions." "Why did you apologize?" the president asked again. "That's a sign of weakness." "Mr. President," he said, looking directly at Trump, "not where I come from." He was a Boston-area native. "Where I was born and how I was raised is when you make a mistake, you admit it." Trump tilted his head to the side like the Victrola Dog, the small dog famously pictured staring at a windup phonograph and long used by RCA Records as a mascot. "Hmm," he said. "Okay.""

"Trump later called Milley twice to inquire about how the military should deal with the issue of Confederate flags, statues and military bases named after Confederate generals. Milley said he favored making changes. During an Oval Office meeting, Trump returned to the issue. He said he did not want a change. "We're not going to ban Confederate flags. It's Southern pride and heritage." Meadows said that the Confederate flags should not be banned. It was a freedom of speech issue, and the Pentagon lawyers agreed with him. Trump asked Milley, what do you think? "I've already told you twice, Mr. President. Are you sure you want to hear it again?" Yeah, go ahead, Trump said. "Mr. President," Milley said, "I think you should ban the flags, change the names of bases, and take down the statues." He continued, "I'm from Boston, these guys were traitors." Someone asked, what about the Confederate dead buried at Arlington National Cemetery? "Interestingly," Milley said of the nearly 500 Confederate soldiers buried there, "they're arranged in a circle and the names on the gravestones are facing inward, and that symbolizes that they turned their back on the Union. They were traitors at the time, they are traitors today, and they're traitors in death for all of eternity. Change the names, Mr. President." There was brief silence in the Oval Office. Pence, who almost always took the super-serious path supporting Trump, half-joked, "I think I just found my Union self." Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, added, "I'm a Yankee, too!" Without saying anything, Trump jumped to the next topic that came to mind."

"Across the Potomac River at Quarters 6, inside his second-floor, top secret Sensitive Compartmented Information facility, surrounded by multiple secure video screens connected to the White House and the world, Chairman Milley was still trying to sort out the meaning of the January 6 riot... The conventional wisdom, which had settled into Washington, was that there had been warnings. But Milley knew the internet chatter lacked coherence and did not provide the specific, credible intelligence that could avert a catastrophe. It had been a grave U.S. intelligence failure, comparable to the missed warnings prior to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and to Pearl Harbor, and exposed glaring gaps and weaknesses in the American system. What did Milley and others miss? What did they not understand? Milley, ever the historian, thought of the little remembered 1905 revolution in Russia. The uprising had failed, but it had set the stage for the successful 1917 revolution that led to the creation of the Soviet Union. Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the 1917 revolution, had later called the 1905 revolution "The Great Dress Rehearsal." Had January 6 been a dress rehearsal?"

"If you can't get in shape in 24 months, then maybe you should hit the road."

"We don't want to lose thousands of soldiers to [the ACFT]. This fitness test is hard. No one should be under any illusions about it, but we really don't want to lose soldiers on the battlefield. We don't want young men and women to get killed in action because they weren't fit."

"Combat is not for the faint of heart, it's not for the weak-kneed, it's not for those who are not psychologically resilient and tough and hardened to the brutality, to the viciousness of it. We've got to get this Army hard, and we've got to get it hard fast."

"Just a few years ago, America was engaged in a war for survival, much like our current war to prevail against terrorism. The war I'm referring to is the Cold War, a war that America was engaged in for more than forty years- a war we finally won in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. This victory was followed by an immediate demand to reduce our armed forces as America had done after every major conflict in our history- WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam. And so we set out on the same course- reducing the Army from 785,000 to today's 480,000, the Air Force from thirty-six to twenty tactical fighter wings, and the Navy from six hundred ships to approximately three hundred. Desert Storm caused a pause in downsizing, but as soon as it was over we continued at an even faster pace. All in all, we took more troops out than the entire armed forces of the UK, Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands combined."

"Today we are still dealing with the aftermath of the Iraq operation to ensure that chaos does not reign and a bitter civil war among the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds does not end up providing Iran the excuse it's looking for to enter Iraq due to the threat to its border. That's exactly what the Middle East leaders in the countries throughout the region have feared since Desert Shield and Desert Storm, and many have expressed those concerns to me personally on multiple occasions."

"Perhaps my greatest concern is that we hold fast to maintaining the incredibly high standards that have made us the greatest country in the world. In doing so, I am confident that through hard work and diligence, we will meet any challenge and triumph over any enemy or obstacle in our path."

"When I reached Fort Jackson, the NVA-Vietcong Tet offensive exploded across South Vietnam, with enemy forces attacking every provincial capital and major population center. There was plenty of grist for the news media to grind, especially when Vietcong sappers blasted a hole in the wall of the American embassy in Saigon and almost fought their way into the chancery building before being repulsed. It seemed that the enemy was everywhere, attacking U.S. and ARVN bases, ambushing relief convoys, overrunning isolated outposts. The remote Marine combat base at Khe Sanh in the misty mountains of northern I Cops was besieged for weeks, and the old citadel of the imperial capital of Hue was captured by NVA regulars. This only added more fuel to the antiwar, antidraft protests on America's campuses and streets. Just back from a fact-finding trip to Vietnam in late February, legendary CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite commented, "WHo won and who lost the great Tet offensive against the cities? I'm not sure. The Vietcong did not win by a knockout, but neither did we. The references of history may make it a draw... It seems now more certain that ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate." When President Lyndon Johnson heard the remarks, he said, "That's it. If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America." Johnson chose not to run for reelection. The national mood was bleak."

