For the better part of the past two days I’ve been watching people – some smart, some earnest, and a lot who are disingenuous – freak out that GEN Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has somehow single handedly destroyed over 240 years of civilian control of the US military. He hasn’t. The feeding frenzy, however, will continue because it provides the political reporters, the pundits and commenters, Republican elected officials, conservative movement leaders, and conservative news and social media elites what they want the most: the opportunity to make Woodward and Costa’s reporting about anything that is not how deranged Trump might have actually been between October 2020 and January 2021; just how badly he and his political appointees had degraded, warped, and twisted the Federal government over their four years in office; and just how craven, anti-American, anti-republican, and anti-democratic the Republican Party and the conservative movement and news and media systems that sustain the party have become to allow this to happen. And before we jump to the next paragraph, the word reporting in regard to Woodward and Costa’s new book is doing a lot of work. Because while it is being reported that Woodward claims to have a transcript of Milley’s call with Speaker Pelosi, the reality is, as is the case with every one of these books Woodward has done for decades, there is NO WAY TO CHECK THE SOURCING because ALL OF HIS SOURCES ARE ANONYMOUS!
The two items regarding GEN Milley that have everyone up in arms are in regard to conversations that Woodward and Costa report that he had with his Chinese counterpart and his guidance regarding orders to launch a nuclear strike. In both cases the people now in hysterics are not actually paying attention to what was either published in the excerpts or what has been subsequently reported today.
Let’s start with the nuclear strike stuff. The argument being made is that GEN Milley, who has no command authority and is the senior uniformed administrator and military advisor to the president, proactively inserted himself into the chain of command for ordering a nuclear strike to block any potential order to conduct one. And, by doing so, he broke civilian control of the military. But here’s what, according to the excerpt published at CNN, Woodward and Costa are actually reporting that GEN Milley said:
In response, Milley took extraordinary action, and called a secret meeting in his Pentagon office on January 8 to review the process for military action, including launching nuclear weapons. Speaking to senior military officials in charge of the National Military Command Center, the Pentagon’s war room, Milley instructed them not to take orders from anyone unless he was involved.“No matter what you are told, you do the procedure. You do the process. And I’m part of that procedure,” Milley told the officers, according to the book. He then went around the room, looked each officer in the eye, and asked them to verbally confirm they understood.“Got it?” Milley asked, according to the book.“Yes, sir.”‘Milley considered it an oath,’ the authors write.
To maintain credibility, Airmen must be ready at all times to respond to requests from the President and his or her advisors via the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to employ nuclear weapons. The inability of nuclear forces to respond quickly could undermine the value of deterrence and assurance. (p. 3)
The President may direct the use of nuclear weapons through an execute order via the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the combatant commanders and, ultimately, to the forces in the field exercising direct control of the weapons.
Execution of these orders through emergency action procedures allow for a timely response to an emergency action message and ensure the directive is valid and authentic. Air Force personnel involved in the actual employment of nuclear weapons are intensively and continuously trained and certified in these procedures so they can quickly and accurately respond to the order. (p. 9)
The US Air Force’s own doctrine places the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the process, not to countermand orders, not to contradict them, but to transmit them from the president and/or the president’s advisors (Assistant to the President-National Security Advisor, Chief of Staff, Secretary of Defense) to the appropriate combatant commanders. Provided Woodward and Costa’s reporting is correct, what GEN Milley appears to have done was to clarify the doctrinal process and procedure. And there’s a very good reason he did that. There was no lawfully, Senate approved Secretary of Defense. There was no lawfully, Senate approved Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence. In the White House, Mark Meadows was the Acting Chief of Staff, whatever acting really means in regard to a position that does not require Senate confirmation and in which the person holding the job serves at the pleasure of the president. Additionally, the Acing Chief of Staff, to the acting Secretary of Defense, was Kash Patel, who is one of Devin Nunes’ stooges.
