Joint Chiefs Chairman — General Mark Milley — deadly vacuity delivered in authoritative fashion

15 January 2020

Years ago, I examined our predilection for knuckling under to authoritative bullshitters

Since then, American culture has turned that unfortunate trait into an art form.

This societally self-destructive bent is at its most obvious among:

military ranks

and

their adoration-receiving relationship with the United States' predominantly unthinking public.

Societal sheep debatably get what they deserve — but nevertheless . . .

It is intellectually challenging to defend military professionals against charges that they violate rudimentary codes of genuine professionalism on a daily basis.

Those codes exist to protect the innocent from unwarranted — or incompetent — allegedly "professional" ministrations.

For more on this topic, with regard to the US military, see here.

In the "failed professionalism" vein . . .

Danny Sjursen recorded his negative perspective of Joint Chiefs Chairman, General Mark Milley.

Sjursen's take — written as a former combat Army major, West Pointer and professor — matches my own tentative view of the bright, but strategically wrong-headed general:

I’ve mistrusted this character – who brilliantly weaves both plainspoken soldier’s bluster with a veneer of intellectualism – ever since he addressed the West Point faculty, of which I was then a member, back in 2014.

On paper, the general appears to be one of the quintessential “Best and the Brightest” . . . being a graduate of Princeton and Columbia Universities.

Milley and company have done their subordinate soldiers, and the American people, a great disservice by repeatedly supporting Trump’s worst misdeeds, moral failings, and utter lack of coherent national security strategy.

[I]n their unwillingness to publicly dissent and/or resign, Milley and his boys are in good company.

An entire generation of generals have been utterly derelict in their duty to the Constitution, to the nation, since at least September 12, 2001, by sheepishly going along with one unwinnable, falsely-justified war after another.

Nothing better exposes Milley’s perfidy than . . . his support for the entire administration’s, evolving – and plainly deceitful – justifications for the egregious and unprecedented assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani.

[Furthermore . . .] when the Washington Post published the Pentagon Papers of my generation, the Afghan Papers, which implicated Milley and many many others in the fully 18-years of deception, misrepresentation, and statistical manipulation that personified America’s longest ever war, the Chairman rejected any suggestion that any officials had lied at any point.

As a final insult to those of us who toiled in the mountains and valleys of that hellhole, Milley had the gall to pronounce . . . that, fear not, more than 2,000 Americans lives had “absolutely not” been sacrificed “in vain” during the ongoing Afghan War.

Milley has largely built his career upon the myth of “progress” in Afghanistan, and has regularly defended the continuance of the US military mission there – against mountains of empirical evidence to the contrary.

I share Sjursen's dislike and distrust of militarists, who put our troops lives in danger for no rationally justifiable national security reasons.

Former Army colonel (now professor) Andrew Bacevich feels the same way:

If the four-stars abandon obfuscation for truth, then and only then will they deserve our respectful attention.

The moral? — General Milley arguably exemplifies the Ambitious Vacuities, who frequently head the American military

They cannot be trusted. Their strategic opinions should not be respected.

There is a marked difference between phony gravitas and competent honor.

PeteFree.com

Joint Chiefs Chairman — General Mark Milley — deadly vacuity delivered in authoritative fashion