"When President Bush came in, there as an immediate difference in style. President Bush would show up to meetings early. It was obvious that he liked the meetings to be well organized, crisp, and then get out of there. It was very organized, with little time for chitchat. Unlike President Clinton, President Bush attended almost all the NSC meetings, chairing them from the head of the table. Condoleezza Rice, his National Security Adviser, was very quiet in those meetings- seldom speaking at all, let alone chairing them. It wasn't for any lack of intellect, because she was extremely smart- and personable, too. I didn't think she really stepped into her own and flourished until she became Secretary of State; before that, she really took a backseat. Early on you saw in President Bush a man who was going to be very loyal to those who worked for him- perhaps even too loyal at times. If you were on his team he would battle to the death for you. While this seems like a commendable attribute, when you're in a position of leadership, I don't believe one should allow loyalty to trump the necessity of satisfactory job performance. I'm not sure ex-President Bush would agree with that."

"There was a certain comfort in returning to West Point after a month at home- not because I was back among those who universally supported the war, but quite the opposite: I was back among those who believed the Vietnam War would soon be theirs to wage and wanted earnestly to understand it. I was back among classmates and instructors who encouraged me to challenge both the idea that the war was a lost cause and the notion that it should not be questioned simply because it was the policy of the U.S. government. I was back in an institution that provided and promoted a liberal education as essential in the preparation for becoming a military officer. I didn't know it at the time, but those days were just the beginning of a journey in learning how to listen, to learn, to question, to communicate, to apply knowledge and skills to real-world problems honestly and with an open mind. Later, long after I had graduated from West Point, I would make sure those around me knew that I would always welcome, even expect, a bit of sensible skepticism."

"There are a lot of memories in this book. I hope they are not too self-aggrandizing. I certainly don't mean them to be. Rather, I intend them to argue that life is a journey that must be felt to be meaningful, that it will always surprise us, and that it is an opportunity meant to be experienced by participation, not by observation. I intend them to show that history finds us, not the other way around. And since we can't know which of us history will find, we should each do all we can to prepare by living a life of character and consequence. I intend them to illustrate that we all- leaders and followers alike- have obligations to each other. Each chapter is a piece of a puzzle, no one piece more important than the other."

"There are certain moments in our lives that are clearly more important than others. They are defining moments, moments that shape us, moments that we rely upon to help us make the big decisions. We should recognize them, remember them, and embrace them for what they provide us. We should welcome moments of surprising clarity."

"Ranger School is the toughest training offered in the Army- not a place for the faint of heart and only recently open to women. Only a fraction of the soldiers who enter the nine-week course make it out successfully."

"Israel went to extraordinary lengths to limit collateral damage and civilian casualties."

"Number 2: We are a paradigm of diversity, now I kind've touched on that already. I had my Israeli counterpart of all people, one day say to me, "hey, do you understand why you are who you are?". You mean me personally? "No, your country." I said, 'well I think so, but I'd love to hear it from your perspective.' And he said, "it's the dash". And I said, 'what are you talking about the dash?' And he said, "the dash, Irish-American; Jewish-American; Arab-American; Black.. African-American." And you know I thought about it, and I thanked him actually for the perspective because we are a diverse nation, and that's who we are. I mean, I don't know how many of you in the audience are actually native Americans; my guess is not many. Everybody else here is at some level, from some other part of the world. And we're very diverse, we embrace diversity, and we embrace it because: in my case I'll tell you when I had the Joint Chiefs around me; the Army; the Navy; the Air Force; the Marines; the Coast Guard. I would never have been able to have been an effective Chairmen if everyone had been of one view, or if everyone was of one culture. It just wouldn't have worked. We would have convinced ourselves that we had a single perfect answer, when in fact the world lend itself to single perfect answers. So look, I think in terms of assertions about America's role, we have to show the world what's possible when you embrace diverse thinking, diverse personalities, diverse groups, diverse ethnicities, diverse religions. And if we don't do it, there's very few that are going to be able to do it. So whether we accept that or not, as I said earlier, is really an individual and ultimately at some level a national choice. But my assertion is, if you're asking me our role one part of it is to continue to be that paradigm of diversity."

"One of the things that fascinated me about the Chinese is whenever I would have a conversation with them about international standards or international rules of behavior, they would inevitably point out that those rules were made when they were absent from the world stage. They are no longer absent from the world stage, and so those rules need to be renegotiated with them."

"To Deanie, who's been there every step of the way."

"There are people in our lives who may know more about what's good for us than we do."

"Not all of us have a moral compass on our desks, but we need to have one in our hearts. Without it, we won't live a life in which character matters."