I think a good argument could be made that the civilian portion of civilian control of the military had broken down. The only people in the chain of command at that point who were lawfully in their positions were Trump who was president and the senior uniformed leadership. The only Senate confirmed civilian leadership at the Pentagon at that point was Secretary of the Army McCarthy. As a result, GEN Milley wanted the appropriate senior commanders in the chain to follow the doctrinal process and procedure regarding command and control over the use of nuclear weapons. He didn’t want them to take such an order if it was passed on by unlawfully serving Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, unlawfully serving Acting Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Ezra Cohen-Watnick, or unlawfully serving Acting Department of Defense Chief of Staff Kash Patel. The orders either came through the doctrinally prescribed channel, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is part of that doctrinally prescribed channel, or they weren’t orders. Between the language in the excerpt, which is the language from Woodward and Costa’s book, and the language in the doctrine for how nuclear launch orders are transmitted, it is very clear what the process and procedure are. What GEN Milley did was to reinforce that to the senior uniformed leadership. That isn’t undermining civilian control of the military. It is insisting that the civilian control be followed precisely as defined in doctrine.
The hysterics over GEN Milley’s reported conversations with his counterpart in the People’s Republic of China is also overwrought and silly. Leaving aside that GEN Milley speaks to his counterparts in a number of nation-states – from allied and partnered to peer competitors to hostile foreign powers – on a variety of matters all the time, We now know, because it was reported today, that GEN Milley was working under instructions from Mark Esper, who was the last actual lawfully serving, Senate confirmed Secretary of Defense.
In mid-October 2020, top Pentagon officials grew concerned about intelligence they’d seen. It showed the Chinese were consuming their own intelligence that had made them concerned about the possibility of a surprise U.S. strike against China, three sources familiar with the situation tell Axios.
- One of the sources said: “I think they [the Chinese] were getting bad intelligence… a combination of ‘wag the dog’ conspiracy thinking and bad intel from bad sources.”
Then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper worried the Chinese were misreading the situation and that their misperception could lead to a conflict nobody wanted.
- Esper directed his policy office to issue a backchannel message to the Chinese to reassure them the U.S. had no intention of seeking a military confrontation. The message: Don’t over-read what you’re seeing in Washington; we have no intention to attack; and let’s keep lines of communication open.
- These backchannel communications were handled a couple of levels below Esper, one of the sources said. U.S. officials involved thought the Chinese received the initial message well. Milley followed up later in the month with a call to his Chinese counterpart to reiterate the message, two of the sources confirmed.
- It’s unclear whether anyone at the Pentagon told President Trump or the White House what they were doing.
Around the same time Esper learned of the Chinese concerns, he also learned that a long-planned deployment to Asia had been moved up a couple of weeks earlier than previously planned, to accommodate COVID quarantine protocols.
- Esper told colleagues the last thing the Chinese needed to see at that moment — when they were already misreading Washington’s intentions — was more planes, according to one of the sources.
- Esper went so far as to delay this long planned exercise in Asia until after the election, to lower the temperature.
Axios has not independently confirmed that Milley told his Chinese counterpart he would give him a heads up if the U.S. planned to attack China.
- One source familiar with Milley’s conversations with his Chinese counterpart would only broadly characterize them as Milley saying something to the effect of: “We’ll both know if we’re going to war… there’s not gonna be some surprise attack and there’s no reason for you to do a pre-emptive strike.”
Finally, given that the excerpt published at CNN reports that GEN Milley was in regular contact about these concerns with not just Speaker Pelosi, but also former Secretary of State Pompeo and former Director of Central Intelligence Haspel, there was no breakdown in civil military relations. Speaker Pelosi, former Secretary Pompeo, and former DCI Haspel were all legally and constitutionally in their respective offices. Yes, they are not in GEN Milley’s chain of command as he reports to the president as his senior uniformed military advisor, but this makes it clear that GEN Milley was not off the reservation free lancing. Rather, faced with a complete breakdown in legitimate, constitutional civilian control of the Department of Defense at the most senior levels other than the Secretary of the Army, GEN Milley consulted and coordinated with other legitimate, constitutional officers within both the executive and legislative branches, reviewed and reinforced the doctrinal process and procedure regarding nuclear strike authorization with the senior uniformed leadership in that chain of command, and in regard to the PRC, carried out the orders he had been given by the last legitimately appointed and serving Secretary of Defense.
This is what the excerpts from Woodward and Costa’s new book are actually telling us. Was this the high water mark of civil military relations in the US? No. Should there be legitimate inquiry into this by the House and Senate Armed Services Committees? Yes. Should this include GEN Milley having to answer some tough questions in front of those committees? Definitely.
This wasn’t a mutiny. It was not an attempt to break the chain of command or get other senior uniformed leaders to do so. It is, however, right now an opportunity for political reporters, the political pundits, current and former Republican elected and appointed officials, conservative movement leaders, and conservative news and social media figures to change the subject to cover their own hugely exposed tuchases. We’re going on seven years now where almost every member of each of these groups has managed to completely misrepresent, misreport, excuse, explain away, and/or divert attention from their failures to report or act on the fact that Donald Trump was not just grossly unqualified to be president, but that he presented and still presents, a clear and present danger to the United States as a self governing democratic-republic. Focusing on what GEN Milley did, and misrepresenting it, allows them to not focus on all the terrible things Woodward and Costa are reporting about Trump and the sycophantic enablers he surrounded himself with. It allows them to slide right on by the fact that Mike Pence was actively looking for a way to make Trump’s coup attempt actually happen because Trump was mean to Pence. It allows them to ignore or hand wave away their own culpability in failing to use the simple terms in their reporting that actually describe Trump, his behavior, his actions and the behavior and actions of his senior appointees, advisors, surrogates, benefactors/funders, enablers, and his supporters. A failure which continues to this day!
A scapegoat must be found. Phoney baloney jobs must be protected. Access to sources and funding and sinecures must be preserved. And the role of Azazel, the scape goat for this community’s sins on this Yom Kippur, will be played by GEN Milley. Because the political reporters, the political pundits, current and former Republican elected and appointed officials, conservative movement leaders, and conservative news and social media figures are unable to and incapable of atoning their political sins of commission and omission.
Open thread!
Adam L Silverman
I’m getting ready to go offline for Yom Kippur through tomorrow. So I don’t know how long I’ll be around.
Spanky
I didn’t know we were in hysterics. Thanks for the info.
Baud
You’re not the boss of me.
SpaceUnit
This post has interrupted a very important discussion of papayas.
Wapiti
Good point on the complete breakdown of the civilian oversight chain.
debbie
Trump wants Miley tried for treason, so totally worth it.
williamc
Thanks for laying out what the Chairman’s role in the nuclear command authority chain is. It’s funny reading this the last couple days, people hysterical about Milley, but this is the first time I’ve seen the actual words laid out that he was actually in the right about being in the chain of command.
All these breathless news items about this and not one has mentioned what the chairman of the joint chiefs actual role is in any of this.
Cermet
Yet again, the Rump breaks every norm, screws the pooch and what does the beyond stupid media do? Create a false story based on the same idiot that creates endless he-said-she-said bullshit, off the record nonsense books. The media is determined to kill this democracy all by itself.
Raoul Paste
I was wondering whether Adam would comment on this
Another Scott
Excellent. Very well done.
Typo – “new book is going a lot of work” (you no doubt mean “doing”)
Yet again, news at the speed of Twitter gets it wrong. If it reinforces that lesson for us, that quick takes are often misleading and potentially grossly slanted, that’s a good thing.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Adam L Silverman
@williamc: He’s not so much in the chain of command as in the chain of transmission of the orders. The reality is that the president can unilaterally order a nuclear strike whenever he wants for whatever reason. That is a huge issue and needs to be addressed with legislation.
Mousebumples
Thanks as always for your very valuable perspective on this!
Adam L Silverman
@Another Scott: Yep, fat fingered typo. Thanks. Fixed.
SpaceUnit
Okay, so basically a non-Trumpist acts responsibly and the republicans shake the branches and screech with rage. It’s just another day.
There go two miscreants
This was a very clear explanation! Thank you, Adam!
Adam L Silverman
When even Fox News’ senior defense correspondent gets the story right…
Roger Moore
@SpaceUnit:
Sure, but it’s good to have some facts around you can whip out if the people around you start falling for the Republican version of events. We know damn well this happens a lot, so being able to straighten people out is very useful.
SpaceUnit
@Roger Moore: Very true.
Lacuna Synecdoche
Thank you, Adam.
I already suspected that the real story was something along the lines of what you laid out above, and I’m glad to have it confirmed and described by someone with military experience and an actual understanding of the chain of command (and the rules that regulate it).
Geminid
@debbie: trump knows a lot about treason.
Suzanne
Even if this was outside the chain of command, I’m glad Milley made that call.
I am not a military person because I don’t have endless faith in the wisdom of procedure.
Benw
I’d have preferred:
Milley: “Men, we’re going to do this our way”
Men: “Our way, sir?”
Milley: “Pick up that rock, if that fool orders a nuclear strike, HIT HIM WITH THE ROCK.”
Men: “Oh, our way.”
Baud
I blame Azazel.
cain
Have right wing media people screaming where was VP Harris during this, yet ?
cain
@Baud:
Before or after he became Batman ?
Oh wait sorry I was thinking Azrael.
Happy Yom Kippur Adam or however the greetings are
Urban Suburbanite
Thanks for writing about this, Adam.
That most of the writing on this comes from Woodward (who has a book to push) and Axios (which is a DC gossip outlet run by Politico’s most insufferable former courtiers) hasn’t helped matters any.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
Milley called General Tzo and discovered he’s chicken
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
@Adam L Silverman:
careful now, this is how got Moshe Dayan
zhena gogolia
Too tired to read anything, too busy to watch TV and I wouldn’t even if I weren’t, but what I gather is that their hysteria over the Afghanistan withdrawal hasn’t worked so they have a new way to try to hurt Biden.
Poe Larity
Haig and Kissinger did the same thing for Nixon.
MagdaInBlack
@zhena gogolia: Pretty much.
Another Scott
In other news where the press isn’t getting the nuance right, …
Click on over. But if tl;dr – Even 20+ weeks after 2nd shot, the vaccines are highly effective in protecting people from severe disease and death, with declining protection only in those groups with severe underlying heath conditions. Most of us who aren’t in that last group probably don’t need “boosters” immediately.
(via CT_Bergstrom)
Cheers,
Scott.
trollhattan
Damn that man for doing his damn job!
Won’t live long enough for the complete and total chronicles of the Trump Presidency {patooey} to be penned but boy howdy, will that ever go down as four years* that nearly killed our nation. One hopes it’s an aberration, but then I thought Bush II and Reagan were aberrations, so….
*NB Those four years still affect us, so don’t go thinking we’re out of the woods.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
Most people (the normies) perusing the headlines are confused and wondering how Miley Cyrus became a general
Woodrow/asim
Thanks Adam! Some very nice person was reposted in my Twitter feed summarizing much the same as you, so you’re not alone.
…and you’re sadly correct about how compliant American media is, around these kinds of issues.
trollhattan
Goodie, Biden is hosting BoJo next week. Maybe he can misplace the PM and the UK can do a not-a-Tory do-over.
Martin
I have a question for Adam. This is probably more of a front page sized response than a comment, and no rush.
How should we handle the conflict between general principles of free expression that is a hallmark of liberalism and democracy and protecting those systems from those who exploit that freedom of expression to gain power with the intent of destroying them. Freedom of expression can’t be a suicide pact, to borrow an expression.
Gen Milley might have been finding himself walking a similar line – stepping outside of the standard military/civilian separation because the civilian leadership had failed spectacularly. I don’t think he has a moral obligation to stand by and watch it implode, rather he has a moral obligation to temporarily put those standards aside in order to protect our ability to continue them.
Bard the Grim
A niggle, but important:
To prescribe is (1) to set down as a rule, or (2) to order the use of. Proscribe is almost the opposite; to proscribe is (1) to prohibit, or (2) to denounce or condemn.
geg6
Thank you, thank you, thank you, Adam. You are a treasure.
NotMax
Mentally making note after perusing the comments that the words hysteria and hysterics now appear to have been stricken from the tsk-tsk list.
Have in the past been taken to task at this very joint for their being of questionable propriety.
Mike in Oly
Adam, thank you so much for this breakdown of the facts and background. It is so appreciated.
Adam L Silverman
@Bard the Grim: Thanks, fixed.
Mike in NC
They might have to pin a fifth star on Milley’s epaulettes when the dust settles.
Starboard Tack
@Adam L Silverman:
Giving the President sole authority to use nuclear weapons might have made sense during the Cold War. Communications were primitive back then compared to today. (I remember party lines and how cool touch tone phones were.) Under stress of Launch On Warning, consultation would have been at best difficult. Technology today would make it possible to poll a group of the appropriate people very quickly for a response. Group size should be large enough so if some were out of contact, the rest would have the necessary resources. Everyone would have a mobile device that would be push loaded with all the available information during an event. Something like a distributed civilian command and control center. We’ve all got a lot of experience lately working remotely so it ought to work.
zhena gogolia
@NotMax: Something offensive about a wandering womb?
I think it’s okay as long as it’s not gendered.
Urban Suburbanite
@trollhattan:
I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of him getting lost in a closet.
LevelB
@Adam L Silverman: I have been hearing this for a day or two now, and it occurs to me that there might be a connection here with the very recent Chinese actions in regards to social media and video games. Specifically, I wonder if these actions are an attempt to avoid the chaos they saw in 1/6.
Lapassionara
Many thanks for this enlightening explanation.
Raoul Paste
If General Milley is brought in to testify about this, I really hope he goes on offense. At first glance, I see no reason for him to take any crap from anybody
Martin
@LevelB: No, those policies are very routine for China. There previously were similar gaming policies. China is now on their 3rd or 4th generation of facial recognition to identify phone users and validate their age. And the social media stuff is part of a larger trend to effectively build an internet that is not operated by US-centric rules.
More broadly, China is somewhat pulling the plug on their Shenzhen/Silicon Valley competitor market, because it hasn’t achieved its goals, mainly because it’s woefully underfunded. They’re turning back somewhat toward traditional large durable good/industrial manufacturing both because they think it can have better political benefits for the country (Shenzhen changed China a lot internally, but didn’t make China a tech leader) and also because they think it’ll be less disruptive to Chinese culture and govt control.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
David Weigel (sp?) the reporter DougJ have a love hate relationship was pointing this out. Also, the quote they have for Pelosi doesn’t sound like the way she talks, it sounds like what some conservative would imagine how she talks.
jonas
In my own thinking about this, I had forgotten that this was after Esper was out and DOD was being run by a bunch of unconfirmed Trumpist hacks whom nobody trusted to have any institutional knowledge, loyalties, or ability. I think Adam’s right — he wasn’t circumventing civilian control, but clarifying the process when, for all practical purposes, there was no legal civilian command and the president was an unhinged moron who, if not ready to start a wag-the-dog war to save his political skin, might be so stupid as to accidentally start one because, well, see again the part about being an unhinged moron.
BTW, Josh Hawley has apparently vowed to block every DOD appointee needing Senate confirmation until Biden’s SecDef and National Security Council all resign or something over Afghanistan. McConnell and Schumer need to shut that fucker down yesterday.
jonas
@Raoul Paste: I think he should as well. I recall a few months ago, he calmly torched, iirc, Tom Cotton or some other blowhard trying to get him to reject the premises of CRT in military training.
YY_Sima Qian
@Martin:
Agree on the 1st para, as gaming console has been banned in China for years (though people carry them over from Hong Kong all the time) & state propaganda outlets have railed against mobile games as “opium for the masses” (which actually contains a large element of truth, as studies have found that modern mobile games are purposely designed to stimulate dopamine highs in players & promote addiction akin to gambling).
Disagree on the 2nd para. The CCP regime is not pulling the pug on the new tech titans, but is clipping their wings. Shenzhen (along w/ other tech centers like Hangzhou and Beijing) has been wildly successful in vaulting China into leadership in a variety fields (such as AI, 5G, genomics, etc.), w/ HQs of world leading corporations such as Huawei, Tencent, DJI, BGI, etc. Shenzhen is indeed the Silicon Valley for hardware, & that position is not likely to be challenged for the foreseeable future.
For years, emerging businesses & applications (all encompassing super APPs, seamless mobile payments for cashless/cardless transactions, AI enhanced C-to-C micro-loans, etc.) pioneered by Chinese internet titans (Alibaba, Tencent, JD.com, Didi, Meituan, Bytedance, etc.) were lightly regulated to promote their development. As seen elsewhere, light regulation indeed proved beneficial in developing a new market, but also led to widespread market distortions & abuses after the players consolidated & leaders emerged to occupy monopolistic or oligopolistic positions. Alibaba & JD.com forbade small merchants from establishing on rival platforms, some platforms actually charged more frequent users higher prices for the same products. Ant Financial used its status as a technology platform to run up huge leverage in its AI enhanced C-to-C micro-loan business, but putting little skin of its own into the game while letting its state owned bank partners exposed to all of the risk. Both Alibaba & Tencent have amassed huge amount of user data w/ insufficient oversight over how that data is used by the tech companies. (The Chinese government can access that data whenever it deemed necessary, for whatever purpose it deemed necessary. However, it does not store or control that data.) Meituan ruthlessly exploited their electric scooter driving delivery persons. Didi rushed to IPO on NYSE, against explicit warnings from Chinese regulators, because its US based investors wanted to go public in the US to obtain greater financial return.
The sudden wave of new regulations across multiple industries are aimed addressing a number of market distortions & imbalances that have developed, issues that are common around the world, though I am sure as part of a larger campaign to bolster support for Xi in advance of Party Congress next year to give him a 3rd term. These policies have broad popular support, there are few people among the masses shedding tears for the tech titans or the people running the after-school tutoring companies. The CCP regime, being authoritarian, uses authoritarian means to solve these problems. I hope the policies are successful in alleviating the issues, but using authoritarian means will also produce unforeseen side effects. One being a sense of uncertainty among domestic & foreign capital, which can negatively affect investment, especially venture capital investment that is critical to nurture start ups and develop new markets. On the other hand, the Chinese government no longer pays as much deference to capital (domestic or foreign) as in the 90s or 00s.
Wapiti
@jonas: And I’d offer: the likelihood that he’d use one of his little yes-men to order something was high (remember the Comey firing). But if General Milley made sure that any order had to go through himself, Milley was the one person who could legitimately demand to hear the order directly from TFG. TFG is a coward who would cave rather than put his word on some action as serious as declaring war.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
it’s true of most of these behind-the-scenes books, but my recollection is Woodward’s reputation is of being so fawning to his sources they’re not really anonymous. From what I’m gleaning from twitter and other political commentary, Milley deserves a co-authors credit on this book.
dopey-o
i seem to recall an American doctrine of “No first strike.” Is this codified, or is it just (another) quaint political norm / guardrail?
if i were on the other end of the line in Beijing, i would be glad to hear that “No first strike” was still operant.
lofgren
From the comments it sounds like a few others have come around to this point of view, but I’ll add to the chorus.
In my opinion it still seems quite reasonable to view Milley’s actions as attempts to limit Trump’s power. It does not sound like he ever truly crossed a legal line (to this non-lawyer), especially given he was in contact with Esper and Pelosi who were both saying the same things to him. It actually sounds like he was trying hard to maintain civilian control of the military, just make sure that civilian isn’t Trump.
The reason I say it is reasonable to view his actions as attempts to limit Trump’s power even though he was only doing what was legally appropriate for him to do is that he was basically reiterating and reinforcing agreements with other countries and internal procedures to ensure that Trump couldn’t find some way of bypassing the proper channels to start a war. Trump is a criminal and most accounts now portray him as dangerously unhinged during this time. Forcing him to follow procedures and the law IS limiting his power.
So there is still a subversive element to Milley’s actions, but from where I sit (non-military, non-lawyer) it sounds like he did the absolute best he could in a nearly impossible situation and may well have made a difference. At the very least, we didn’t nuke China, and it’s hard to argue with results.
I’ve seen many people saying that he should resign, which is apparently an expectation of a military person who disobeys an order even if they turned out to be in the right? If that truly is the tradition, he should resign because it would help signal that he did the right thing. If that’s just BS the internet is feeding me, then honestly I don’t even see a reason for him to resign.
Wyatt Salamanca
Adam,
For the vigintillionith time, thank you for being the voice of sobriety, reason, and common sense!
Speaking of stopping the hysterics regarding General Milley, I’m sending out a giant Fuck You to clueless dumbass CNN legal analyst Sunny Hostin for this over-the-top bullshit reaction:
h/t https://www.mediaite.com/tv/the-views-sunny-hostin-sparks-fascinating-debate-by-arguing-milley-may-have-committed-treason-trump-is-no-excuse-for-silent-coup/
Omnes Omnibus
@lofgren: I would say that, if Milley did only what Adam outlined in the OP, he was operating entirely within his brief and no resignation is necessary. If he went beyond that, he was probably in the right to do so should resign. The fact that Biden has probably known about this for a while and had kept Milley on indicated to me that he stayed in his lane but acted aggressively to make sure that everyone else stayed exactly within theirs. And that’s what he was hired to do.
Omnes Omnibus
@Wyatt Salamanca: It wasn’t a coup. That’s not what a coup is. These people are idiots.
lofgren
@Omnes Omnibus: I agree, the press is asking Biden if he’s worried about Milley undermining his orders as if Biden just found out about this and as if Milley wasn’t in a difficult position only because of the president’s actions.
And frankly if both Biden’s defense secretary and the speaker of the house are treating Biden like an unhinged threat to the Republic, then I hope the people around him do use their authority to keep him from doing something disastrous, if only until the 25th Amendment can be invoked or impeachment accomplished.
The only thing I don’t like is that the failsafes should have kicked in within the civilian hierarchy so the military didn’t have to be putting themselves out there. It sounds like when Esper was around, that was the case, but with Esper gone and Trump stooges everywhere responsibility fell to Milley, if only because he was the only one who was willing to act responsibly.
That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if China wouldn’t have cared what Esper or Pelosi had to say. They’re not stupid. They know how the American system works. Reassurances from an actual military man within the chain of command might have carried more weight than the civilians they knew might be sidelined if the president really did try to start a rogue war.
AJ of the Mustard Search and Rescue team
@YY_Sima Qian: super helpful comment. Do you have a blog or would you consider a guest post here if they asked you?
Another Scott
Hmmm…
(via nycsouthpaw)
Cheers,
Scott.
AJ of the Mustard Search and Rescue team
@Adam L Silverman: thanks for this, clarifying as always.
Reverse tool order
More thanks to Mr. Silverman for once again bringing clarity. It seemed to me Gen. Milley basically acted rightly. No, it was exactly right & appropriate in the face of high chaos and uncertainty. For both folks executing in the field and for other stakeholders.
To mix metaphors, it’s good to calm shit down when it’s exiting the fan in quantity & at speed. At least some of it.
Tehanu
I shared this on Fbk and I hope more people see it. Thanks for the clarity and sense of your exposition, Adam.
topclimber
Sounds like Village needs a Day of Atonement. Followed by 1,000 consecutive ones more.
J R in WV
That big quote from the Air Force Big Book of How to End the World in 20 Minutes was very helpful, as it puts Gen Milley squarely in the chain of command for launching any nuclear strike!
Plus enjoyed the comment about some folks being confused about how Miley Cyrus became a General — how indeed? ;~)
Thanks Adam.
Sniffit
LOL…is very simple: The GQP Trump KKKult DESPERATELY needs to demand his resignation before he testifies about what he observed and what made him so concerned because it helps them argue that he’s already been completely discredited and therefore shouldn’t be believed. The MSM goes along with it because they like to see things like that happen not just for the sensationalism of it, but because it gives them a rush to have evidence of how much power they wield by manufacturing the narrative and manhandling the facts in order to do so.
Philadelphia TruckingPros
In my own thinking about this, I had forgotten that this was after Esper was out and DOD was being run by a bunch of unconfirmed Trumpist hacks whom nobody trusted to have any institutional knowledge, loyalties, or ability. I think Adam’s right — he wasn’t circumventing civilian control, but clarifying the process when, for all practical purposes, there was no legal civilian command and the president was an unhinged moron who, if not ready to start a wag-the-dog war to save his political skin, might be so stupid as to accidentally start one because, well, see again the part about being an unhinged moron.
BTW, Josh Hawley has apparently vowed to block every DOD appointee needing Senate confirmation until Biden’s SecDef and National Security Council all resign or something over Afghanistan. McConnell and Schumer need to shut that fucker down yesterday.